On Cleaning Out My Writing Intake

Hethersett, St. Remigius Church: Right hand porch label stop 1 by Michael Garlick, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

You “never start a piece with a quote” folks just grab onto something and bare down for a moment, we are going to quote right off the top here.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is an age-old philosophical exercise. If you grew up in the woods of West Virginia, it was irrelevant, since a downed tree meant clean up and if you were quick enough before it rots maybe some firewood.

It was darn breezy Up Yonder for a family shindig this past weekend, and the large fireplace was popular, so Cousin Gary brought a load of firewood to keep the festivities warm. When asked if we had enough wood, he pointed to Aunt No-no who lives nearby to him and remarked “All these storms, her yard is full of firewood.” The trees definitely made a sound coming down, and the chainsaws cutting them up did as well. Let the philosophers make of that what they may.

Since I first started writing publicly in 2017, the single biggest change I’ve made to my “process” is really pruning what I intake off of social media.

Twitter was the first social media account I ever had, of any kind, and I was almost 37 years old when I signed up. Now, Twitter (I refuse to call it X) has really devolved under its current leadership but it is still my primary social media. The reasons I started on Twitter, and how that led to my writing, are explained here.

As is all too common with mental health issues, and PTSD in particular, I rapidly began withdrawing and cutting myself off from the outside world, as well as those around me. Isolation is a common attempt to self-correct mental health issues of almost every kind, but it is also the gateway to the truly dark side of a troubled mind, and the awful places it can lead without intervention and treatment. Sensing this danger and desperate to avoid it, I admitted and confided to my VA mental health provider that I was struggling, frustrated, and withdrawn from the world. Along with setting a long-term plan for individual therapy, other things such as peer support groups and options for learning were made available to me. On a more practical and immediate level, she made a short list of items to challenge and work on with me, to attempt to improve my interactions with others. She encouraged me to come up with one of my own ideas to add to the list. To my own shock, and hers I imagine, I did something out of character, something that felt more like I was watching myself do than experiencing it. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

I joined Twitter.

Understand, at 37 years of age, I had never had any social media account and rather despised the concept. However, my decision was not without sound reasoning. I have always been a follower of current events and politics, and most of the media now is using the medium as a companion to their official writing, reporting, or punditry. Being a historian at heart and a person who still deeply loves his country, it seemed like the appropriate outlet to dabble and engage in areas that interested me, and in a small way participate in the public discourse. The truncated format keeps things brief, and it is a controllable environment; unlike being in a public, crowded, noisy place full of potential triggers, a phone can be put down or turned off. Even as a public platform, a certain degree of anonymity remains as I am a virtual nobody, pun intended.

Mostly, though, I wanted to see if I was still sharp enough mentally to compete in the arena of ideas.

The whole of that piece details some of my health issues and other things as well, but you get the idea.

So, therefore, why in the world should I waste my time on the griftosphere, bot farms, troll armies, and fully integrated online engagement machines? I do not begrudge anyone making money; God bless, do what you need to do to eat, don’t hurt anyone to do it. Still, it is rather astonishing to watch how little discernment folks have with social media in realizing how much monetization affects what flows into their feeds.

Not all of those accounts during a presidential primary that suddenly became all (insert candidate here) content all the time were paid to do so, but some were. Anyone with any kind of following, media presence, or — God help you — if you had a podcast or writing platform, such offers were relentless last year. The pitch from the campaign, party, or PAC goes something along the lines of “You don’t have to tweet anything you weren’t already tweeting, just when it is supporting (insert candidate here) you’ll receive compensation for it” or some such. The thing is human nature quickly takes over, and all of the sudden tweeting for engagement dollars changed how you tweet. Meanwhile, followers of that account may catch on, or may just wonder why the lukewarm suddenly became a firebrand,or might just unfollow and go do something else.

Then there are the for-profit online culture wars. This past week some circles, including some major outlets, went content farming over the evolution of the “alt right” or the “idw” or other nomenclature for trending debatable cranky, controversial, and mostly wackadoo folks from a few years ago who have only gotten more debatable, more cranky, more controversial, and mostly more wackadoo in the interim. So, it was I turned down a couple of media invites this past week on the subject with the honest reply of “I’m not wasting my bandwidth on this” more politely phrased that I was very busy this week (very true) and the topic isn’t one I was happy about.

The professional protesting set, the grifter right, the grifter left, the “trad” lunatics, and the constant made-for-internet skits that are passed off as something meaningful and debate-worthy is a landscape of lies, slander, and calumny. Sure, I lob some insults at them from time to time, occasionally might pay attention long enough to write something or comment on the self-serving chaos; but mostly I have culled such things out of my feeds and out of my online life. Most of the current socio-political culture-warring is the pinnacle of mistaking activity for achievement,and is far more masturbatory than meaningful.

So, I demur.

If a culture war happens online and you don’t get sucked into the algorithmic vortex of it, did it make a sound? Who cares, I have better things to do. If the content stokers want to gather all the tinder off the ground as firewood for their engagement furnaces have at it. Hope those fires keep them warm enough in the cold, meaningless world they are constructing around themselves.