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what is it with our endless desire to share all the things that's happening in our lives? all the great things that happened you want to take a picture of it, write about it to capture the moment and tell the world about it. expecting the world to give you the validation for your happiness. all the times things didn't turn out so well, you want to share it with people and hope they feel sorry for you or in any other ways, mirror how you feel. offer you kindness and consolidation.
this post is largely inspired by:
the art of not sharing (substack)
I can't remember where I found that article from. down, down the rabbit hole I went until I found something interesting then closed the other tabs.
it's true that as social creatures we want connect with others, and be happy together. but we now live in a society where it takes just a few seconds to capture a moment (through media, through words) and tell the world about it. and we are then "trained" to wait for interactions -- y'know, those lovely likes, upvotes and comments to either validate how we are feeling or to brace ourselves for hate speech. for some of us, it's as if we can't feel good about something until we know our followers affirms that you should feel good about it. or, in any case, we've come to *expect* validation for anything that happens in our lives.
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before AI, it's already easy to ask for advice. make a post on a forum and let strangers make the life choices for you. stuck on a problem? why waste the time to figure it out yourself when you can simply ask someone on the internet for answers?
alas, we now have generative AI. why write the whole paper yourself when AI can write it for you?
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I've recently observed myself to have an impulse to record things down whenever something significant happens. in the linked article, it was recommended to start a journal so you can share things with yourself to fill that need instead. but why share at all? when I see something cool I feel like I *must* write it down somewhere or I won't get to feel the happiness or excitement from it. immediately grab your phone when you see a beautiful sunset for the 100th time or the time is wasted experiencing it without making a lasting record of that experience.
merely reflecting on this makes me a little anxious.
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we keep on creating things. posts, tweets, articles, texts, comments. it's all digital, but they are still 1s and 0s, and still need to be stored somewhere. consider the number of people with an active social media account, multiplied by the average number of social media accounts they have, multiplied by the sheer volume of content we produce each day. all of this is stored. most of the times, permanently. until the service is shutdown. all of this require physical storage to hold. all physical storage require physical space. it's crazy to think about those random texts and posts that I've long forgotten are permanently taking space on planet earth for at least decades to come.
also posted to:
izzzzi, a slow social media experiment
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