As I began this morning by finishing the first draft of a short story and am feeling overwhelmed by my own productivity, I'm indulging in a little hedonistic blogging.
Every time I give up social media I feel the benefit - tasks get done that otherwise would languish in guilt-inducing purgatory, I exercise more, I pay attention when my husband's talking to me instead of nodding and going 'Uh huh' while scrolling through Twitter memes. And yet, in the last week I've relied several times on the fact that I got said husband to block Twitter on my phone, laptop and the communal computer. I literally typed 'Twitter.com' into the navigation bar, knowing that I would get a notice saying... something or other, basically that it couldn't connect.
I feel like the internet expanded the amount of bad news that we get to a scale that we just didn't evolve to cope with. Many times Twitter reminds me of the bit in The Happy Prince, when he gets moved to a high plinth where he can see all the poverty and suffering in the city that he used to be blissfully ignorant of. The internet brings hundreds of injustices and tragedies to the time-line that has taken the place of our village street, and then it gives us, as tools, the tweet button and the Facebook post.
I think a lot of the time when I posted stuff on Twitter or Facebook I was doing it in a blind urge to change things. Which of course was futile. But it didn't feel futile, because the feedback that should have come from seeing change, came instead from likes and retweets. Little kicks of endorphin, detached from anything meaningful. Imagine if you were using a console to control something important - a power or food supply - and when you hit certain buttons, you saw gauges giving you positive feedback. But it turned out the gauges weren't connected to anything, they were just random lights.
There's an experiment that's related about a pig who received random gifts of food as it moved about its stall. The pig started associating particular movements with the food, believing that it could somehow cause the food to appear if it made certain steps. I think you're meant to laugh at the pig for being superstitious or something but really it was just working on the information available to it. A kind person would sit the pig down and explain to it that it has no way of influencing the supply of food. The pig would then sigh and talk about the days when pigs did control their own fortunes to a slightly greater degree, foraging in the forest for acorns and beech-mast, and perhaps both person and pig would agree that some kind of happiness and usefulness is only to be attained when aspirations and abilities are more or less matched. Maybe to be happy we need to search for the place where our activities can have effect.
Maybe it's just cynicism to think that arguing on Twitter about politics and the environment is the equivalent of headbutting an indifferent food-chute, but I don't feel cynical planting nursery plants for moths in the garden. It feels a bit sad, because I genuinely care about all those bigger things. But it feels good to do small things that I actually can do.
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