Why don't I spend more time on social media?

I thought about talking about this a couple of weeks back, but I had other things to pay attention to and then it felt like a post on this might look like I'm responding to some specific thing without naming it. 

I'm not.

Maybe I kind of am.

But I'm really not.

It's Our Year of Dumpster Fire 2025. That's the specific thing that isn't really a specific thing. Social media's never easy for me, and this year has added many layers of Not Easy to everything. 

Social media moves too fast for me. I don't just mean videos, because I'm not watching most of those. My sound stays off, so I'm definitely not watching any that don't have captions. I mean the flow of social media is too fast for me. I can't handle topics bouncing back and forth, 18 conversations happening across three or four different apps, commenting on everything that pops up in the news while still replying to threads that have been continuing throughout the day... That's too much! Overwhelm happens, anxiety kicks in, and I'm not getting anything meaningful done. 

That's the easy explanation. It's true, but it's not the whole thing. It's reason enough to limit my time. I've done it for years, no matter how many people tell me, "You should be on this other platform that has all the things you say overwhelm you, but it's popular!" I'm not great at promoting my work, but I'd have less of it to promote if I spent as much time on social media as too many people try to tell me I should. I get where they're coming from. I know a lot of the things they say are true when it comes to putting my work out there. None of that changes the effect it has had on me in the past. 

The harder part of the explanation is that I'm having to limit myself even more than I used to. It used to be that a few filters and a couple of muted accounts (or just not following certain accounts) could keep my feeds safe enough. That's not true anymore. Because of past trauma, I have to be careful about what I take in. Sometimes that means ignoring everything about certain shows so many other people watch and love. Sometimes it means not following an artist whose work I really like, but certain themes show up too frequently for me to keep having those images in my feed. And it has always meant I need to limit how much news I take in. Stay informed, but do not run the risk of being overwhelmed by it.

These days, there's no way to stay informed without being overwhelmed. Opening any app feels like instant doomscrolling. People need to speak about things, and information needs to be shared, but I can't handle getting hit with Bad News, Worse News, and Breaking Horrible News with every post that flies past me. 

It's not about what makes me comfortable. In fact, I think I'd be more comfortable in the discomfort if I did give in to doomscrolling and rageposting. I could really get going and just let it all out until the hypervigilance ramped up, nightmares kept me from sleeping, and seizures got even more frequent! And then... Well, my doctor and family members would be telling me I need to do what I'm currently doing. I should just stick with the healthier emotional isolation and crap promotion of work. 

It's especially hard in October. There are many things about popular ways of celebrating Halloween that hit way too close to personal trauma for me. It used to turn into 31 days of watching other people celebrate how I almost died. Then I learned to limit my exposure to social media during October. 

The good news is I've got time to work on my writing! I'm also learning about hockey, and I've chosen to focus on the Seattle Kraken. I'd say that will just be for learning, but I know myself and why I chose to focus on that team. I'm probably going to be a fan forever. I decided to try again to learn juggling. It's been more than twenty years since my last failed attempt. It's resulting in some kind of soothing hybrid of traditional and contact juggling. I'm betting it would look boring and awkward to anyone else, but I'm not trying to perform for other people. I'm doing this for myself. There's also knitting, getting started on making Christmas presents for people, spending time in my art hobbies, and sometimes just sitting around and petting a cat.

I'm not telling you that I think you're wrong if you do spend a lot of time on social media. I can't make those judgements about other people's lives. I know it's not good for me, though, so I spend most of my time doing things that will give me something to share when I do pop in to see what's going on.