social media Archives - Dragonchasers

The title is a joke, get it? Like I don’t have the attention span to finish the last word. C’mon, it’s hilarious. No? No one!!? Sheesh, tough room.

So after a hell-week at work I slid into weekend 2 of my social media cleanse which has kind of morphed into an exploration of my 5-second attention span. Yeah I’ve been drinking deep from the YouTube Shelf-Help Firehose [I picked up that term, shelf-help, from a YouTuber whose name I can’t recall but I love it. He used it to refer to when we read all the books and watch all the videos about improving our life but then don’t actually change our behavior in any way.]

But I keep watching these videos, starting out skeptical then thinking to myself “Holy heck this really sounds like me!” I flit from thing to thing like a cranky old butterfly. I’m going to see if I can change that.

So Saturday PartPurple had another craft show. That kept me pretty busy and by the time we get home from those we’re fairly spent. No attention span worries there.

Sunday, though I was in the dark zone. Not really doing anything, irritable for no clear reason, kind of wanting to pick up my phone and doom scroll, and feeling alarmed by how much I missed social media.

I decided it was time to focus on one thing, which turned out to be Diablo IV. I played a bunch of it, finishing the campaign from the new expansion. More than a few times I felt tugs in my brain “Ok this is enough of this let’s go do something else.” But I stuck with it.

Here’s one of the traps I’m having to navigate carefully. There’s a fine line between “This isn’t fun and it’s dumb playing a game I’m not enjoying, let’s move on” and “This is fine and I want to finish it but I’ve been doing the same thing for 20 WHOLE MINUTES and I need more variety in my life!”

In this case I wasn’t LOVING the gameplay in Diablo IV but I did really want to finish the campaign so I stuck with it, finished, even wrote a blog post about it, and that all felt pretty satisfying.

I also watched a movie this weekend, on my own. Purple and I always watch a movie together on Saturday nights and honestly I sometimes dread it because the idea of sitting there watching something for two hours seems daunting. But I do it for, y’know, domestic bliss and all that (remember that the whole time we’re watching she is dinking around on her iPad). So that’s kind of a ‘forced attention span’ thing.

Choosing to watch a 2nd movie was…well, a choice. I was interrupted a couple times by real life, but in the end I did go back and finish it. Sounds trivial but my streaming service accounts are FULL of partially watched movies and partially watched TV show seasons. Even stuff I’m enjoying I just drift away from for some reason.

By late Sunday afternoon I was getting SUPER antsy but we had a break in the weather (heat and storms both) and I did a walk and that helped a ton. Got me out of the house, some fresh, extremely humid air, and of course desperately needed exercise. Image at the top of my post is of the angry clouds gathering strength for the next deluge. I got home just as it started raining again.

After dinner I finished a playthrough of Coffee Talk (weird game, I completely missed the actual gameplay) and then spent some time choosing my next game to try to focus on.

In the midst of all this I realized that it isn’t just social media crashing my attention span. It’s also all the ‘daily tasks’ I have in Todoist:

1) Play a Game Pass Game for 15 minutes
2) Play a PC Game for 15 minutes
3) Play an Xbox Game for 15 minutes
4) Make an AI image on Night Cafe to earn points
5) Do a lesson in Brilliant
6) Log into whatever Gacha game I have a monthly sub to in order to collect the daily goodies

The first 3 of those are to earn Microsoft Rewards points, and item 1 can be combined with either item 2 or 3. But these are not contributing to me rebuilding my attention span. I play with one eye on the clock and as soon as that 15 minutes clicks over I quit. I’m turning gaming into a chore I have to do in order to earn points that I can spend on games that I don’t want to play because I’ve turned gaming into a chore. LOL I feel like I need to give that up.

The AI image thing is just dumb. I have SO many credits on that service and I don’t even really like it that much. I can make better images using local AI models, or ChatGPT. And honestly in general the desire to create AI images just for the sake of making images has kind of lost its appeal. The novelty has worn off and I can’t actually USE them anywhere or y’all will come at me with torches and pitchforks and blocking me and my blog.

Brilliant still feels useful as long as I resist the urge to game it to stay on the leaderboards. It’s always tempting to start some really rudimentary course so I can just churn through lessons and shoot up the leaderboard, which is NOT the point. Learning and thinking is the point. Why is every damned thing gamified these days!?

And then there’s the gacha daily log-in thing. I only have one sub (Neverness to Everness) running and don’t think I’ll renew it.

So if I chop these 6 ‘daily chores’ to one, and that one which has some real value, I think that should help.

