Why am I here?
So why the blog?
In part it is because, like many people these days, I’ve become disillusioned with social media such as Facebook and Instagram, with their cookie-cutter profiles and emphasis on self-promotion instead of self-examination. Until recently, I would find myself mindlessly scrolling my FB feed, barely paying attention to what I saw and failing to interact with my “friends” beyond a cursory like or single-sentence comment. How many of these people did I really care about? And what was the use of all these posts, forced into bite-sized chunks and divorced of a larger context? I wasn’t actually getting to know people any better, nor were they getting to know me in any meaningful way.
Recent books and podcast interviews by Jaron Lanier, Cal Newport, and others have helped me realize just how intellectually and spiritually bankrupt social media have become. The original vision of social media as a way to connect people and create bonds has given way to avaricious data collection and crass mind manipulation. Lanier is pretty blunt in his assessment of Facebook and other social media, collectively calling them an “existential mafia.” They have become too massive and inescapable, and he feels that they are saying, “You have to work with us or you effectively won’t exist. You’ll become invisible to everybody. Your very corporeality is in our hands, so give us a cut of your being.”
In response to such realizations, guys like Newport are advocating for a kind of “digital minimalism.” He describes modern minimalists as people who “advocate a simpler life in which you focus on a small number of things that return the most meaning and value—often at the expense of many activities and items we’re told we’re supposed to crave.” (If you’ve read Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism, you’re familiar with this riff.) Newport adds—and this is the crucial point for me—“[Minimalists] tend to be much more intentional and often quite radical in shaping their lives around things that matter to them.”
My new goal is indeed to be much more intentional. The mindless FB scrolling is representative of my life writ large. I spend too much time flitting around—from one book to the next, one experience to the next—without having a real purpose or taking the time to deliberate on what I’ve seen, heard, and learned. My hope is that this blog will help me focus my intellect better, so that I may distill my thoughts on a particular subject or question. I can begin to draw together all the disparate threads of knowledge that I have obtained over the years and weave them into something coherent, and even, with some luck, something elegant.
Also, I will make this blog public and invite my friends to read it and send me comments. Hopefully those comments will ultimately result in actual conversations over coffee or lunch, and we will have a chance to connect more deeply over meaningful topics. I’d like to think that most of us are growing tired of the fluff and hot air that social media calls “discourse,” and we’re ready to return to something more real.
Thus my experiment begins!
Postscript:
Meantime, although my FB profile still exists, I have effectively gutted it—unfollowing nearly two-thirds of my friends and unliking any pages that aren’t genuinely interesting or useful to me. As a result, I am far less tempted to view my feed more than once a day. The FB app has been off my phone for months (and I haven’t missed it in the least) and Snapchat notifications are now turned off. The decrease in pings and beeps has been truly noticeable and quite nice.
Post-postscript:
One more worthwhile point courtesy of Cal Newport: he warns us to “be wary of tools that solve a problem that didn’t exist before the tool.” He mentions GPS and Google as useful tools that solved real problems (how do I get somewhere I want to go? how do I find this piece of information I need?), but much of social media does not solve any preexisting problem; in fact, it creates new ones. We now have increased self-consciousness (is my post getting enough likes?), FOMO (look at the fun things other people are doing!), and information silos and opinion echo chambers (I only see news and hear opinions from sources that share my beliefs). Are these really worth the increasingly diminished benefit of keeping tabs on people who, if we really cared about them, are just a text or phone call away?
Further Exploration:
Cal Newport being interviewed about Digital Minimalism on the Ezra Klein Show
