Being online twice a month is a lot like being not online at all, except I’m depressed twice a month when I go online and see the alienating bustle of the posts I used to love. It takes a few days for my posting brain to spin up again after a pause, so my experience of coming online is frantically catching up with 50 people, not saying anything funny or interesting, and feeling a major part of my social life and creativity grind down to nothingness. In exchange for… what exactly? The ability to do more with my life – which I appear to not be using much.
I see myself in the big valley of fuck all, between two peaks on a graph: the medium peak that I’ve been living on for 10 years where I post but do relatively little with my life, in part because posting ruins my brain, and the higher peak where I don’t post and have the energy to do major creative projects.
In the valley of fuck all, I don’t post, I don’t make friends, I don’t conserve a reputation. I’m not sure where the hours are going, but I’ve played a lot of Magic the Gathering. (I weaned myself off it last week, feeling pathetic.) I have projects where a good 5-hour push could get it to a completed-enough-to-share state. But I go, “ehhh but what for? I could also lie around chatting with my partners, or I could do the dishes.” Social media used to be a suction device that regularly cleared the pipe even if it didn’t guarantee the completion of any single project. Now things just accumulate in there.
I am perched on the foothills of the posting, looking across the desolate valley of fuck, to the other peak wreathed in shimmering clouds. I have no desire to return to posting – it actually fills me with slight disgust. But neither can I make the crossing
At the 6 week mark my resolve wavered. I wished to leave the valley and go back to posting. But it occurred to me it would be surprising if I could make the crossing in 6 weeks. Transitioning to a state of higher output is a whole separate action from managing to leave social media. I was being foolish by conflating the two, and being being disheartened when I entered the valley was due to misunderstanding the nature of the challenge. There are two gauntlets, not one.