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Title : Recharging the Battery
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Recharging the Battery

I’m trying not to be one of those self-righteous people who announce their departure from social media with a megaphone. As if the whole world has just been relying on my (or any one person's) pithy wisdom, witty jokes, and jaw-dropping pics without which the whole internet would be a barren wasteland of cat memes and Thinx Period Panties ads.

Really, I’m just writing this last-blog-post-for-a-little-while as an explanation for myself. As a way to reckon with the fact that social media—this blog included—is cunningly and insidiously designed by mega-corporations to be addictive, outer-directed, and profiteering.

Although it feels like--and perhaps is--a necessary evil these days, much of social media is a drug of diminishing returns.

Yesterday two small everyday things happened, in which a couple of strangers—whom I know agree with me on the issue being debated—tried to start a fight with me on the internet. This happens all the time, which is why my first rule of internet engagement is not fighting on the internet.

But for whatever reason, this time, even just being baited into the fight was too much. It was the proverbial last straw. It was like that morning in 2005 when I boarded a crowded downtown 6 subway train, and although it was no different from any other NYC rush hour commute, I suddenly reached a breaking point and knew I would not spend my adult life doing this every day.

Similarly, I know I can no longer spend my nights, weekends, and early mornings spiraling down the bottomless rabbit hole over Who Is Wrong on the Internet, and thirsting for validation that I Am Right/Smart/Funny/Good on The Internet.

It’s stupid. It’s futile. It contravenes my beliefs about the value of being inner-directed. It’s bad for my mental health. It takes the final third of my life (the one that is not spent working or asleep) and fractures it into little slices that should be re-distributed to my family, exercise, and human interaction.

Worst of all, it contributes--or can contribute--to the overall divisive, negative, depressing, and utterly desperate despairing zeitgeist of the Age of Trump. An age in which even people who agree on something find ways to cannibalize each other, thereby catalyzing the divide-and-conquer mission of fascism, all the while fueling the propaganda engine that once relied only on newspapers and rallies, but is now super-charged by social media and commodified outrage.

I don’t want to be a part of it anymore, no matter how much viral content I manage to create in the process. It's a devil's bargain and it isn't worth the trade-off.

So I'm trying to take some quiet time to return to the things about social media and blogging that I love. The things that are real, and that were my reasons for being so active on social media in the first place: Meeting new people. Connecting with people. Sharing ideas. Honing a craft. Bringing some small moment of laughter or intellectual stimulation to a friend or a stranger’s day. 

I know I can do that if I just recharge my battery and return to the creative essence of why I started this blog in the first place. This picture of my kids on a rainy Juneau October December morning says it all. 

See you soon.

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