Thursday Meanderings

Hi Dear Readers!

I hope this post finds you and brings you joy, insight, and/or action steps for defeating the Diabolical Forces in the Universe (DFUs).

You may have noticed an uptick in posts from me this week. That's because I am on a 5-Day Social Media Fast, and when I don't have the distraction of useless social media to waste my time, I use that time for more productive things.* It feels great to be free of the negativity and toxicity of the social media. But also, it feels even better to deny the Big Tech companies from profiting off my attention. I encourage all of you to try a five day fast from social media. If enough people do it, the Big Tech companies will feel the dent in their bottom lines. Ideally, someone with some charisma and persuasion power would call for a General Boycott of social media for a day, week, month, or (stretch goal!) year. If social media wasn't so ridiculously addictive to the human mind, this might even be possible. But the Big Tech companies were ingenious in making social media both irresistibly addictive and immensely profitable.

I remind everyone again (and this is not disputed by anyone), you are not the customer of social media (that's why it is free). YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. Every time you use social media, Big Tech profits off the time your eyeballs are on the screen, to the tune of billions of dollars. And you NEVER get any cut of that pie. Your attention is nothing more than a commodity and as with any commodity, the goal is to mine and exploit more and more of it. Think of social media as an attention mining operation, and the more addictive it is, the more profitable it is. So, if you can escape the addiction (and that's no easy task), withhold your attention from social media exploitation companies until/unless they offer to pay you for the use of your attention. Remember way back in the day when people with landline phones would try to charge Telemarketers who called them for the use of their phones for business purposes? Some of those people even took the Telemarketing companies to court and WON! So, there's hope. But not much, because you are human and that means you are ridiculously bad at resisting addictive things. But...change my mind and prove me wrong. I'll wait...

I guess that's all I have. I should wrap it up, because I want to get a few minutes of mindful meditation in before I kick off an action packed morning of seeing marriage and family therapy clients. I have the afternoon off today (because when you are self employed, you can take time off whenever TF you want, albeit unpaid). I will meet my parents at the Middleton Starbucks at lunchtime for some chit-chat and the NYT mini-crossword. Then I'll come home and pound out a solid Peloton workout with intention (outcome = the demise of a certain specific DFU in the next few days).

Fin.

* NOTE: It could be debated if writing blog posts is actually a "productive thing." But that would also be unproductive because all signs point to blog posting being a far more productive pursuit than social media doom scrolling.