Social Media and Creativity

I’m already hating my year commitment. Clearly I was right and a week was way too long a commitment to make.

Sigh.

Today was an okay day… But I think I’m just done with the school year. I’m going to pretend that’s what’s going on and this isn’t a larger, systemic problem… I just realized I lost my water glass between the kitchen and the office… And this is my life.

I found it in the bedroom. Apparently I very carefully (with a coaster, even) set it out on the bed stand in the room I was planning to NOT be in for the next hour. I’m sure sub brother appreciated its presence while he was reading… Image result for eyeroll emoji for blog

I also just spent three minutes looking for an eyeroll emoji. Before I started this post I came into the office and promptly spent thirty minutes on Cabin Porn (seriously, it’s crack…) Then I tried to go onto Facebook (after spending two hours on Facebook today already) and then going onto Instagram… I desperately avoid writing here every single day…

Today wasn’t terrible, though, I got a lot of food cooked. Unfortunately only like… two meals worth, but I cooked four things, with multiple parts and steps. I’m probably going to have to figure out simpler recipes… or some of them will get easier with time. But it generally felt like an efficient day because I cooked then I watched Deadwood, then I cooked, then I watched Deadwood, and now there is food in the fridge for at least tomorrow. Though I totally forgot to buy protein powder at the store on Friday so… gotta go back again tomorrow.

But here’s my thought for the day.

I spent a large portion of my “free” time today, in little chunks, absorbing other people’s ideas. I watched a TV show, I looked at Facebook, I looked at Instagram… I spent very little time, besides when I was cooking, just occupied with my own mind. I was essentially living vicariously all day.

A while back I read an article about creativity which claimed that our creativity (as first world people in general) is becoming more and more compromised by the readily available stimulus of social media. That psychologically, when we are constantly “connected” to others’ ideas, lives, experiences, etc. Our brain doesn’t have to spend as much time engaged with our own lives, experiences, etc. It’s a very displaced state of existence. The opposite of mindfulness, really. And this author said that this really atrophies our creativity. His number one recommendation for increasing creativity is to reduce social media… As in… Don’t check your phone the minute you wake up… don’t take your phone to bed to scan Facebook before you go to sleep, and all the rest of the times during the day.

I’ve gone through periods of restricting my social media exposure, though I wasn’t trying to make myself write during those times… but I definitely can tell there is a difference for me… It became most evident a couple of months ago, though.

I, even knowing I shouldn’t, downloaded a couple of games onto my phone a couple of months ago. They were both “real time” games, as in, they continued in real time even when I wasn’t actively playing them. One of them was one of those “design a city and run businesses and farms” games, where you plant crops and come back and harvest them and sell them or use them to create other products to sell, etc. And once you get a few levels in you start having time-limited challenges (plane takes off in 4 hours and 29 minutes) which run in real time, not just in game time. So even when I wasn’t playing the game, I always had in the back of my mind when I needed to log back in to harvest crops to load warehouses, etc.

I also downloaded a game that allowed you to be an interior designer and participate in challenges which lasted anywhere from 24 hours to 3 days. I actually really had fun with that game, you had a room with certain requirements from the “owners” and you got to create an interior design with rugs, furniture, artwork, lamps, etc. Then you submitted your design and users would vote on designs and you would get prizes based on the number of votes your design would get in a given challenge.

Needless to say, I ended up spending inordinate amounts of time on these two games. But not only, I realized, was I spending a lot of time on them, they were occupying my mental space even when I wasn’t playing… I was feeling actual stress about harvesting imaginary crops on time and whether my completely fabricated room design would pass muster with random players in a game with whom I never interacted in any way.

I was THINKING about the games all the time, and playing them a lot of the time, and I felt more and more detached from my own life.

After about three weeks I made the, depressingly difficult, decision to uninstall both of them from my phone. I found that while I experienced a lot of separation longing for both games, I also immediately felt a kind of sense of freedom or relief that they were gone… the stress was gone… And I felt as if I began to notice my own life again. Not as if it had been missing, but as if it had been muted in the background instead of full color and surround sound.

Although I’ve always gone through spurts of using Facebook more or less frequently, I’ve been in a heavy uptick lately. I think that I partly feel overwhelmed by the current political situation in my country. I feel helpless, I feel frightened, and Facebook is a place for me to see that others are fighting back, to see that there are people battling what is happening, that people are debating issues with rationality and empathy and that intellectualism still trumps fear-mongering in at least some small corners of my current world. And I think I am very anxiously clinging to that, trying to create my own side-reality where I can feel at least slightly comforted against what feels overwhelming and out of control.

And Sir and I have been back and forth about this extensively and… at this point, while I don’t think we’ve ever come to a resolution, we’ve come to the decision that completely cutting myself off from the news and all media would be harmful because I then feel blindfolded. Lovely as it would be to turn off the phone and the TV and have the world become “out of sight, out of mind,” my mind doesn’t work that way. My anxiety would become more crippling if I didn’t know WHAT was happening at all.

We’ve talked about just watching TV news which would have a built-in time limit, but decided that TV news is not helpful as I don’t control the direction from which it is coming or the amount of any topic I see. On Facebook I scroll past multiple Trump stories because… I just can’t. Or I skim headlines to get the general idea and then I go to certain friends whose judgment I trust to hear what’s going on… it’s a way I have of filtering the information to a level that I can manage.

But even so…

I’m doing it too much, too often.

And anxiety and depression and eyestrain aside… It could be crippling my creativity.

Of course, teaching the last three weeks of school could easily do that job completely on its own, but… multiple hours of Facebook doesn’t add any favors.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this introspection…

I’ll probably be getting Facebook limits coming down from the Sirly one…

I probably should be able to do this on my own.

I don’t know if I’m that strong.