i wrote this and then i kind of wasn't sure how i felt about it so i never posted it because i don't think i articulated my thoughts perfectly and i might not even agree anymore with everything i said but. in the spirit of Transparancy and Logging my thoughts and being Vulnerable and Wrong and Stupid and Yeah i think that i should Just be Posting, so i'm going to post it here below. yay!

recently, my friend ivy wrote a fantastic article (that you should read) about social networking services, noise, and detachment. that article got me thinking about a lot of feelings i’d been having lately and i wanted to put some of them into words, so here we are.
for clarity’s sake, i think it’s best if i break this down into a few chronological sections of thought, so i’ll start by discussing my issues with twitter, then my issues with sns as a whole, then i’ll conclude by talking about my own experience on the matter and what i’m trying to do about it.
i feel the need to preface with two very important warnings:
1. i’m going to be extrapolating my own experiences into large claims, and you might disagree with them
2. i used to be resistant to a lot of the ideas i discuss in this post because i believed i had a healthy way of engaging that made me immune. if you relate to the feelings i describe or you feel resistant to any of the ideas, i ask that you let yourself consider how much any of this affects you. maybe it doesn’t at all, and that’s perfectly okay (and a good thing!)
the tl:dr here is pretty simple: i think that the platforms we use to connect have much more impact on our connection than we allow ourselves to believe

the Twitter Problem and why Bluesky isn’t the answer

i don’t think it’s an unfair assertion to say that twitter is a “hot topic”. i’ve had countless discussions with friends that basically involve all of us talking past each other, because everyone’s experience with a social networking site is different, right? so if i say “i feel x or y when i think about twitter” you might say “ah, i used to feel that, maybe you should do x or y to curate your experience better!”. i used to think that these kinds of discussions were unproductive, but i’d rather argue that this dialogue is great at highlighting one of the most significant (and purposeful) flaws of sns as a whole.
the first problem with twitter is that it’s too good. this might sound stupid, because everyone has a lot of gripes with the platform, but everyone continues to use it because it does a seemingly good job at keeping you up to date on the people or content you care about. this is an aspect that’s shared with most social networking services though, so it’s why “twitter sucks, let’s move to a better platform” sounds quite appealing. it’s also why many of these motions fail, because unless all of your friends migrate, you’re either now failing to keep up with some people or you’re forced to use both sites to keep up.
that being said, the “twitter sucks, let’s move to [anything]” motion also fails to account for what i believe to be the actual problem, which is that social networking sites are horrible mediums for connection. this is why i don’t think bluesky is the answer, even though i agree that bluesky is significantly better than twitter. i’d actually rather argue that i think that’s a bad thing, because it makes it even easier to engage with the platform without addressing My Next Point:
the “significant flaw” of social networking services is that they’re convenient. i have a lot to say about why i believe optimizing for convenience is nefarious, but i plan to make an entirely separate post on the matter, so i’ll try to keep this point brief.
social networking services are purpose-built to make it convenient to keep up with people. many of them handle this task differently: instagram says that photos are the best way to do it, twitter argues for brevity, and discord tackles this by being non-committal. i think that “i would like an easy way to keep up with my friends” is an ostensibly good concept that ends up being negative in practice. we lead busy lives, so i think it’s natural to desire connection in a non-committal and convenient way. that being said, i think that this concept is an ill-fated fantasy, and it’s one that both corporations and the state desperately want you to believe. you do not have power when you are alone and helpless, which is the entire endgoal of the media, but i don’t want to belabor my point with politics. i do think that aspect is important, but i want to focus primarily on personal fulfillment, because you don’t have to agree that “this is all capital’s fault!” to agree that social media is making us more alone. (expand on this point you never actually made an argument lol)
what i’m trying to say with all of this is that there is a significant difference between “being in a room with your friend” versus “asking your friend to come to that room with you”, and that most of the current ways we communicate involve putting ourselves in a very big room with all of our friends. this is not to say that you shouldn’t ever be in a big room with all of your friends, but rather that it should not be the default medium for your connection with them. this is because connection and convenience are directly opposed: when you optimize for one, it is at the expense of the other.

