On Social Media and Hiatuses (Patreon)

I just realized last week that I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus. I haven’t made a video for the last two months (coming on three), and it’s part of a pattern. Last summer I got caught up playing STALKER, the year before that it was Fallout 4; it seems that every Summer I get un-glued from Youtube and take my time on things. Part of this is laziness, spending more time outside with friends and family, but another equal part is sitting back and taking a look at things as they stand, and how they could improve. I genuinely enjoy creating videos on youtube, it’s a part of my creative life that I’ve come to cherish. However, there are aspects to “spreading a brand” on youtube that I don’t, and have never enjoyed doing, or being a part of.

Part of that introspection process has been taking the summer to examine my relationship to social media. Even when I initially started out making a facebook account almost two decades ago, to keep up with my friends and classmates, having a Facebook seemed a little big-brother-ish. Over the last several years, the public has been finding out exactly how much, with Cambridge Analytica last year, to the frequent and increasingly constant Senate hearings for tech giants about how much, when, where and why they collect information about every one of their users, and about how they have been trying to engineer society to suit their whims. This alone would be disturbing, but to add to that I had already been questioning how much social media really makes me happy. 

The de-individualizing nature of online interactions makes it so that you don’t treat people the same way you would if you were face-to-face, even if you already knew them personally before. You’re so much less likely to have a reasonable conversation with someone about something you disagree with them about on social media, and this was the typical interaction I would find on social media: arguing with old friends in very harsh and un-friendly ways. 

My rationale for keeping a social media account was that I could keep up with old friends, have a little black book, only this time filled with little kitten pictures and animated banannas. This was exactly what it ended up being, except instead of keeping up with old friends to one day rekindle the friendship, play games, have a dinner if they were in town. No, it seemed far more likely that I was keeping old friends around in order to find out who they had voted for in the last elections, and to wheedle them about it, and so they could do the same to me. I feel like I’ve lost more friends than not over Facebook, having a constant stream-of-consciousness to someone you’ve known in person causes problems: you will certainly not see eye-to-eye with your friends on everything, and good luck having a reasonable conversation with them about it on a platform where they are not only talking to you, but to everyone else they know at the same time, plus random strangers, employers, parents, etc. You don’t find good information on social media, you only find half-truths, memes, factoids, daily “insert ideology here” truisms, and any attempt to speak seriously about these rather serious statements would draw up an argument, again, in the harshest possible terms, and for everyone you have ever met in your entire life to watch it happen in real-time. I’m really not a drama-prone person, and this aspect of social media creates for me a hell-scape of unending drama and meaningless acrimony. It also creates an environment where being social is a performance, not a genuine interaction, where you are constantly striving to say things that other people like or share and if they don’t, then you don’t get the dopamine kick that we now know comes from this gamified social experience. People have reported being genuinely addicted to interacting with social media, Jack Dorsey stated in his interview with Tim Pool and Joe Rogan that he didn’t invent Twitter, he discovered it; they discovered the psychological mechanisms that help Twitter be addictive, and developed on top of that. The people who run social media know that it is keying into these psychological mechanisms, which they then exploit to keep people engaged, not in interactions with their friends and family, but to the site itself. Steve Woziak, co-founder of Apple, warned people to get off Facebook, and Christopher Stone, co-founder of Twitter, warned people against too much Twitter use. Tim Pool calls Twitter a hell-scape, Jordan Peterson says that he’s tried to step back from the platform as much as possible, Joe Rogan says that he hates going on Facebook and Twitter; many other, more successful, creative people have expressed their distaste for the medium, and I add my voice to that chorus. There’s survey data to back this up, not only negative interactions, but neutral and positive interactions all produce a greater likelihood of depressive symptoms; there’s nothing you can do about it, social media will make you unhappy no matter how you interact with it. References available upon request, of course, and you’re welcome to come into our Discord to talk about it, because this is one of the defining conundrums of our age, and we all want to do it “right”.I am still thinking of what part of my life I want to devote to social media, but I am leaning towards the cons outweighing the pros at this point. I still like talking to people, talking about ideas, and being a part of a community, but I think that the majority of this should happen on Discord. I am far more comfortable with people one-on-one, and I always have been; Discord is a far better platform and it suits my needs more completely than the graffiti on the wall that is Twitter and Facebook.

Some of you might have noticed that I haven’t posted on Twitter in a while, and this is purposeful, and maybe now you have a better understanding of why: I am still thinking about how to negotiate my life with social media, and daily Twitter posts ain’t it. Along with Twitter, I’ve taken a break from a bunch of other social media I frequented previously, and I have been hundreds of percents happier since I’ve stopped posting photos of my meals and scrolling through endless timelines and notifications. I’ve lost weight, re-connected with old friends, and have gotten tons of personal writing done that I never seemed to have time for before. Even though the lack of postings on social media and the lack of Youtube content are coming at the same time, they’re not related. I still intend on making videos, I’m working on three scripts right now in fact, and despite my delay in getting the work out, I plan on continuing. That is the part of having an internet presence that I enjoy, and I again thank each and every one of you for helping me along for this path. It’s one of the reasons that I set my Patreon to by-the-work rather than monthly, I know that I will occasionally have periods where my work is slow, where I’m not motivated, where I need to take a break, and I’ve been tickled pink to see that the majority of you who pledged to support the channel have remained right where you started, waiting.

I just had a conversation with a game developer I talk to occasionally about the dangers of telling people if and when stuff is going to come out, and I’ve seen myself when people become disappointed and discouraged as deadlines pass and no upload is forthcoming. My purpose in saying that, yes, there are still projects in the pipe, is to make sure that you’re aware that the work continues, as it has over the last several years. A lot of this post has been pretty gloomy, but several people who follow the channel have told me that if I plan on taking a hiatus, I should tell people. Well, this post should have come around a month ago, but these hiatuses are never planned, even though they do tend to come around once a year, during the summer.