You know, for about a decade, everyone was pushed to share everything they did on social media. It was a mistake. It was a mistake on the scale of cigarettes and smoking inside and in airplanes and in hospitals and in schools. No one thought it was a stupid idea, and a lot of people pushed it as the only way to get jobs and show you’re a clever chimp that can internet so hard because interneting hard was the cool new thing.
Lower right is the hangover from that. Anyone I didn’t find or didn’t find me between 2008 and 2018 wasn’t ever worth connecting with. The people that did find me were nice to hear from once, and we haven’t talked ever again, despite being connected, for 10+ years.
My grandparents and their parents, etc. went their whole lives never seeing people again and not knowing what happened to them because they moved one time and they didn’t know their new address. Whole movies were about that. Elvis had a song about that. The last episode of the first season of The Real World ended with everyone moving out of the apartment, and once that landline and address no longer went to those people, it was 100% possible that those people would be gone from each others’ lives forever.
Y’all, we’re not supposed to collect and keep 27,000 casual contacts throughout our lives. It’s unnatural. Our brains are not built for it. We’re made to have a few dozen up to 100-ish close connections that mean something, including family you don’t pick.
Email some old friends you don’t text with daily. Send anyone you truly care about an email to say hi. If they respond, then great. If not, don’t worry about it. Enjoy high fidelity communications with those who mater to you.
We are not built to drink milk beyond infancy, yet we do. We are not built to cross oceans in a few hours, wake up in one time zone and fall asleep in another, yet we do. We are not built to eat ice cream on a scorching summer afternoon or preserve food for months and experience flavors from far away, yet we do.
The argument that something is “unnatural” has always struck me as incomplete, because humanity’s defining trait is that we are not merely shaped by nature, we reshape our relationship with it. We build tools, cultures, institutions, and technologies that allow us to transcend many of the constraints our ancestors lived under.
That does not mean every new capability is wise or healthy. Some inventions enrich our lives; others burden us in ways we only understand decades later. But the fact that something exceeds the limits of our evolutionary past is not, by itself, an argument against it.
Human flourishing has always depended less on the number of people we can reach and more on the depth of the few relationships that truly matter. I miss having many Facebook friends (some I have never physically met) and seeing their life updates every once in a while, because now we all think Facebook is no longer cool.
Fair points, though, maybe more so in the abstract. To be fair, when I go try and fix or adjust or tweak something, I do always tell myself “we’re humans, we change our environment to suit our needs.”
Though I think you’re excusing burnout and BS social media hustle culture when some people simply don’t want to do that. If you want to post everything on IG, go for it. But people shouldn’t feel shame for falling into the lower right square. It’s a decision some people make consciously, and others less so. Which, for me, feels like loss. We had this nice thing where it was great to see what my friends from 20 years ago were up to. And now I can’t participate in it because it harvests my data, and I would tell them the same. The infrastructure found us, friction-free. And when it turned out that pipes were to suck us dry, the gap was real, and the previous infrastructure not up to the task of casually serving up information. Now it (barely) takes work to say hello to someone and has to be meaningful again. People should be allowed to be OK with that.
Which is to say that my evolution argument is that we have, within a generation, taxed the limits of a part of us that hasn’t gradually worked up to a universal higher capacity. Better weapons have extinguished genetic lines with no regard for adaptation or evolutionary traits other than what country someone was born into. Given 30 generations, we don’t physically adapt to having bombs dropped on us. We aren’t selecting for terminally online people to reproduce more and be more successful in the species, either. Maybe we are and I’m so far out of it that I can’t tell.
Based perspective on this, thank you. :)
Gen Z here. Burnt out of social media. Deleted every mainstream social media app. If you want the fastest way to never ever hear from me, it would be email. That shits incredibly overwhelming. I check my physical mailbox more than I check my email. The goal is to get away from the computer.
Aww man, I got
Constantly working (not into it)
Be gay
Always playing map painting games
And
Declared a terrorist by UK government
Declared a terrorist by UK government
By the sounds of it, this one is fairly easy to do.
Yeah, not to disparage his hard work organising beforehand and 2 years in prison (so far), but ultimately all he did was park really badly. At most he should be getting a few points on his license.
That’s what you get for wanking without a license sicko
40s is the same, but one of them is dead
I was going to say: There’s no space for dead, moved to Austin in the 10s, or crippling pain killer addiction.
All sub sections of category 4
Here I am going strong in the bottom right!
Same, I’ve come to realize life is best alone. Solitude is the best dude.
I’m loving how many bottoms there are in this thread
I’m number four. I mean, I was. Those people have probably all forgotten about me by now.
It is a peaceful life.
I lurk in the high school chat, saying nothing all year round except “happy birthday” or “congrats” (baby/marathon)
They didn’t have any of that new-fangled stuff when i was in school.
