I started this project when I was depressed. On top of my usual fragile disposition, I lost my job and had to put my mom in care in the same week. It was too much. I spent two weeks in the utility closet.the utility closet.
At some point I started reading. This was not new. I read a lot already. I would say that I always read a lot, but that is inaccurate. Notably, between when I aged out of Going Out (where I liked to read) and when I made a conscientious effort to read two chapters daily, I was not reading.
But I recall getting frustrated at the space my TBR was taking up, made worse by an unsettled living situation, and seeing on Ethan Michaeli’s The Defender looking at me like something that I would never get all the way through, I made a point of turning it into practice. It stuck. This remains my core advice to people looking to read more: set floors, not targets.
At some point, sitting in the utility closet, looking forward to each cycle of the HVAC, I go tired of the dark started to read. Specifically I started reading Wolves on the Border, which caused me to re-read the Warrior series, but in a blended fashion where I was reading events in the four, then five (when I added in Heir to the Dragon) books in internal chronological order rather than publication order.
Why those books? I had electronic versions, meaning that I could read them on my tablet, still in the dark. I harbored (harbor?) thoughts about contributing to the vast mess that is YouTube by doing an unhinged guide version of some span of the Battletech timeline (think Jenny Nicholson on the Vampire Diaries TV show, I would cite Lexi aka Newly Nova as the specific inspiration). But like a lot of my ideas, I was ahead of myself in the conception of what I wanted to do with it, before doing the necessary work to underly it. So I started in.
I had always written reviews. I did it mostly for theater. Chicago is great for that. I realized at some point that it was the only intrinsically motivated thing that I did. It lead to my first major breach with social media. I realized that I got no reaction to the review posts, but if I posted near-insane messiness I got engagement. There are different lessons that I could have taken from that. The one that I did was that I was uninterested in what sort of response that social media gave me. I would write the substantive thing, even if it drew no attention.
I started using Goodreads to provide tracking on the list of these that I was reading. That lead to me discovering Libby, but it also lead to me discovering ARCs. I knew that ARCs existed, but they existed for me in what I presumed to be a locked off sort of non-space, something authors and other interesting people got. That realization anyone could ask, and one would be given, not always, but often enough, produced a feeling that I can only analogize with the Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. I still feel like I am cheating the system.
Eventually, the Red Queen arrives. Here, one has to run as fast as they can to stay in the same place. This was a new feeling. I am accustomed to the hedonic treadmill, as attested to by my homemade hot sauce. This was new. I did not experience a decrease of enjoyment. I experienced an increase of uncertainty. The more you do a thing, the more you think about how you can be better at the thing. I wish that I meant this as an aesthetic thing. I would even accept this as a self-aggrandizing thing. Instead, it is a networking thing.
I did not want to grow. But in order to keep doing what I was doing in the way that I was doing it, I needed to have buy-in from others, which meant increasing my footprint. I had what I wanted, but so as not to be reliant on what I had, I needed more.
I suspect here that I am both right and over-thinking it and evidencing my insecure attachment.
So Goodreads lead to Storygraph, Netgalley led to Edelweiss, Amazon led to Barnes and Noble, YouTube led to TikTok and all the above led to this blog so that I had a hub in order that I could write “review post to my blog” in addition to the other sites. That leads to a Bluesky account so that I could fill in that blank and while I further tinkered around with TikTok. But Bluesky is not working out.
I cannot speak for whether social media is bad for everyone. I suspect that it is not, and on the average its influence is neutral. I think, however, it is bad for me. I think that it is bad for me because I have a high need for sociality that is unmet in my life. Emphasis on the ‘high.’ I am social, but I feel that I am never enough social. Some of this is structural: I live alone, am single, work for myself, deal with anxiety, and most of my hobbies are solo in nature (like reading). But even in the absence of all those things, I would feel this way. I like this aspect of me. It is also a pain.
More than “The Algorithm,” the half measure that is social media causes me a certain distress. There is a skill to social media usage, and any skill can be learned. So I assume I could learn it, and garner a mad number of followers or what have you. Yet I think that it would never satisfy me. I get something out of it, but the description of cocaine as a drug that gives you the incredible feeling of wanting to do more cocaine is apt.
I would not wish it different. I mean, that would be cool, but it seems neither a good use of a wish nor a hill worth dying on. Moreover, I would not wish it different, because it is a me problem, not an it problem. I think that I am uniquely vulnerable, so acting responsibly is choices to address that.
I am not 100% sure of this. The problem with trying to assess your own personality is that you are in the inside looking in and there are always a surplus of variables for any sort of rigorous testing. But I do think that there is a correlation between a general negative mood and whether I have social media in my life.
In specific, I feel that I am much more able to…do things without it around.
I cannot delete it. I want it here to hold the names space. Some future world I may use it. But I make an effort not to be there.
I am not orderly by nature, but the disordered part of my brain likes a grind. Social media gets in the way of that by creating what feels like some half-measure of living, even if intellectually I think it is a full measure. I worry about going away in times like these of pure newsworthiness. But I will experiment to see.
CITATION HEEDED 