The Brain is going to brain.

I guess it’s been about six weeks since I deleted my account with SG, which has been for me a place where I could meet minds that were running along the same track as mine. We in the GAH household are not living much in tune with most of the people around us. IRL, I have to bite my tongue a lot. People, as wonderful as I find them, often cannot understand or relate to the thinks I’m thinking. It was very nice to find a place to be blunt and straightforward, to be able to trust the folks I was interacting with to be the same with me, and to know that most of us were on the same page regarding lifestyles, current events, and most importantly, recognizing that Christ is Lord.

Also, the memes. If you have any good ones to drop on me, please do. I’ve found no better place for memes than SG.

I can’t go any further in this post without expressing my appreciation to Vox Day for rolling up the community and doing so much intellectual heavy-lifting that I’ve marveled over for the last 20-odd years. He and his core group of commenters have really changed the conversation and kept the Enemy on his toes, and I know they’ll continue to do so. I’m digressing a little, and I’ll not go the whole fan-girl route, but thank you, SDL. It’s been cool. I’m still reading.

I had some small issues with SG for some time before I logged off for the last time. I found the community to be heading off in a direction that, frankly, bored me. A few new folks (I’m sorry) dragged down the average IQ. In addition to that, a lot of the people I’d met there and become real-life friends with had either left the platform or communicated more with me in other ways.

I had plenty of reasons to continue to be a member of that community–good folks are still there, there’s still a lot of great, new thinking going on, and it’s stinking fun to have social media with that much honest engagement–but one very compelling reason to leave:

My brain can’t handle the scroll.

At the same time that I left SG, I also deleted my FB account. That was a completely peaceful and pleasant change to my life. Meta is of Satan, and  you need to find a different platform if you’re on it. On both platforms, I daily, hourly even, found myself scrolling down, even through feelings of extreme boredom. I noticed long ago that I had a pattern. I’d sit down to do a thing I really needed to do–the budget, perhaps–and the loop would start. I’d open that legitimately needful page up, do it, check my email, check SG, flip to FB, clear my notifications, respond, realize I needed to be doing something else, do something else in a most distracted and rueful manner, and then just a minute later I HAVE TO CHECK MY NOTIFICATIONS AGAIN!

You’d think I could just tell myself to put that stuff down until a better time; that I could have used a stopwatch, apps that limit screen time, punishments, rewards, anything at all to control my own behavior. I did try those things! They’d work for a day or a week. But I would always drift back into that pattern. I’d lose five minutes here, ten there, just a minute sometimes, and it didn’t seem to add up to that much. My housework still got done, things I’m responsible for still look kinda ok on the outside, but on the inside, I feel awful. I’m foggy. My attention is not where it needs to be. My kids are getting a very distracted version of me. My husband is getting a very distracted version of me. There’s a physical toll to it, as well, since it’s very hard to be as active as one should be while staring down at a phone or at a computer screen.

So when the time came to re-subscribe to the private social media, I went to the page to give my credit card number, and a still, small voice said to me “This is your exit.” So I ripped off the bandaid and abandoned my friends (I do consider SG to be real friends, most of FB not so much) without so much as an explanation. I hate that I left people scratching their heads, but I absolutely can’t handle social media. I don’t think some of you can, either. Not if you find just the right media and right kind of people.

It is impossible to dopamine fast.

Dopamine, of course, is one of the popular buzzwords right now, with people taking “dopamine fasts” with zero internet or entertainment to calm down their fevered brains. I feel sorry for people who need social media to do their work, because it would be very hard to limit it when you have to be there. It might even require a job change to become happy and peaceful.

The thing about dopamine is, it’s not the reward-receiving chemical. It’s the reward-seeking chemical. People aren’t really fasting from dopamine, which would involve not making any dopamine, voluntarily. Your brain is always dopamine-ing, ok? (Dopamine has so many functions beyond this one. Here’s a quick nerdy video on the chemical.) Dopamine “fasters” are simply giving themselves a chance to seek some other, more salutary result. You will always have dopamine. It’s the thing that makes you seek food, sex, friends, and fun. You can’t fast from it. You can only change what you do in response to it.

What I’ve found is that, if I don’t have access to that quick, low-cost social reward, when dopamine revs mind and body up to look for something to satisfy, I end up doing things like improving on a Sunday School lesson, taking the kids for a walk, experimenting with a carnivore-ish oatmeal cookie simulation (recipe and proper apology for even attempting such a thing will be posted sometime soon), coming up with better school plans, reading a book, sitting down at the drums or piano, calling a friend or my mom. You know, living. All that stuff I had to remind myself to do before, I’m just doing. I used to use cigarettes the same way! I know this feeling.

It’s not just a habit. It’s an addiction.

Now, when my dopamine rises, it causes me to do something I ought to be doing. My brain becomes satisfied and calm in the doing. Somebody in my physical social sphere benefits. Instead of “influencing” or placating people who probably wouldn’t even like me if they knew me in real life, I’m getting a real smile and hug and pheromone hit.

I wasn’t even completely wasting my time on social media! That’s what made it so easy to keep doing. Unlike smoking, which benefits no one, I could justify my presence on these platforms. I do think of myself as someone with a way of saying things that can help people sort themselves out. I was learning stuff from people who know more than me about pretty much everything. It kept me in the loop for events. Finding runs is going to get a lot harder.

I think that feeling of success I got from interacting positively with a bunch of people isn’t entirely untoward. I have helped some folks in carnivore and running and Christian groups. But it’s not the way I should be influencing the world right now. Maybe when the kids are grown, or something else changes in my obligations, I’ll go back to the scroll. I shudder to think of it right now, though. I’ll put my useful stuff on this blog from now on, as it does not play the same tricks on my mind. It won’t have the same reach, but it’ll have to do.

I think I’ve admitted all of this before, but addictions being what they are, I’ve fallen right back into the same pattern, time and time again. I cannot be the kind of wife, mother, friend, and neighbor I should be when I have access to some forms of social media. I still have an X account, because I don’t even care enough about the site to go delete it. You might be more into Tik-Tok, or something else, but the result is going to be the same.

Anybody who doesn’t feel this happening in their lives is, of course, free to disregard all of what I am saying. Anybody who can get social media (or other kinds of media) to fit into a manageable chunk of his day, is welcome to enjoy the world any way he sees fit. Just ignore me. But I think many, many of you–especially some of us moms who don’t meet with a lot of adults every day, introverted types, high IQ folks with little intellectual interaction IRL, and people who connect well with others through written media–have the same problem I do, and need to hear a little tough love. You don’t have to admit it right now if you don’t want to, and I am not calling any particular person out. How could I?

The next time you feel that bored, irritable feeling welling up in your chest, turn the media off, but somehow just five minutes later you’re scrolling the same page that made you feel that way in the first place, remember my story.

Kill it. You don’t need it, and it’s hurting you.