The “Why is nobody joining my games on X-Box?” answer guide.
Most of this was correct
I know a guy who is three of these things. Goes to the gym 6 days a week, works in a hospital, starting a business, has a wife and a kid, and he still manages to have time to hang out once or twice a week. Man is as successful as I am not
As someone who is some of those things as well, I would love to know what the wife and/or child are doing during all those activities. Because something has to give when you’re doing that much.
In my experience, that balance is really hard, and even in the most hospitable, high-quality-of-life places, that balance is not exactly always something that is nurtured and valued by the systems in place.
I think he really is just built different. I’m good friends with both parents, and knew his wife long before he did. Both of them are working on higher education, kid goes to daycare most days every week. It’s not like he never sees his son either. Usually when I hang out, we’re watching his boy while we play BG3, which is nice because he can just walk away for a minute whenever a diaper needs changed
Having recieved a large sum of life insurance money after his father passed away certainly helped with the house buying and the car maintaining and the education pursuing, but his time management is pure skill
I wonder if your friend can sleep only five hours and still function to the maximum. Apparently it is genetics. Napoleon and Thatcher could sleep less than 7 hours and could still think sharp and be fresh as a daisy.
Welp, don’t know about Napoleon, but Thatcher pulled some stupid and evil shit.
Maybe if she had slept more, we could have had a better world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
How successful can he be if he failed at using birth control?
Where’s
Work
Come home too exhausted to do anything worthwhile
Sleep
Work
I don’t think it falls into the first category because I really don’t give a shit about my job. I just have no energy.
I don’t mean to be snide or clever, but it sounds like you care about your job a lot. At the very least what would happen if you did not have that job. I feel for that and it sounds like you might need to talk to someone. Could be over analyzing a small comment on the internet but your short lines of text felt… raw.
Good luck buck.
I think a lot of it is Long Covid, to be honest. After I had Covid I started sleeping really poorly, and I still do. I also really need to lose weight.
As far as my job goes it’s actually pretty cushy. Of course, if I could find a way to survive without it, I’d quit in a heartbeat - as I imagine many people would.
Fifth category: Everybody has forgotten about YOU, and you essentially no longer exist.
The disappeared ones. I’m one of those.
I’ll tell you what we are up to. We are
Yikes! You can’t just tell people about the
People are disappearing left and right! I need to tell the world about this before
There’s also the “still acting like they’re 16 years old” and they’re as bad if not worse than all the other cathegories
This could be funny if it wasn’t such a sad outlook on life.
At least you can pretend to Excel at something
Word.
Powerful Point.
Windows puns run out, Lemmy know.
First I started a family and then I promptly disappeared. I still have little to no social media presence. This really the only place I’m active online.
Dad?
you guys still got friends?
When the definition of “friend” is “person you hung out with in HS/College and then only ever associated with via the computer”, maybe you don’t.
Box 4, in particular, is a really depressing rubric for friendship as it assumes a person vanishes the moment they stop providing new content on Social Media. I’ve got friends who occupy the first three quadrants simultaneously, but we still keep in touch by SMS and by actually visiting one another on a regular basis. We’re 100% logged the fuck off past that.
Box 4, in particular, is a really depressing rubric for friendship as it assumes a person vanishes the moment they stop providing new content on Social Media.
I just think of it as shorthand for the very real phenomenon that some people fall off the radar in every measurable way: can no longer be found in person, won’t respond to calls or texts, no online presence (even DMs/chats, or electronic invites to in-person activities). I have a few friends in that category, and it’s often something like trying to build a new life away from their past (sometimes including a new spouse and/or social circle), or even mental health issues.
And some people really do want to live off grid in a cabin in the mountains, or backpacking, or in a faraway, low-connectivity job (at sea, or in remote wilderness, or whatever else). If they end up doing that and fall off the radar, it happens.
I just think of it as shorthand for the very real phenomenon that some people fall off the radar in every measurable way
Sure. But there tends to be a certain distance already baked in. Unless you have a deep bound with someone - a parent / sibling / child, typically - once you stop interacting with that person IRL, there’s less and less of an incentive to engage with them remotely.
Damn this is they way it is for most of us 20 something’s after college…
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Looking forward to being on the bottom right.
At some when people get too busy to be concerned I’ll delete my snap and insta leaving nothing behind. I just don’t understand why people feel the need to share everything they’re doing constantly or how they get upset if you don’t have the energy to react to it all.
I just don’t understand why people feel the need to share everything they’re doing constantly or how they get upset if you don’t have the energy to react to it all.
Dopamine hit.
Ive already done this at 24, no snap, insta, reddit, Facebook, and im slowly starting to get rid of tiktok now
I just don’t understand why people feel the need to share everything
Sign of life. Some people keep posting what they’re doing even if no one cares, just a reminder they’re still alive and breathing.
