Feeling good feels like a luxury

I am not someone who gets depressed. Frankly, I resented that for years--I was surrounded by people who couldn't get or keep their lives together, and I had to pick up for them while everyone (sometimes including them) were scolding me for not having a better life of my own. Not being able to do something sounded like a luxury.

I understand depression a little more now, and I am grateful that I have been spared. When something terrible happens, I don't retreat, I get motivated. 

So I don't get depressed, but boy, was I devastated this week when that horrible budget bill was passed. That hit me worse than the election, and it's not like I was skipping through a field of flowers for that. It's not that I can't believe a bill which condemns the most vulnerable among us to destitution and death passed, it's that I can't believe we've been watching this slow-rolling disaster for months and NO ONE has a plan. No, do not say "the 2026 midterms". That is not a plan, that is a delay, and if that's the best you can do, that is you saying that you are fine with people dying before that. How can that be the best that anyone can do?

I am not the expert--please believe me, you don't want me to devise a work around for our medical system and housing availability--but the best bet we have seems to be a general strike. Nope, sorry, we can't wait until 2028, as some proposed previously. We do not have time for that. 

I'm very concerned that the media wants to see something like a general strike--you know, for the drama--but they are unwilling to do their part, which is truthfully report events. I take this personally; my uncle risked his safety as a reporter and then editor in South Korea to tell important stories. I don't see our press doing the same thing. In the prestige media, I see a lot of capitulation, and it makes me ill.

Someone on an episode of Tech Won't Save Us earlier this year advised that the platform decay (aka enshittification) of media and social media sites means we need to go back to smaller scale communication and distribution. We need newsletters--though, please, not ones generated from all of those popups--small group chats, and blogs. This was music to my ears in an otherwise depressing episode, because those are all things I've been enjoying. I hate the internet, but since Cory Doctorow recommended using an RSS reader, I've hated it a little less. Progress!...?

A few days ago, I stumbled onto a website called good internet. The writers are young enough to be my children, but it actually makes me feel better to know 1) that people that young feel the same way I do about the internet and 2) that they see a way out. Spoiler alert: it's about making the internet smaller and more interactive again, as opposed to the hellscape our tech overlords have been shoving down our throats. I'm enjoying it, and I recommend it, almost to the point that I feel guilty feeling so cheered by it.

But if we're going to get out from these fascists, we need to have a dream of what the world should look like. That, maybe, is part of my plan.

Deb in the City 

TikTok is so bad, only Steve Mnuchin can save it (Day 54)

I don't care about TikTok anymore than I care about Facebook or Twitter, but I do care that TikTok is being singled out for doing exactly what every other platform does. Cory Doctorow explains why the platform is as garbage as the others; worth a read. 

I would applaud the US Congress for trying to control TikTok if they were also trying to do it with other platforms. This is not the case. Well, of course it isn't. 

The big winners, based on what happened in India (I'd link to this, but it's from an Economist Newsletter), are going to be YouTube--sorry, Google--sorry, Alphabet and Instagram--sorry, Facebook--sorry Meta. Those services ended up eating the local services that were developed after India banned them. (India and China get into a hell of a lot more than China and the US, in case anyone was wondering.)

Fine, here we are, China should divest, yada yada...but how should we be sanguine when Steve Mnuchin, aka Trump's Treasury Secretary, is now said to be trying to buy TikTok? Are all the people who were concerned about the Chinese government getting a hold of user data and weaponizing it, that somehow wouldn't be a concern if it's Mnuchin's crowd? Uh. Huh. 

Good thing I wasn't going to use TikTok anyway.

Deb in the City

To blog

I started blogging in the summer of 2006. You can read my first post here. I changed blogs because I thought I would follow all of that advice about making everything more "professionally" focused, but that isn't who I am. I've been relieved to see that advice and mindset recede (at least in some corners) over the last few years.

I know the momentum of activity on the internet has moved to social media, but I just can't. I do like my very focused communities--on bullet journaling and everything people are really trying to get to, Gaslit Nation, a couple of servers on Discord, and even, on occasion, my library's review boards--but Social Media 2.0 hasn't made any improvements on the 1.0 versions. Bluesky degraded very quickly into the worst of Twitter, and Mastodon is unreadable. I have no desire to get into anything Meta puts out. I know there are more out there, but I have better things to do with my time than tinker every time a new website comes out.

