Connections

I stopped using Facebook a few weeks ago, and it hasn't been easy. Like the zillions of people who, over the past two decades, followed the siren song that put them in easy-as-pie contact with people they knew from every corner of their lives, I got sucked into feeling the illusion that connections I had through the app were real connections that would continue if I were no longer using it.

That is, unfortunately, not the case. A good many of my (former) Facebook friends also made the decision not to feed the beast. They are probably feeling the same kind of "let down" as I feel every time I pick up my phone. I though that once I left Facebook my email correspondence might increase, but there is very little I see of a personal nature in my inbox.

Most of what I get are substacks encouraging me pay to subscribe, messages asking me to support candidates for public office in states other than my own, advertising emails from stores I have purchased something from during the past year or two, countless reminders about medical appointments (five or six about a single appointment), and bulk messages from people I do not know who ask me to listen to recordings and make blogposts about them. Most are in musical styles that I am not equipped to discuss. Clearly the people who send those requests have never actually read my blog.

Sometimes I get a request to review a recording that is both appropriate and interesting to me, but that hasn't happened for a long time.

I still do the stuff that I do, and find joy in the doing. But I feel like I have forgotten exactly how to interact with people the way I once did. When I do send a personal email I worry that I might have said too much, or that the person getting the email message, who is not as prompt at ridding their inboxes of spam and ads as I am, might forget to respond. 

Remember the email exchanges we had twenty years ago, when the internet was young? I loved those days.

I clean my inbox several times a day. And it isn't much fun to do all that cleaning without the reward of having actual contact with living beings. And the degree of instant contact and attention we have been conditioned to receive over the past two decades is unrealistic. But gradually, without even being aware of it, our appetite for attention increases. 

At least mine has. 

This new "normal" (and I guess it is normal and human to communicate in ways that we can control, particularly when it comes to not questioning whether what we say and what we hear is true) is going to take a lot longer to adjust to than I thought.