I plan on blogging a lot more here for several reasons. For one, social media has become increasingly toxic for me. Some may be able to better navigate the Twitter and Facebook verse. But to me, it feels much like walking into a crowded bar, where everyone is drunk and angry and furiously trying to get people’s attention by shouting and spitting, and half the patrons are looking to knock your teeth out if you look at them the wrong way. In such an environment, only the loudest, most vociferous, and most extreme voices get any real attention at all. Not only that, but social media is ruled by opaque algorithms, where hidden overseers determine what you do and don’t see. I find the whole thing abominably frustrating, dispiriting, and most of all toxic to my mental health. I won’t be deleting my social media accounts. I’m sure I will be popping in from time to time on them to post news of recent sales, artwork, and whatnot. But generally, I plan to leave the loud, crowded bar for the quiet space of my own personal reflective study.
The second reason I’ll be blogging more is related to the first, in that I feel social media doesn’t offer the kind of nuance and long-form thinking that I like to write and appreciate. Social media kills nuance, destroys attention spans, and allows anyone who speaks authoritatively, despite their lack of knowledge, to be perceived as experts. Thus you get tweets calling Hannah Arendt “reductive” getting thousands of likes and you get Jordan Peterson, who sounds to me like that asshole in college who took one meditation class and thereafter thought he was the Buddha, elevated to stardom. Atrocious voices have always had a say in human history, but my read of the contemporary world is that those voices have a greater reach than ever before due to social media. Bad ideas can travel far. So, for my own sanity I plan to seek solace elsewhere.
So if you for some reason ended up here instead of on Twitter, Insta, Facebook, Twitch, LinkedIn, SnapChat, YouTube, etc., etc., ad-fucking-itum, hello. Welcome. Stick around. Things might get interesting.
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