A Betamax man in a VHS world

Something I posted on facebook last week

Alright, this is going to be a very long post – so buckle up. On April 3rd I left social media, ostensibly because I was too busy to spend/waste time posting memes. Like many of you I struggle a great deal with my mental health – namely depression, social anxiety and health anxiety. I find social media to be very unhealthy for me in this regard, for the following reasons:

1) Twitter especially, but facebook also, tend to be an arena of people being offended by things, and other people insulting them for being offended about those things. It’s constant adversarial rhetoric from all sides, with ideologues seeing everything through the prism of their specific bias, and none of this has any bearing on reality as I experience it

2) Mass media controlling thought. All mainstream media is fed by an agenda, and there are no ‘good’ agendas – not even the ones you happen to agree with. Every piece of ‘news’ is carefully selected, groomed and manipulated to make you feel a certain way (usually scared). It’s all designed to drive a wedge in between people, because this is how money is made and companies, countries and factions stay in business

3) Privacy. As I predicted in my best-selling novel ‘It Looks Like You’re Writing a Letter’ (available on Amazon) we have become our data, we are bought and sold and marketed to relentlessly and largely without our full cognisance. Your phone listens to your conversations and serves adverts to you based on them. Facebook, google etc scrape your life and use it to perniciously pump ‘tailored content’ into your eyes. It leads to more confirmation bias and manipulation of your reality – you are the product.

So I thought deeply about what I actually gain from social media – I give them my data, what do I get in return? Twitter was easy to dispose of, I deactivated my account by default by refusing to accept their new T&Cs in light of GDPR. Facebook is harder, because all my friends are here.

But then it hit me – that’s the problem.

Because all my friends are here, I’m drawn here regularly, refreshing my news feed, kidding myself that I’m learning something, keeping connected, being a ‘good friend’ by liking your posts, or pretending I’m popular when I post a funny joke and a few people lol.

You are the logs in facebook’s furnace of attention.

So am I.

So why haven’t I deleted my facebook account? Well, I find the groups and pages useful for finding creative opportunities and self-development content and support. There are still certain content providers that supply links to interesting long-form articles. I don’t read the news, I don’t visit news websites, the only magazines I read are Wired and Positive News. I need some fresh content occasionally.

To this end, I’ve done something drastic. I’ve unfollowed every single last man jack of you. This is not a commentary on your content or our friendship or anything like that. But you are the logs in facebook’s furnace of attention. I remove the logs, and I don’t visit as often or stay, and when I’m here I’m benefitting in an amount commensurate with the price I pay for it (my data). I remove the logs, and I pay a lower price, by interacting less and giving less data.

I urge you to do the same – unfriend/unfollow me by all means, it’s unlikely I’ll be posting much if at all and when I do it will be sporadic and self-serving.

Peace.

Differentiated from magic

Once, I threw a coin into a wishing well at Mother Shipton’s cave and wished that I would win a writing competition. A month or so later my first short story was accepted for publication.

Another time, I came back to my car in a car park to find someone had driven into it and he was kindly leaving me his details. He had exactly the same name as me. He also lived a few doors down from a house I lived in some time ago.

Either coincidences mean something or they mean nothing. If they do mean something, do they just mean something to you, or to the universe? On a wider scale, given that our whole reality is based on our perception of events from our own perspective, perhaps coincidences really are the universe speaking to us. Hiding in plain sight.

The odds of someone you meet having the same birthday as you is 1 in 365. Not particularly far-fetched, but if it happened it would make you raise an eyebrow, and you would attribute meaning to it on some level.

As humans, we’re programmed to spot patterns and create connections and tribes due to commonalities. We also wage war due to our differences.

The universe, however, in its cold indifference doesn’t give a shit.

Would be nice

Nobody said life was going to be easy.

But being an adult is hard and it really sucks. Yes, you get to drink beer and drive a car and potentially die in a war, but beyond that there’s little to recommend it.

I don’t remember ever really wanting to be a grown up when I was a kid. I just remember not wanting to be a kid. Now, of course, I would love to be a kid again.

Sometimes I go for mental nostalgia walks through my old secondary school, with big blocks of fuzzy blackness where my memory can no longer fill in the gaps. It serves no purpose, save for increasing general melancholy.

Often, I feel like my best days are behind me, and even they weren’t that good.

Persistent, all-pervading metaphor

I suffer from Tinnitus – hearing a sound when no sound is present. For me, it’s a perpetual, high-frequency whine that favours my left ear.

Likely caused by over two decades playing in rock bands, it’s something I just live with. It goes without saying it gets louder the quieter my surroundings are.

But – and here’s the funny thing – it goes away when I forget about it. Or maybe it doesn’t, and I just concentrate on other things. It gets worse when my anxiety gets worse, and I can’t remember it being there at points when I’ve been happy. Although it almost definitely was.

I wonder what else this could apply to – what other maladies, mental and physical, fade away when not given the oxygen of attention?

Oddly, there is some comfort in constancy. Some respite in acceptance. A bend in a toe, a kink in an ear. Wear and tear.