Circling back to the gaming: I farm Microsoft Rewards points to pay for Game Pass and I’m not sure I want Game Pass any more. All these subscription services are both a great deal but also kind of de-value games and cause choice paralysis and sometimes make me feel like a gaming Sisyphus as I low-key try to clear the backlog. My Playstation Plus expires in November and I don’t think I will renew that, but I have Game Pass pre-paid for the next few years and I almost wish I could cancel it. I really don’t need more MS Rewards Points and don’t need any more games for quite a while. Heck I’m not even sure what kinds of games I like at this point. But that’s another whole discussion – you’ve been warned.

So, that’s where I stand now. Feeling pretty OK about things in general. I did NOT get any significant reading in this weekend and that is still something I would like to improve on. I miss all those many years when I absolutely LOVED to read and I’m sad it is no longer part of my daily routine. But I want to reintroduce that organically, if that makes sense. I mean, adding “Read for 15 minutes every day” into my Todoist is exactly what I’m trying to get away from!

This all feels like progress to me. Perhaps more accurately, setting up for progress. Social Media is no longer the bogeyman under my attention span’s bed. Or at least not the only one. I’ve managed to put in place so many systems that seem almost deliberately designed to fracture my concentration. For now I’ll stay off social media, quit the Night Cafe thing, let the gacha subs expire. Those are pretty easy. The thing that feels hardest (but is the worst offender) is giving up the Microsoft Points habit, because that is actual value being left on the table. I’ve redeemed hundreds of dollars worth of Rewards Points over the years. But going back to only playing games because I want to be playing a game, and not to earn a few cents in points, feels like the right move and one that just might bring back the joy that gaming used to be a source of.

For the last few months I’ve been really down on social media. I found that too often spending time on the various services wound up depressing me rather than being a positive experience, so I vowed to give it up. I checked-out of Discords (where I’d been most active), stopped logging in to Facebook, vowed to never read comments on articles and avoided Reddit. Twitter was the only network I stayed active on and I tried to do my best to pull away from that.

At first I felt great. I had a lot more free time and felt a lot less stressed. I became an anti social-media zealot, telling anyone who would listen that it was toxic.

Except there was one catch. Without social media, there really was no one who would, or could, listen. As time went by I started to feel cut off and kind of lonely.

See, I’m more or less a recluse, by circumstance rather than design. I work from home, 100%. I don’t make friends easily and since moving to North Carolina really haven’t made any. I have Angela of course and she is terrific but other than her I can go days without talking to another human being (depending on how many work meetings are happening at the time). Since I work and she doesn’t, her job is to do the shopping and run errands so I never really have reason to go anywhere. I walk the dog, of course, but in the winter it’s generally dark and we don’t run into other dogs and their people as much as we do in spring/summer/fall.

Anyway, point is without any social media I was feeling really isolated. So I’m re-thinking my plan.

In 2018, I tried, with modest success, not to engage in topics that frustrate/annoy/sadden me. And by “engage” I mean that literally. I wrote plenty of irate responses but never hit “send” on them. I wasn’t 100% successful with this but I feel like I did OK about it.

In 2019 my goal is to try to find a way to just let these topics slide past me without them bothering me. Because I was bothered in 2018, I just didn’t get into arguments about things. I still felt down about them, which is where my ‘toxic social media’ feelings were coming from. I’m just not quite sure how to accomplish this “let things slide” idea.

In the past week or two I’ve tried to be more chatty on Twitter and tried to engage people on topics that I take delight in. Suddenly Twitter is becoming a source of pleasure again. Maybe it’s just a matter of having more good stuff than annoying stuff in my timeline?

I mean, I don’t want to seem like I’m sticking my head in the sand here, but the things that used to get me riled up were often really trivial. I’m cautious about giving an example because I don’t want to start a debate since that kind of defeats the purpose, but here is one that I don’t think I saw any of my friends said.

There was a thought circulating before the holiday that said something like “If you’re depressed and alone this year, don’t worry, things WILL get better.” So that seems like a positive message to a lot of people I guess. To me it just seems dismissive. You (random person who sent this) can’t know what the situation of the person reading your message is. Maybe they’re losing a battle with cancer. Maybe they’re older and have been watching friends and relatives die off. At some point in life, things will probably NOT get better. Mostly I think my problem with this ties into ageism (an issue I’m getting more and more passionate about). Young people think everyone has all the time in the world and it isn’t so.

Anyway, not to go into a long rant about that. My point was, I didn’t engage in any of these discussions because I KNOW that the people saying this were trying to be kind and positive, so what benefit could come from me going after them? But it did get to me. In 2019 I need to learn to just let stuff like this wash over me and not get me riled.

If I can do that, I think I can use social media as a way to feel more connected to other people. I still need to find “my tribe” but that’s a topic for another post.