the Discord Problem, how this all Ties Together, and What I’m Doing

i mentioned discord earlier when speaking about social networking services. i’m aware that discord doesn’t exactly fit that bill, but when i speak about “discord” what i’m talking about is any communicative platform that allows for you to non-commitally engage with your friends. when i say “the discord problem”, i don’t mean that discord or that any of these services is inherently a problem, but rather that our currently-favored modes of communication (convenience-optimization) have resulted in an environment where it’s very easy to be constantly surrounded by all of your friends, but feel completely, utterly alone.
i distinctly remember when facebook first gained popularity and the older generation utilizing it became the butt of many jokes. logging on daily to collect likes? caring about the number of friends you have? “what a sad life! don’t they know that they don’t know any of these people? is that really making them happy?” i would think to myself. i probably don’t need to point out the irony here. fast-forward to 2023/2024 and i’m wondering what the absolute Hell is wrong with me, because i’m doing better than ever and i’m surrounded by the most wonderful and inspiring people, but for some inexplicable reason, i felt more lonely than i had ever felt than when i was actually alone.
the reason it was so difficult for me to treat this situation was because i fundamentally misunderstood what the actual problem was.
my first mistake was that i thought i couldn’t be lonely because i was surrounded by friends, and my second mistake was that my coping mechanism for this was to continue surrounding myself with friends. i knew i felt alone, and i knew that this wasn’t the solution, but i didn’t realize that the actual issue was that i wasn’t actually secure in my relationships because i was not putting any “inconvenient” effort into them. i wanted connection, and i was trying to fill that hole by “being in the big room with all of my friends” instead of actively connecting with anyone in there. i felt very stupid when i realized this, because it feels obvious, but i think that in actuality it’s both a common mistake and a common sentiment amongst the people i’ve talked about this with. i also don’t find it surprising that it became significantly easier to realize this once i stopped drinking socially and realized that i had never taken the time to connect with many people that i had considered to be close.
so what am i doing about it? the first step for me was trying to use social networking services less, because it was my first reaction to feeling isolated. this was extremely difficult for me, even though i didn’t think i used them that often, but the subconsious “pull” towards them was akin to the feelings i had when i had first quit nicotine. it was genuinely very upsetting to realize how addicted i had become to checking something that mostly made me feel a strange sense of dread, and it was very easy to come up with a long list of justifications as for why i shouldn’t pull away from sns. the difficulty here came from the fact that, like any vice, i was utilizing these services to fill a hole, even if they weren’t actually filling it. and when you first quit anything of that sort, it feels very terrifying to sit there with yourself. the solution to me being lonely was, shockingly, to make a concerted effort to actively and directly connect with people.
amusingly, once i started doing this, it struck me again how deluded i was about my own social capability. i was significantly less confident than i thought i was, because being committal and directly asking people for things made me deeply anxious. i figured that all my time in discord calls, public settings, or ironyposting on sns meant that i was some sort of social butterfly, all the while i had been slowly forgetting how to be comfortable connecting with people i consider close.
so for the last little while i’ve been taking steps to work on all of this. and i still suck at it, and it still makes me anxious quite often, and i’m still much less confident than i thought i was, but i’m getting better, and the fog is gone. i know where the problem is, and amusingly, i now feel significantly less alone when im alone, because i understand that i can remedy these feelings as long as i’m willing to take a minor leap of faith.
as for my thoughts on social media, i’ve realized i don’t really want to keep up with you on there, and i don’t really want you to keep up with me on there! i think that it’s nice to live in parallel and connect whenever we decide to do so, and i think that it will be much more fulfilling to share in a more direct way.
i’m sure this sounds cliche, but i’m sick of being a bystander in my own life. over the last two years i’ve rid myself of a lot of addictions and compulsions and with every single one i learn how easy it is to believe that there is nothing you can do to better your life. issues like these self-perpetuate because the coping mechanisms often reinforce the problem, by design. for me, becoming less lonely means dragging myself and some unlucky person out of that big box of friends and making an effort to connect on a personal level.

to conclude

i don’t think that i’m the first person to have struggled with this, and i also don’t think that your struggles will look exactly the same as mine. but regardless, i want to encourage you to make a space for yourself. a website, a blog, or some time with someone you only passively engage with in your life. i implore you to try to distance yourself from participating in self-perpetuating actions. if you feel a subconsious pull towards something, i encourage you to see how hard it is to resist. becoming more comfortable started by getting out of my comfort zone, and it’s much easier to get out of your comfort zone when you step back from things that tell you how you should feel. finally, if you do make a space for yourself, i would love to see it. i’m enthusiastic about the idea of reading what you have to say when you are saying it to noone at all.
thank you for taking the precious time out of your day to read my thoughts. if you felt anything at all when reading this, i would love to hear about it. you can email me at ele@strafe.ing with quite literally whatever you want at all. if you want to email me saying that you didn’t read this, or what you ate for lunch, or a bunch of the letter “a”, i would feel extremely warm to receive it! this post is the result of many years of pain, confusion, and failure, and i’m very happy to be where i am now. i have no doubt that i will look back on this in a few years and laugh about all of the other things i didn’t yet understand at this time. thank you again for reading, and i hope that if you’ve suffered or related in any way that this could help in some way or perhaps make you feel less insane for feeling so.
until next time,
ele