When Social Media Becomes Too Much

Since early June, I have every month received a little notification on my phone to buy a replacement throw pillow for my living room couch.  One of mine has a tear in it, one that gets wider every time I throw it onto the couch, and because it's part of a set of five, I need it to match.  I have not bought it, though, because it costs $50 and in my house, I am very fiscally conservative with my money (much different than my larger politics), and if I don't have the money, I don't spend the money.  At the end of each month, I look for that $50 and when it isn't there because it got spent or saved elsewhere, I bump the reminder to the next cycle and hope that eventually I'll get to replace the pillow.

This sort of cost-trimming has become common for most Americans.  Employment rates in the country are really strong right now, and in the United States, inflation rates have not been as bad as some other industrialized countries in Europe & Asia, but that doesn't mean that this is something we've avoided.  Transparently, my cost-of-living raises at work did not keep up with inflation rates throughout the Biden years, and as a result my paycheck doesn't go as far as it once did.  Whereas I once might have splurged on things like organic eggs or free-range chicken (or just bought the damned throw pillow), I now find myself writing down what I spend in my little budget note on my phone as soon as I leave the store, frequently trading in for store brand olive oil & cottage cheese rather than the national brands.  I am not in dire straits, I still buy some national brands (paper goods specifically I have so far refused to go generic), and as I said a while back, I am not living paycheck-to-paycheck.  But I am not going to pretend that I am much more cautious about money currently than I was a few years ago.  People are stupid about saying "are you better off now than you were four years ago?" because that's a really selfish way to look at your civic responsibility (and also because four, rather than five years ago, I was stuck inside and debating if I could see my family for Christmas or not due to the pandemic), but I will not lie-I was able to afford more during the Trump years than the Biden years, even if Trump & Biden have little-to-nothing to do with that in my personal situation.

You might be looking at the title of the article and thinking "what is John talking about grocery shopping for?" but I'll get there now.  On Twitter, one of the most recent trends has been people complaining about grocery prices & claiming this is a reason to vote for Trump.  In some ways, this is real-I understand it, as I said above, that I have to watch my purchases when I'm shopping, frequently buying things specifically because they're on sale or having to meal prep for the full week before I get in the store so I only buy what I'll eat (not wasting money).  But these tweets are not meant to highlight a valid concern impacting millions of Americans-they're meant to make people angry.  They will feature pictures of Kerrygold butter & Vital Farms eggs, and then claim that it cost an impossibly high fee.  The most recent one to go viral featured pictures of these products, along with grass-feed beef and organic yogurt, stating it cost $175.  This simply isn't true, and people quickly showed this, shopping at a Manhattan Whole Foods online (possibly the most expensive mainstream way to get groceries in America), that this was simply not the case, being at least $40 cheaper even in that method.  They also point out that you could buy store-brand butter, beef, & yogurt at Wal-Mart or Target for considerably cheaper if you actually cared about the prices of these items.  But these Twitter accounts don't care about underlining a valid point ahead of the election-they care about engagement, because on Twitter that has become monetized, and has incentivized the downfall of the app.

Twitter under the leadership of Elon Musk has become a shell of its former self.  A site that has always been called a "hellscape" by its most frequent patrons has gone from that being a bemused observation to an undeniable truth.  In the weeks leading up to the election, I have seen gargantuan amounts of misinformation spread as if it is all fact.  Twitter users tend to mock their parents for falling for Facebook (the older sibling of Twitter, but no less a problem in this regard) and its AI images that are proclaimed as legitimate, but I'll be honest-Twitter is just as bad, and because of the way it says everything as written fact, it's almost harder to decipher what is real and what isn't.  I'll be honest-I know more about election processes than most people, but I've had to investigate seemingly true-sounding numbers on things like early voting in the past week that I was stunned turned out to be the poster just straight-up (convincingly) lying.  This is really dangerous-if even (amateur) experts in the fields can't tell the difference, why should someone casually looking at it be able to tell what is and isn't helpful on it?  And when certain posters who are respected try to use the site for engagement bait to get more clicks, that doesn't help the matter.  People like Nevada elections expert Jon Ralston and MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes I've found bending the truth to make people as angry as possible so their articles & shows get more eyeballs, rather than staying level-headed...and these are posters you'd actually count on being right.

I have talked about how November 4th will be the last day I'm writing this blog, and I say that with a heavy heart.  I feel good to leave it behind (it's the right decision for me), but I will miss it terribly as it's something that I love.  My plan following that (it'll be the final day before the election) will be to watch the election, and then once I confidently know who will win the Electoral College, Senate, & House majorities (not individual races as that will take too long, but the majorities), I will be taking an indefinite hiatus from social media (which for me is Twitter, Instagram, & TikTok).  I'm not going to delete my accounts (that's so dramatic, and also impractical as I have friends who will send me posts that I'll want to see), but I'll be taking the apps off of my phone, logging out on my laptop, and seeing how I do with it.

I'm weirdly excited about this.  Twitter is a place that I used to love.  I have made genuine friendships on it.  I've met people in real life from the app, I text some of them daily, some have even been to my home.  I will miss having that avenue, because as an adult, it's hard to make friends.  But taking a break will be very healthy for me, because Twitter is not that place anymore.  I find that it's extremely addicting (to a degree TikTok is too...Instagram is not something I'm super into so I'll just be skipping it because I think it makes sense to make it a clean social media break save for productive-for-me apps like Letterboxd & GoodReads); I will close the app, and thirty seconds later be refreshing it to see what else is new.  I also find it hurts my attention span-I have my phone out during movies & TV shows which I used to think was blasphemous, and even when I'm reading I have to put my phone in the other room because it's too hard not to peek.  I do feel like it's mildly irresponsible to not have a legitimate news source (up until this morning I was thinking about subscribing to the Washington Post, but after their refusal to endorse Kamala Harris I'm not sure I want to), so I need to figure that out, but otherwise I'm curious to see what happens.  I understand looking at where I am in my life that giving up the blog to pursue other goals is the right decision, but it is something that makes me sad because I know I'll miss it.  But with social media, I'm excited to understand what my life might be like without it even if it honestly seems impossible to give up cold turkey (we shall see), as it increasingly feels like a really unhealthy presence in my world (and in the world at large).