I just need to avoid silence.

Searching for lost time

I have a very bad relationship with my own past. Not because anything particularly terrible happened in it, but because it’s something that has gone and won’t come back.

I suffer badly from nostalgia, a little-recognised medical complaint with melancholy, regret and rose-tinted thinking being the main symptoms.

So much time has passed, that cannot reoccur, which seems somewhat obvious to state, I realise.

Now, the more positive among you might say – “well, given that you are currently, this moment, living in your soon-to-be past, why don’t you relish it now before it gets away, then live with no regrets?” which is an excellent point. Well done.

However, it’s like having your nose pressed up to a masterpiece – you simply can’t appreciate it for its beauty and its flaws until you’re stood far enough away.

By which time, you’re too far away to touch it.

Ripple that millpond

I don’t have many qualifications, but one thing I do have a formal training in is art. I originally trained as an illustrator, believe it or not.

Although, thinking back to my college days, I don’t remember being taught very much about how to draw or paint.

Recently I’ve taken up painting again. Still at the experimentation/regaining muscle memory phase, but it’s very enjoyable.

However, that sinking feeling of sitting in front of a blank canvas was all too familiar.

It’s the same when you sit in front of an empty blog post, or a white sheet of paper. The possibilities are endless, and endless is terrifying.

Kierkegaard said “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”. He could well have been talking about the freedom to create anything we like, from nothing.

The blank canvas is like a millpond. Perfect, unmarked. We must have the confidence to throw the stone into it, shatter it with ripples and stand next to our work.

“I did this”.

The cure for procrastination

We’ve all got long to-do lists, and no end of ways to avoid to-doing anything on them.

There’s always something, either we need the time to be just right, or perhaps there’s that evening off next week. Maybe you’ll put it in your calendar so you definitely do it.

But you don’t.

So, here’s the cure for the endless putting-off: JFDI. If you need to write something, open your laptop right now and start typing. If you need to do some admin, crack open that ledger before you finish thi

Oh, you’re still here. If you’re not sure what you should be doing, pick the thing you want to do the least, and do that now. Right now.

And once it’s done, you’ll wonder why you put it off at all.

So – Just Fucking Do It.

I was going to say “thank me later”, but you should thank me now as well.

The beauty of impermanence

Don’t forget to back your data up! Back up your backups, backup to the cloud, or all your work will be lost forever. Now we don’t have things like printed photographs or actual paper documents because we love the planet and the dolphins, everything is digital.

Which is great – obviously. Zeroes and ones in particular combinations express your thoughts and feelings to the world.

Your fiction (more zeroes and ones) creates characters that live and breathe and love and kill – until your laptop dies and the magic smoke comes out.

(You can’t put the magic smoke back in).

Every year I walk around York’s Christmas market and look at the ice sculptures. Works of great beauty, that took hours and hours to make using years and years of practice. And they’re made in the definite knowledge that they will turn into a puddle.

Imagine if you could create with that same mindset. Imagine if this post, and this website, disappeared from the internet forever.

Who cares?

How freeing would it be not to grasp, white-knuckled, to your zeroes and ones, knowing that the act of creation was enough.

Or you could print it. Fuck the dolphins.

Everyone wants it, and you’ve got it

In this bustling, oh-so-exciting new realm we call ‘the digital age’, companies have given up fighting for your money because they realise you know how BitTorrent works, and you’ll use an adblocker or find another link to avoid a paywall.

But everyone needs to get paid.

So, the new currency is your attention. Advertisers will pay for your fleeting gaze at their increasingly desperate and focussed online banners, trying to sell you something you looked for last week and have probably already bought – most likely on Amazon.

Your attention is so valuable – so precious – that Facebook, Google and Amazon will stop at pretty much nothing to get it, keep it, and resell it.

Remember – if a service is free, that means you’re the product.

Be aware of where your new currency is spent, because you can only spend it once. And believe it or not, you have a limited supply of 80 or so years.

Thanks for the five minutes.

Ambivalence towards corporeal location

Your consciousness resides in a collection of bones, blood and tissue, and the senses by which you absorb the world are restricted to poking out of them.

I’ve lived in a few places, visited a few different countries and what have you. It’s very interesting, and in the case of the mouldy one bedroom flat I occupied in my twenties, occasionally pretty awful. Nonetheless, as long as the basic amenities were present (somewhere to sleep, somewhere to bathe, somewhere to store books) they were all pretty much as good as each other.

I’ve known people whose lives would apparently be so much better if they could move to Paris, or London, or Los Angeles or Doncaster. But I’ve always struggled a bit with this logic. Whatever problems you currently experience are likely to exist, or become apparent, in your new location as well.

Travel and relocation is fine, but you never do it alone, because you always have a constant companion – yourself. This might seem like a dichotomy, but really, there’s the you that wants you to succeed and the you that wants you to fail. And they come as a package.

So, in the immortal words of Buckaroo Banzai: “wherever you go – there you are”.