Decolonizing our Attention
Back on social media, but not back on social media
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Last week I got back on social media. I’d been doing it incrementally, then suddenly I was on Twitter daily, and checking/posting on Instagram. It was a good experiment. I noticed more anxiety within hours of posting a succession of tweets. Instagram didn’t feel so bad, but when my friend reminded me how terrible she felt being trapped in the app, I blocked it on my phone.
My Twitter is more tricky. I started an account for my podcast, baby bodhisattva, and deactivated my personal account. The thing about Twitter is that my account will be deleted after a month of deactivation. Very sneaky, Twitter. I don’t foresee myself deleting my account. But I do, after this week, have more lucid insight into just how deeply social media affects me, and how much I don’t want it in my life. It took over two months away for me to regain enough feeling in my soul to understand that these apps had been sucking essential life out of my heart.
It makes sense to me that I reactivated everything (except Facebook, which I’ll never reactivate) when I arrived to this isolated location in Montana. It felt good at first. Exhilarating. What felt bad? The way the sites and apps took my previously wandering and curious attention and gathered it into a tight knot, focused almost solely on them. The thing is, if I’m on Twitter or Instagram frequently, I think about Twitter and Instagram frequently. Both are overwhelming. Instagram, with its stories feature, reminds me of Sisyphus with his boulder, rolling it up the hill only to have it roll back down, on an endless loop. Who has the time to look at all those stories? The problem is that I want to see them. I want to see what my friends are up to. They have interesting things to say, great fashion sense, cute pets, and interesting lives. But I just don’t have time; never mind that flipping through snapshots of someone’s life doesn’t constitute any significant kind of knowing, and doesn’t presence me at all— not in my life, and not in theirs.
Because presence is the thing that’s important to me. I’ve written about the dissociation that happens when we scroll, but what about the sense of presence we’re robbed of when we’re on these apps, which both contain the flashing stories of our friends, strangers, and peripheral humans, and also the will of advertisers and others who wish to influence us and collect our data. Going on Twitter can feel like wandering into a chaotic ocean, every word and sentence setting into motion reactive waves which, sent in certain directions, can be violent and hurtful.
If we aren’t present in our lives, we cannot perceive reality clearly.
As a species, we veer towards distractibility. It’s our natural disposition.1 Because we evolved in an environment that required our hyper-vigilance to survive, our brain is designed to focus for a small amount of time, and then scan our surroundings to see if there’s anything more important that needs our attention. In modern times, this plays out when we reach for our phone, or click over to Twitter. Social media and our distractibility culture exploits our natural hyper-vigilance. But what happens when we don’t pick up our phone, or check our emails or the news or social media? We scan and return to our point of focus. It’s that simple. This is one of the reasons meditation has been shown to be so powerful; it doesn’t necessarily help us lengthen our focus, but it helps us observe the natural movements of the mind. In observing, we understand our penchant for distraction and grow accustomed to bringing our wandering mind back to the present moment.
And in this moment of time, presence is deeply important. As Roshi Joan Halifax says, attention is fundamental non-aggression. When we are attending to ourselves and others, we are present with our reactions and biases, and present with the person with whom we’re engaging. We’re seeing them as another human being. We’re seeing the reality of our own human connection with them. We can see their pain, their struggles and joys. We may be able to understand where they’re coming from, something that feels absent from the way we engage with others here in America, specifically on social media.
Without attention, our penchant for negative bias can easily be exploited, and we can gravitate towards fear as our primary driver.
The picture of this cat is to demonstrate hyper-vigilance and is also very cute, yes?
All of this to say, I am still wrestling with my relationship to social media. As someone with a podcast (please follow and rate and share!), as a writer, as a future yoga teacher, I know that I need to be able to coexist with the internet in a way that’s beneficial to me (specifically in a way that allows me to make some money, because we live in capitalism and I need some of that). But— I don’t want to sacrifice my presence, as a Buddhist or as a writer.
One of my mentors, Dana Spiotta (read her latest book), upon hearing that I was off of social media, said that leaving social media was “the highest form of self-care.” And it feels true in so many ways.
I am deeply grateful that I took two months and a half away from social media completely, so I can be having this conversation with myself with the understanding of what social media robs me of: my time, my focus, my attention, my presence, my deepest sense of knowing. I also understand what it gives me: access to friends and the ability to connect with people I otherwise wouldn’t meet. Now the task is to feel into a way of being with social media that serves me, which may mean only popping in once a week, otherwise keeping everything blocked, or something like that. The terrible thing is, the algorithms reward frequent use and engagement, and punish infrequent use, which only further convinces me of their inherent evil.
Also, dear Substack friends, there has been some controversy about this platform (which I wouldn’t know about without Twitter) and I am reevaluating my newsletter and if to keep it here or move it.
Things and Stuff:
I love this rendition of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now:
And here Joni is at Gordon Lightfoot’s house singing Coyote.
My asthma and my fatness (and my status as a childcare worker) mean I am fully vaccinated now. I loved this piece about how fat folks shouldn’t be ashamed for being vaccinated.
I have been a lifelong admirer of Aung San Suu Kyi, a democratic revolutionary in Myanmar who has recently been guiding the country but was ousted in a military coup after (false) allegations of voter fraud (sound familiar?). It’s been truly heartbreaking to watch (and heartbreaking to see one of my most admired women deny genocide against Royhinga refugees, which partially fed into this coup because they weren’t allowed voting rights). This LRB piece outlines what may be next for Myanmar.
This short by Mishka Kornai beautifully explores social isolation/digital disconnect/connection. He says: “The filtration of information we consume every day creates communities that are smaller and more homogenous”. The costumes are reminiscent of Nick Cave’s soundsuits.
I really want to read this book about the Zen master Hakuin.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/brain-distraction-procrastination-science