Weird outlier: Goodreads. I still loathe Amazon, but many of the authors I enjoy post their blogs there. Some of them have led me to other amazing books, and some of them have led me to other communities. So while it will still be very rare for me to leave a review there, I am happy to check them a few times a week.

Another great source of information: Brooke Gladstone's On the Media radio show. She has led me to some great books as well as some great authors, as well as putting on a consistently informative show. 

But I digress. Then again, that's part of what blogs are for.

Blogs are a little easier to share with the world

 

I like blogs. I like writing one (believe it or not, given my output), but I also like reading them. I mean the ones that are written for their own sake, though they may have incidentally become an income stream or enhanced another. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with making money from your blogs, it's that the ways people do it don't encourage me to read. I love the old cooking blogs (please check out Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Post Punk Kitchen for an example of why), but even if the point of every post is to get me to buy some schlock off of Amazon so you can make a percentage of a penny off of the sales, please stop writing PAGES of text to describe how to make a grilled cheese. It doesn't fool anyone, and at the end of the day almost all of those types of posts aren't informative. You don't make me feel like I've learned anything; you make me feel like I've wasted my time.

I've been loving Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Cory Doctorow, Ann Wood, Austin Kleon, Elizabeth Spann Craig, Dr. Michael Greger, and Chris Guillebeau. (I've also loved Jenny Doh, but unfortunately she doesn't appear to be blogging anymore.) These people write for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is a desire to share, which in many cases is linked to an explicit desire to *grow*. That is a fantastic thing to witness in public and sometimes even participate in, and flies in the face of yet more ridiculous advice that we have to be perfect fonts of wisdom before we can present ourselves in any capacity to the world. I don't always agree with everything they write, but I do still love the way they write. I find just about all of them inspirational in some way, however earnest that may sound.

This year, I want to find more such places to go. (Yes, sometimes a good newsletter does the trick, but there is something about the history--the evolution--of ideas and projects that I take more comfort in.) For as much as the blog has been declared dead for the last decade, I don't think that's true, and in fact I think they're coming back. So point me to the new ones as they come up, but also point me to old favorites.

The passage of time

Happy 2024!

I've been silent for the last few months because there have been things going on of a legal nature that I need to keep quiet about until things settle. (To the point that I took down a handful of posts that I wrote while things were blowing up; maybe someday I'll repost them.) All I will say is that this is not just about me but about someone extremely vulnerable, and that heightens the need for me to be discrete until I've achieved a resolution. (No, I am not getting a divorce.)

Worst case scenario is that the resolution does not arrive for another two years, in part because there are at least three different parts of the legal system my family must navigate. There is always, of course, the possibility that it won't take two years, but in my experience with the other party, counting on "the worst case scenario" is the safest bet. That's made me bitter and desperate, if I'm honest...but it occurred to me last week that this is part of why we come up with the worst possible cases. We can be mentally prepared, but we can also have some perspective. Two years is too long--this is something that should have been resolved years ago--but two years isn't forever. (And while I'm firmly planted in middle age, perhaps the news that the average lifespan of modern Korean women is 90.7 years has informed my outlook.) So the question my family and I have been trying to answer is what the next two years will look like. It's still messy and it's definitely unfair, but being able to define a time frame makes it a little more manageable.

This is not, fortunately, my whole life. I did, as of December, start transcribing my saga, and I keep thinking, you know, this isn't as bad as thought it would be. (Don't worry, I also keep finding things I'm going to need to edit, and I'm not talking about grammar or typos.) As of the beginning of January I started stimulating those other parts of my brain that respond to numbers and logic. (There's really only so much a sudoku game is going to do for you.) Sticking up for my nineteen year old self was the reason why I wanted to get into Differential Equations, but it's my middle aged self that wants to stay with it. I am as daunted as anyone else by learning something new, but with math I'm inclined to stick with it because to me math has always felt like a puzzle, and I like solving puzzles. Chemistry has a similar attraction--those equations involve a lot of math!--but Korean is to reclaim something I feel I should have gotten when I was younger. Maybe we can't go back--and ugh, why would you want to?--but we can appreciate in maturity what we would have slogged through in youth.

This is a lot of fun, I swear

One of my sons will be leaving home at the end of the month to finish up his degree. It is bittersweet for me, as it is for most parents in this situation: I know he needs to leave, but I'm heartbroken that he has to. My husband and I will have only one child left at home after, but it is only a matter of time before he stretches his wings as well. 

