Last week I did some gratuitous depressed posting so I figure it's now my turn to do some pleased posting: life's pretty dang good. I had a very socially connected weekend and have been spending a lot of time with my family and astonishingly I feel very secure and serene. The dominant social culture is really isolationist rn and I have plenty of fingers to point.
I got a phone when I was 14 years old and it was like an infinite crack source for my poor developing teenager brain. I had a weird relationship with my peers because I was both socially immature (autistic) and functionally more mature (very intense mother), but I was smart and good at school so while I was bullied and shunned for being a weirdo (autistic), I was also useful to get homework answers from and proofread papers. This social limbo led to having mean pretentious friends (and some great friends I still hang out with!) and an intense yearning for anything I could do to possibly fit in. I wanted to stop dressing so weird and acting so weird and start talking cool and knowing when things were happening (and maybe even get invited to them if I got really lucky), and clearly this would all happen once I finally had a phone. When I was in middle school almost everyone had a phone or an ipod touch, meaning they could text, snapchat, insta, facetime, and play one million mobile games. I was highly wary of youtube bc my mom said there was innapropriate stuff on there and the videos my friends told me about (lightbulb fight, 10 blended mice, two girls one cup, lesbian poop party and general gruesome workplace deaths recorded on cctv cameras) confirmed the fuck out of her diagnosis for me, and to this day I still don't like watching videos. However, I was ready to DIE to get on social media. Instagram was the second app downloaded on my phone the day I got it in may and by the time september rolled around I was spending 6-10 hours a day on the instagram explore page. Social media has since then grown into even more of an insidious attention trap, a gambler's paradise of drivel with nuggets of cold strewn throughout. I was never into posting in the way I was into Consuming; finally I had access to the infinite data stream that i could then mimic and copy to refine myself into a person my peers would accept and like.
fast forwarding through all that to now I have spent tens of thousands of hours mindlessly consuming internet content like slop, and while I consider myself fully cured of all social media and internet content addiction, the damage is still most noticeable in my attention span. Videos and memes rot your mind's timescale down to seconds and creates an attention myopia focused on novelty and brevity; show me something new and funny and at the maximum you have 15 seconds before I move on. As my mother (a staunch late adopter, she got instagram and facebook this month in the year of our lord 2024) describes it, we've lost the opportunity to tell stories over and over again because we expect others to consume them passively through our social media posts instead. Gone are the days of telling your favorite joke a hundredth time, or performing a little skit for your friends; silliness must be ironic or post-ironic, but never in true earnest. Not only has the social media machine robbed us of the filling for our normal personal conversations, but it has put an end to meeting strangers.
Have you been in a waiting room lately? It's like watching everyone suspiciously plug into the matrix. The magazines are obsolete, don't even look at the perosn next to you lest they become disturbed, and all conversation is unwelcome in this room of silent scrollers. Having access to the (bloated, unusable, terrible) internet 24/7 has made idle socialization with strangers damn near impossible. I understand that many people dislike talking to strangers, but this is fucking ridiculous. How are we supposed to make friends or hear new ideas or just have an entertaining moment in real life if every stranger you have an opportunity to talk with is antisocial and wearing airpods. Socialization in cyberspace is sugar free candy and makes us depressed as fuck, bc in real terms what actually is happening when you spend an hour on social media is all the social interaction, conversation, and joking you perceive to be taking place is really you sitting alone and gently slack jawed while staring into a screen. Cellphones allow a person to fill their day with idle consumption, instead of being pushed by boredom to make things and talk to people (things and people you can not just see, but touch). Additionally, they allow all unpleasant situations a perfect escape.
ok I lied i had one giant finger to point. I hung out with very good friends of mine, a bunch of my grandparents' friends, and my cousin this weekend and it was interesting to see that while the old people were not using the same language as me and my friends, they were much less awkward and all very easy going and ready to chitchat about whatever. There are many explanations for this generational split and comfort in their own skin (living for 70 years certainly seems to make a person more open and relaxed than your average 20something), but the starkest contrast was how each group spent idle downtime. My young friends and relatives will check their phone or scroll through ig/tiktok when given an idle pause, while my grandparents' friends ask each other questions and are eager to idly chitchat. I hope more people my age start to break the shackles of cellphone and we grow to be less antisocial and more happy in the real world