or why this, why now, why, why, why
This has been a long time coming.
If you, like me, are part of the last generation to live in both worlds—childhood memories of landlines and no internet, days spent biking around the neighborhood with nothing else to do, juxtaposed by young adulthoods of increasing expectations of connectivity and productivity, 24-hour news cycles and instant fame and trauma as a marketing strategy—you might feel similarly. This is not to discredit how folks older than me or younger than me feel about today, about what we’ve become, about where we’re headed, but I think it is a unique place to land on the human, American timeline.
I have become tired, tired on a cosmic scale, bone-weary, soul-sapped, absolutely exhausted by “social media.”
It only hit me in the recent past (i.e. a week ago? time is meaningless in this the year of your lord 2021) that social media, as we know it today, only really took off around 2012/2013. I lived a childhood without home internet, and then internet right up until I left for college was a thing you had to schedule doing, and yes, I had facebook in high school, but only at the very end of high school, when they stopped requiring a college email address to register for one. Somehow, in the last 9ish years of my life, I have forgotten the Before and replaced it with something After; social media stretches out infinitely behind me, what would we do without insta, twitter, fb, snapchat, tiktok, goodreads, &c, &c, &c, except I didn’t even have a smart phone until the very end of college, right before I ostensibly started my Real Adult Life and moved to New York City.
I deleted my facebook in the fall of 2019 and haven’t looked back since. I deleted my twitter spring of this year, purging it for a brand new account where I could follow 5 people and not condemn myself to doom-scrolling that was keeping my lifelong anxiety at extremely high levels. Somehow instagram seems the hardest for me to get rid of, though I’m not sure why—I only follow like 50 people on there anyway, and I rarely post.
Part of what started this purge was a simple pro-con list. I can rattle off all the cons that everyone can about social media—a time suck, a great weapon of comparison, not good for your eyes, divisive, two-dimensional, now mainly a marketing tool—and I know what other people’s pros are. But when I started to list my own pros, the weak ones fell flat immediately (it’s necessary for people with certain careers or aspirations, said I, someone with absolutely not that kind of career or those kinds of aspirations) and even the good ones felt hollow. To keep in touch with people? I wondered. Was it doing that? Did I really feel like instagram gave me useful information about what was happening in the lives of people I cared for?
Once I started interrogating my whys, started looking at, closely, metaphorical magnifying glass in hand, the list of my pros against my cons, it became nearly impossible to ignore: I get nothing good from social media, and it costs me a lot. Why, then, would I keep doing it? Social media doesn’t feel social to me anymore, it feels compulsive. It doesn’t feel media-based, it feels media-exploitative. It doesn’t feel connective, it feels like a facet of the ever-increasing disconnect I feel to the world at large.
Now, as I get older, I yearn for community. I yearn for friends—not many, but all important—to have conversations with, and share food with, and keep details of their lives fresh in my mind. Social media runs contrary to how I want to interact with people—intimately, honestly, presently. It took 2020, a year where the predominant way I kept up with people was through social media, to show me that fully, and for good. Social media is a scrap, and I’m tired of scraps—I want a whole-ass meal of connection! Social media makes it harder for me to get that, for myself, in my way.
So, here we are then, with gentle animal. I have realized, through therapy and time and the single most important intimate relationship of my life that I have with my wonderful spouse, M, that relationships with others begin, primarily, with your own showing up.
This is my plan for showing up, for now.
gentle animal will be, hopefully, a weekly or semi-regular missive where I write to you about something that has been on my mind, and probably include a photo or two from my life, some things I am reading or watching or listening to or doing. I do this as an offering: my hope is that you will write back to me, about what has been on your mind, with a photo or two from your own life, or things you are occupying yourself with. You don’t have to do that—that, of course, will be up to you—but it will be welcome here. Lastly, this is a way for me to show up for myself in the area of writing. This will be a topic for another time, but for the last decade I have called myself a writer of many kinds, and have very little to show for it, for lots of reasons. I am tired, yes, of social media, but really of not showing up, for the people I care about or for myself.
Like your neighborhood stray, or the rescue you curl up to, or the part of yourself you still contend with, gentle animal will show up on your figurative doorstep, and if you let it warm itself there, hopefully it will give to you and be ready to receive.
someone’s gentle animal encountered in Scotland 2013, captured on film by me
Thanks for showing up, here, now. I am ready to receive.
Yours, KM