In other news, I started playing with social media again, though between Discord and the Bullet Journal University community, I've been on it for longer than I'd thought. I've been dallying with Bluesky...and wow has it taken on toxic Twitter vibes really quickly. Signed up for Mastodon as well, but I suspect that won't be any better. I also suspect that I am just not cut out for this anymore. There was part of me that missed discussing things like politics with like-minded people on social media, but as I've encountered an incredible amount of people defending the Houthis this week, I'm starting to remember part of why I walked away in the first place. I am more than a little uncomfortable to realize that the spaces where I feel most comfortable are mission-focused and/or paid for. That is kind of awful. We shouldn't have to pay for a digital home anymore than we already are.

I have solved nothing, I know. I guess you can see some of the other appeal math has for me.

Deb in the City

Disconnecting is now "a thing"

I deleted my Facebook account this week. I bragged (somewhere) about doing that before, but I did keep a shadow account so I could maintain a Facebook author page. Finally, after a few years of FB making it harder and harder for anyone to see my posts there, I decided it wasn't worth it. So I deleted my page and I deleted my personal account, which had all of 30 friends on it.

And it feels so good.

A day before that I deleted my Instagram (I'd been on for less than a year), Tumblr, and Pinterest accounts. At some point all of them became primarily vehicles for ads (or sponsored posts), and everything they told us about how to tweak our preferences so we only saw the things we'd be interested in was a lie (at least it was for me). I like visual inspiration as much as the next person, but not enough to tolerate what passes for social media now.

I got rid of my Twitter account a while ago, but in that case it wasn't because they were selling to me as it was that it only wanted to show me the most extreme content that was sure to get more of a reaction (or rise) out of me. You know what the world looks like when you're surrounded by those kinds of posts and opinions? It's a scary place, and darker than I could let my web get.

I'm still on LinkedIn, but frankly I'm not going to need much of an excuse to get off of that, either. Of all of the platforms, it's the most disappointing. That's the place where I should find the most useful information, not memes, inspirational posts, or ads (no matter how business focused they are). I thought it was a problem with the contacts I had, but after culling almost 30% of them I'm still seeing updates that have no relevance to me or anything I'm interested in.

I'm also still on Goodreads, but only because I fell in with a community of local writers I really enjoy who want to use that as our primary forum. But I'm no longer telling Goodreads what books I've read or want to read, and I've whittled my list of contacts there as well. There's sooo many ads there, too, plus they keep trying to send me to Amazon to buy things.

And speaking of Amazon: I'm not posting book reviews there unless someone has a really, really good reason for me to do so. I've been reviewing there for almost two decades, but in the last two years it's become so much more trouble than it's worth. I understand why they felt they needed to privilege the reviewers who bought their items, but I'm not going to buy something I read from a library just to have the pleasure of seeing my review on Amazon's site. Right now, if you want to see my reviews, please check out my profile on the Boston Public Library website. It's not as sexy, but I'm enough of a library geek that I still get a thrill out of having any kind of presence there at all.

I was nervous about writing this because I didn't want to come off as a retrogressive Luddite (again…), but I shouldn't have been. Disconnecting is a thing.

This is what I'm saying!

The true genesis for me was The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It doesn't take much tidying in the real world to force you to realize that you're not deriving nearly as much joy from your time-consuming online life as you should be.

But I started to feel that I needed to take action when I heard about this study earlier this fall. In short, just having your smartphone in the room with you, even if you can't touch it, is distracting enough that it affects your ability to solve problems. Then I saw this video. You don't have to be a millennial in order to be affected by your smartphone (or social media). Since watching this, I started keeping my phone in another room while I sleep--and now I. Sleep. So. Well.

Even at my peak social popularity, I never achieved the kind of fame that exposes so many people to the kind of abuse Jack Monroe describes here. Her solution is perhaps the cleverest still: downgrade the phone so it's impossible to be constantly barraged by social media (and abusive messages). Life goal now: go get a flip phone (if they still sell them).

But it was the last post that confirmed for me that I'm not an outlier. It's not that Nathan Bransford is an authority on lifestyle trends; he's actually an author and publishing professional. I came across his blog as I was going through recommendations from my blog feeder and saw his post on disconnecting.

Serendipity? Universal truth? Something in between? I can't say, but my calendar and my life have opened up as I've pulled back. I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) and I’ve written over 12,000 words so far. My home is cleaner, and I’m reading so much more than I have in months. And I’m excited about things again—like blogging. So expect to hear a lot more from me in the coming months.

