Hamsters

I've been feeling good as a result of staying away from Twitter. I have more concentration and I feel like I'm spending more time reading about things that are expansive and constructive. In a way, reading books or listening to online talks is like following a path on a pleasant and interesting walk - afterwards I feel calm, energised, I feel like I've spent my time well. Reading Twitter on the other hand often felt like being a hamster on a wheel, on some nasty drug, maybe ketamine [It's been pointed out to me that ketamine is a sedative and that what I had in mind was actually a nasty dirty mixture of ketamine, speed and acid]. Little paws scrabbling furiously, jaw grinding, and afterwards feeling sticky and guilty, and that it was all a waste of time.

Anyway despite all that I do find myself taking peeks at social media, because while one part of my brain might be a sensible hill-walker, the other definitely is a hamster on ketamine [see above].

Social media furores tend to have a particular feature: a screenshot of a single tweet or post will be presented as if it sums up a person's entire personality, the balance of good and bad in them.

But people often aren't consistent. Our personalities are more a symphony than a Sine wave. (I'd just like to point out that symphonies can be awful). We'll have an overall trend, certain things will be 'in character' or 'out of character', we might have motifs. We'll change too, over years or maybe, sometimes, over weeks. But to freeze us in one snapshot, or screenshot, doesn't really show who we are. And sometimes we are two things in a tug of war - a hillwalker and a hamster - and that pulling-in-opposite-directions will happen in lots of different dimensions.

Two people can describe a third person and both be speaking the truth, and yet the two descriptions will be entirely at odds. Sometimes, when we read things we wrote, we don't recognise ourselves.

I find it's good to recognise this consciously, about myself and about other people. Seeing it in myself, I know that if I want to achieve some goal that takes willpower, I have to plan ahead to thwart the hamster. Hence I got my husband to block Twitter so I literally cannot log on even if I wanted to.

It's possible to train the hamster in some things. It takes sheer brute willpower to do sit-ups for the first while, because they are awful, but at some point they stop feeling like flaming swords being thrust into your stomach and the hamster cops on that afterwards there's a nice feeling of having done them. And the hamster should be listened to, at times - its deep melancholy when confronted with wheatgrass shakes or chia burgers is a wise melancholy, insusceptible to faff about superfoods. I suspect that, if something really is a good idea, the hamster will eventually be brought round to it, but if it is never won over, that might mean that the hillwalker got it wrong.

I wonder if hamsters ever truly fall for that joyless Art that usually takes the form of installations. I bet they don't. There's good in hamsters, as well as bad.

Anyway in making sense of or just not losing my mind with other people, the hamster theory again helps. Sometimes, people just do stuff that they shouldn't do. Trying to make sense of it is, sometimes, a waste of time. Asking why will lead either to fruitless quarrels or the person who is questioned imagining some reason that isn't actually correct. Homing in on that one thing, trying to wrestle it into a narrative that makes it consistent with other aspects of that person, or somehow making that one thing representative of the whole person, is not going to lead to a better understanding.

The unfiltered aspect of social media means that we see that disparate, inconsistent side to people more these days. Once we'd only have seen it in family or close friends, those we hold in familial contempt and familial forgiveness. Now we see it in people we don't know personally or well, and I think that makes it more likely we'll misinterpret what that inconsistency means. Arguments with a spouse are inevitable and unless they're very bad, don't make us think less of them. Arguments with a stranger feel very different, and can colour our whole opinion of them. But social media lulls us into an intimacy where we do say things unguardedly, make jokes we wouldn't make at a formal gathering, venture opinions we'd never think to share with strangers that were in the room with us.

So I think we need to stop trying to squeeze people into screenshots. Maybe it's the hamster that tries to do that, but it's up to the hillwalker to say no, we're going for a walk instead. To take the hamster out of the social media treadmill, and lift it up high to see the view. And the hamster will bask in the sunshine like a happy animal, and make the hillwalker enjoy the view even more. Because there's good in hamsters, if only they're brought up right.