Our beautiful walled gardens of moral purity.

One day Gumroad is a symbol of independence. The next, it’s toxic. So what then—Stripe? Square? MyPillow? Ok, I went too far, that dude and his stupid pillow need to go away for good. What’s the exit strategy when every platform, store, app, whatever  eventually fails our purity test?

…

Here’s what really gets me about that question: the assumption that someone else has already decided for us. “Did we decide…” Not “Should I use this?” or “What do you think about this platform?” but “What’s the verdict? What’s safe? What won’t get me excommunicated from the group?”

…

Not because I want to defend broken platforms or bad actors. But because I want to defend something bigger—something we’re at risk of losing: the ability to engage with people without exile. The ability to stay in dialogue—especially when we don’t see eye-to-eye. The ability to build, together, without requiring each other to pass a moral purity test every three months.

Our beautiful walled gardens of moral purity.

This spoke to me. We have one life. As long as you are a kind person who attempts to leave the world a better place than you found it, you certainly don’t need to justify yourself to me or anyone else. I have stopped doing so.

None of this is easy. As someone went increasingly and unhealthily online, it’s a big personal change. For me, it comes from a place of diversion of attention. I stopped focusing on myself and asking myself what I think and filled it with other people’s opinions and their moral justification (which is performatory given it was driven by social media). Complete the feedback loop of tribal acknowledgements and I was caught in a vicious cycle. It resulted in a lack strong conviction, adoption of other people’s / tribe’s opinions accompanied by an erosion of intolerance to differences of them.

The only way I’ve fought against this is to follow a 3 step plan:

• Reduce external stimuli – as much as I told myself that even podcasts were “fueling” my brain, the truth is that it was just reducing the time, space and opportunity to think and form original opinions and thoughts.
• Replace social media with writing (and thinking) – what happens when you have more time to think and process is that you start forming thoughts that need an outlet. I’ve first resorted to my physical journal (pen, paper).
• Focus on writing on the blog: This blog predates social media when I first developed my own CMS on geocities. I am a child of the blog and I’ve come back to sharing my own experiences here.

The social media cycle entertained me but numbed me. It was also the type of entertainment that made me feel yucky as anxiety kept building up while i never tackled what I had to process.

It’s hard to trust someone who’s been through a cleanse. They see clarity that’s hard to see for someone in the middle of the muck. There is a similar clarity that I will share one day when it comes to focusing on the physical aspects of your body too.

For now let’s just say that I am rejuvenated. I am rejuvenated to think and share those thoughts again. I am reading with a clearer mind, my focus is longer and stronger and I feel like myself again.

You should do what works for you. All the best. If you want to chat to me about it / share what you are going through, put it in the comments.