I can feed myself
I just got sucked into my facebook feed for fifteen minutes again. So, I deleted it.
Maybe I’m just hungry and woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, but every time I get sucked in like that, it leaves me with a unique kind of hollowness inside. Like there is no real action that I can take in my life to feel better. That the only way to feel full is to keep scrolling. That there will be something down there that’ll make it all pay off, and I’ll be satisfied. But there’s no guarantee of that. The facebook algorithm isn’t designed to make you feel satisfied, it’s designed to be addictive, and I’m done with addictive stuff. Except coffee.
Alcohol, weed, nicotine, I know it’s all unhealthy, but I don’t think that’s why I quit. I didn’t even quit because of all the memories I’ve lost to booze and pot. I quit to have less things to think about when I’m not on any of it. Less wondering in the back of my mind if it’s time to imbibe, if it’ll be the thing to make me feel perfect right now.
Facebook feels the same. I wonder if there’s some bit of news that will help me feel perfectly connected to my friends and the world. So I type an f in my search bar, the ...acebook.com part automatically appears, and I hit enter. Then I’m there, and most of my mind shuts off and I scroll, and I get tunnel vision.
I become only vaguely aware of the smoke soaked mountains and the flickering aspen leaves out the window. Of my toddler babbling and running around the living room and absorbing life faster than I ever will again.
But I can absorb more than I have been. And create more than I have been. I just have to find my own feed. Build my own tunnel that leads to something besides dimmer tunnels.
Live my own life instead of scrolling through an algorithmically determined version of other peoples’.