I’m not recommending that everyone disconnect to the extent that I have, and as Monroe points out in her post, for some people social media and smartphones are the only way they’re going to have contact with the people. But I am going to say that if you’ve been feeling like everything is just too much, it’s okay to play with letting go of them.

Maybe there's no there there

Last year I read The Life-Changing Magic of Cleaning Up by Marie Kondo and it did just that. I tidied my bedroom and the common areas of my home and in the process had to tune into what it was that made me happy and what I wanted more of in my life.

I won’t bore you with those answers—shockingly, it includes more time with my family—but one thing that did not make the list was social media. I had already been worn out by Facebook, but I finally decided that I was going to quietly delete my account and slip away as opposed to making a big deal about it. (Yes, I do still have what I call a shadow account so I can maintain my Facebook page, but I post nothing as a “person” there.) You’re not going to be surprised when I tell you that it felt like a weight off my shoulders, in large part because so many other people have reported the same thing.

My problem with Facebook, in a nutshell, was that it became a hyper-filtered environment that had a limited view of what I wanted to see. I liked that Twitter allowed me to create lists so I could, essentially, create my own filters, and again, this isn’t an original insight. Sadly, Twitter decided that if it was going to take Facebook on, it needed to become Facebook. They turned on filtering and started recommending people that, really, I didn’t want to deal with. Add that to the extremely contentious presidential primary season, and by April I was happy to walk away from that too (and did).

I started looking at everything else, and they seemed even less useful. Pinterest, which used to be a fun place to curate images, is now a billboard filled with ads that also doesn’t trust my judgment about what I want to see; Tumblr, which does seem to have a lot of potential, was impossible for me to figure out and the fact that almost no one I knew was there sucked my motivation to try; and LinkedIn, which I joined before anything else, looks like a bunch of graphics with platitudes—one of the other things I hated about Facebook—and they’re admonishments to reconnect with former colleagues seems unattractively desperate.

It's not fair to call the internet a black hole; black holes aren't hollow

Without social media, what’s left? Blogs! So I spent some time on my list of blogs to follow, researching what I should add and then happily deleting content that wasn’t working for me. It was a little thin, but it reflected my interests more than any social media scroll ever did.

Too bad one of my favorite bloggers, so disgusted by the political circus, quit blogging. And it’s really, genuinely awful that one of the first bloggers I followed (stalked?) needed to be treated for a life-threatening illness and therefore stopped blogging for more than a year. And then there was the blogger who had all kinds of great information about self-publishing and was openly using her posts to build a network but then decided that blogging wasn’t as much of a priority once she landed a traditional publishing contract.

People are allowed to change and I wish all of them well, but those people have been hard to replace. While one of them is, arguably, irreplaceable because of his resume, the others, in theory, aren’t. So why has it been so hard to fill those holes?

Perhaps because I’m not as motivated to look. Sometimes it is just painful to surf the world wide web that Google presents to us. So. Many. Ads. And so many sites trying to lure you into signing up for their newsletter (guys, I want the same thing, but my link is on the left, and I promise I will not use a pop-up to peddle it). It’s enough to make you want to hide in your email...until you get the spam. If I don't get fifteen review requests every day, I don't get any.

There are two tools that have been somewhat useful. The first is, er, those newsletters. There are maybe three or four people or companies I enjoy getting regular updates from, and—for the most part—I feel like I’m getting useful information. But oh how I burn when they try to upsell me! Yes, I might want your next DVD or book—this is how we got to “know” each other in the first place—but why do you think I want to go away on a retreat with you—all I did was buy your DVD!—and why do you think I want to be...A TIDYING CONSULTANT?! Et tu, Marie Kondo?

So the tool that has disappointed me the least might be, of all things, Google Alerts. It’s very nice to find something in my inbox pointing me to the latest article about Kondo or Christina Tosi (have you made her cakes yet? Mmm…), and the worst I have to get through is an occasional library book list or restaurant opening announcement.

I like filters as long as I can create them.

I have a feeling I’m not alone. I’ve been amusing myself with Korean movies on Netflix (but for the love of all things holy, can they please improve their search engine and stop trying to get me to watch things I’ve already seen—on their site?!) and spending time in the gorgeously renovated Boston Public Library. Am I still stressing that I’m not churning out stories quickly enough? Sure—but at least I don’t have to be irritated by the weirdness of the internet at the same time.

If you’re also spending less time online, what are you doing with those hours?