Inauguration Daze

I find myself today less concerned about what Trump's going to do going forward, although I am concerned about that, and more concerned about what I'm going to do going forward. I don't have any broad panacea for our troubled times readily at hand, but I'm keenly aware that the only behavior really within my control is mine so I should probably focus on that.

I read an article once about a woman who lost a ton of weight after a doctor gave her some sensible dietary advice and the admonition to not actually tell anyone what she was doing, just to quietly do it so as to avoid some psychological traps inherent in any attempt at personal change. I have been thinking about that last bit of advice for quite a while.

So, in that spirit, I am quietly trying to change at least some of the wealth of bad habits I have mistakenly cultivated for myself and am going to not talk about them too much. With the exception of my twitter/media habits.

I spend way too much time on Twitter. I downloaded an app to track it and it's at least a couple of hours a day usually, and that's just on my phone. I'm not sure the time/benefit ration is really even close to high enough to support that behavior. So this year, I'm going to try and change my twitter habits to something that enables me to get my focus and attention back under my control (a big part of a larger problem). I'm probably going to unfollow people who mostly tweet one unsourced bit of outrage after another, and in the era of Trump it looks like that behavior will only be gaining steam. I can't be obsessed with "what he's done now" all day every day and live my life. I can't. I can't.

Instead I'm going to follow people who mostly tweet thoughtful articles about society and technology and/or the few people I tend to tweet and retweet a lot because I like how they think or at least like how they think in ways that challenge my own thinking. But I want to escape the outrage train and I will be pruning my feed with that in mind.

Some people recommend cutting Twitter time back to set periods in the day, I'm going to try and cut it back to a set day in the week, which is more ambitious given my current habits, but ultimately where I want to be. I'm probably going to also start treating my phone more like a landline. Probably off when I'm out in public and am not expecting to need it for anything but a bus pass and leave it charging in my room when I'm at home so I don't pick up the damn thing every time I have 30 seconds of down time and feel, at this point, a completely unconscious desire to "keep up with the news."

I keep thinking about chapters 1 of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death where he talks about the news of the day not existing as a concept until the telegraph appeared, annihilating space and making fragmentary events from around the world available for immediate consumption. This idea is discussed at length in chapter 5 where he points out that the telegraph not only "would not only permit but insist upon a conversation between Maine and Texas" and notes that we started prioritizing news based not on relevance or quality but by "how much, from what distances, and at what speed." Leaving us in a state of affairs where "most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about, but cannot lead to any meaningful action." And further, that "the news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing." And finally, "to the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them."

(It really is a great book and you should read it)

Ever since reading that chapter in particular, I have been struggling with the concept of "the news" and what my relationship to it should be. Local news that impacts me directly seems important. As does national news that might affect my voting choices. But how frequently should I check in?  Is it every goddamn second as my phone would insist? Do I have a social and/or moral obligation to "keep up with the news" no matter how fragmentary and unactionable? And who decides what news I keep up with and to what degree? Is there any actual utility to keeping up with the news of the day other than being seen as someone who keeps up with the news of the day?

Moreover, how much of my news consumption simply acts as entertainment? Is the importance of keeping up with the news simply a rationalization for time I spend entertaining myself with information that generates a number of addictive emotions on demand? (I am sure there is an interesting analysis somewhere here of how infotainment choices have been shifting from traditional news media to internet browsing because the first gives you dopamine hits of outrage/cute/lust overload at regular intervals and set times but the latter gives it to you on demand....) In short, what news is actually important to living my life going forward and what news is just an entertaining distraction? I suspect the former is a very tiny fraction of the latter.

So today I'm thinking of a Trump presidency and how electing a reality TV star is a fairly predictable outcome of a culture that confuses important, relevant news with entertainment and what, if anything, I can do about that. As I said, the only person I have influence over is me, and it seems wise to tend to my own house first before I start suggesting spring cleaning for everyone else. So I have decided to try and become someone who is not addicted to a stream of information and consumes it simply because it is there in my feed, and instead lives consciously and consumes carefully in the service of focusing my attention and time on things that truly matter to me and I will be proud of myself for doing when I look back. Because friends, I am not proud of myself of how I've been spending my attention and time looking back.

I can tell it's going to be a long road and a difficult addiction to break (because at this point picking up my phone and checking twitter is frequently a subconscious act), but I am determined to try and become the kind of person that does not feed the circumstances that made this current state of affairs possible, at least, as much as I can. This is like the bare minimum I can and should do.

However you decided to proceed in the days ahead I hope you will take the time to focus on what is important to you and how you are going work for it and that nothing will distract or detain you from creating the better world you know in your heart is possible. I will be thinking on and hopefully actually doing those things too.