To forget is an ethical act
emilygorcenski.com
emilygorcenski.com
If you have to work, manage relationships, and have to cook and clean up after yourself, where is the extra time for it?
Not only that, but with what little free time that's left, people would choose to spend it on engaging in online drama instead of doing something actually pleasant
It's one of those things that I thought was funny and entertaining when I was younger, but it just seems kind of dumb to me now. Similar to the digital nomad thing. Maybe I've just gotten boring, idk
The author considered their writing on social media to be social activism, so that may be why they spent so much time on it, for a higher purpose.
it's usually easier to read about something after the fact than it is to participate in it as it's unfolding. Especially if there are strong emotions involved
> social activism
It's less about the end goal than the way she goes about accomplishing it. Taking the time to seek out alt-right troll accounts to regularly engage with is probably the worst way of doing it (both from the standpoint of effectiveness and psychological cost involved)
On the one hand for me, it's escapism. On the other, there's a lot of novelty available, new things that we'd never encounter irl. Which gives us new ideas for things to try irl. Sort of like the printing press spreading information faster
Think about the drama that was the recent rust for Linux lead resigning. People then have their opinions about it and then it spills into the comments here.
I think you just care less about the social media drama as described in the submission (which is ok).
I remember when I was in elementary school teachers would talk about minimizing time spent watching tv. Parents would be encouraged to tell their kids to minimize tv watching and spend more time reading. The point wasn’t to never watch tv. But to keep the time spent watching as little as possible.
It was well understood that tv is addictive and a life spent in front of the tv is no life at all.
But now we have the internet. Far more addictive than tv. People spend hours staring at the interactive tv that is the smartphone.
People spend hours engaging in “activism” on the internet that feels good inside but accomplishes nothing. The feeling of false accomplishment feeds into the addiction. Everyone instinctively knows a life watching tv is a waste but people are deluded into thinking that a life on social media matters.
In other words it’s all a drug. Makes you feel good but leads you to waste your life. Nobody says live and let live to a drug addict.
“It’s not a hobby for them, it’s their whole personality”
Just like a life lived like this is no life at all, a personality like this is no personality at all.
I couldn't care less how others spend their time, I'm just glad that everyone has their niche.
Most people accomplish nothing. You go playing basketball with guys after work, you will accomplish nothing with it. You sit and read books, you are accomplishing nothing. You tend to your flowers at home and you are not actually accomplishing all that much.
Insisting on accomplishment all the time just leads to mental health problems.
> Just like a life lived like this is no life at all, a personality like this is no personality at all.
Why? Of course it is personality. It is not like the rest of us all had super special valuable personalities either. We just exist.
Some people are busy because they need multiple jobs or have unexpected caretaker responsibilities. But many who feel busy are busy because they choose to be busy. They have made so many commitments that they are doing the time equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck.
2080 hrs at work, based on a 40hr work week - of course not counting days off.
Math seems to be mathing (mostly) but it feels wrong, work definitely feels like it takes up much more than 1/3rd of our waking hours.
If anyone has good tips on how to mentally separate from work after hours I would love to hear them. I know some people can literally switch it on and off like a light but I've never been able to.
> I’ve read more books in the last 16 months than I have in the 16 years before them. I’ve ran 5k, 8k for the first time in my life. I’m able to do more situps now than at any point since I was probably 15 years old.
At the start, I was definitely thinking "why keep going to a website you say is like hell?"
> We so belovedly called it the “hellsite” for good reason: the daily trek through the timeline was like tapdancing in a minefield. Twitter was awful because it rewarded awfulness.
And online, those who have cut back on (or are slacking off at) work, relationships, etc. are probably over-represented.
(Yes, their wanting to drama I really don't get. But I'm an old geezer, so...)
She seems to sincerely think that Twitter is bad, but it's not bad because of what she did with it, it's bad because well, you don't always win fights on it and when you attack someone you can get in trouble too and that's really messy and she doesn't want to deal with that. If she didn't want to deal with it, she didn't have to participate; the kind of political activism described in this article is not how most people use Twitter.
I can understand wanting people to forget if you said one or two things years ago and people took them out of context. Or even if you did one misdeed, but it was years ago. This is not, according to her article, why she wants people to forget.
While this is an excellent Rorshach for exposing the internal biases of others and demonstrating that even the staunchest progressives are also readily capable of misidentifying others or failing to recognize their "self-identification", the issue of not being seen for who one is and constantly "misidentified" also presents its own challenges.
I think this is only as issue if you are a “known” person in some regard. For most of us plebs, receding into anonymous nonexistence is likely a very healthy thing.
In light of this the safest recourse is to simply not post anything online at all, for fear of being doxxed at some point in the future (an inevitability given modern standards for and cultural attitudes towards privacy) and subjected to invective for years' old posts and writings. This is the culmination and terminal state of "anonymous nonexistence" you refer to.
In this way the chilling effect achieves totality, and nobody feels comfortable sharing genuine thoughts online at all. It's arguable that this is a societally healthy state of affairs.
He writes about (sometimes) controversial stuff for a large(ish) and influential audience. He wants to be known and influential. I think he deserves the right to do so pseudonymously, but that’s tangential to my actual point.
Most of us plebs do not want to be famous or influential, and therefore it doesn’t make a ton of sense to leave a trail of possibly regrettable or easily misinterpreted bits of data attached to our real names.
Scott Alexander was not in fact doxxed. He said in his final post before deleting his blog that the NYT planned to reveal his name, deleted his blog and the NYT published their article three weeks after he had already revealed his own name.[1]
The pros and cons of whether they would have revealed his name became this massive hoo-hah and maybe they would have revealed his name given the chance but the fact is he was not in reality doxxed by anyone other than himself.
[1] eg this article cites an anonymous source saying that none of the proposed article about him had yet been written at the time he took his blog down https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/16/21325678/venture-capitali...
They are just saying the person they are no longer reflects that. Because people are continuously evolving, but posts online are frozen in history without context.
There are things I did in kindergarten that I no longer identify with, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong at that age or for the world at that time.
Take comfort in the contributions you have made to projects bigger than yourself will be incorporated into maybe some of humanities greatest works.
The idea of pseudo-anonymity is interesting. I’m not sure how it sound work, but would love to know if others could identify it.
Only solution I can see is to stop being held accountable for every thought and action we’ve ever had. And while we can’t change society we can at least change how we look at our own past.
I can think of one case where a minor sports figure was fired for decades old statements from his father, but I haven’t seen any others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
I had wondered about how much being involved in this bloodsport impacted the participants.
Interesting read.
Somehow this person (hope this doesn't get me banned as well) felt that that was ok to put down into words. Twitter brain-rot at its finest, Musk did these people a lot of good when acquiring said company because it has allowed some of them to try and get some sort of normal life back.