Posting Is A Disease

One of my favorite podcasts is Who? Weekly, and a few weeks ago, one of the co-hosts nailed it with one sentence.

Posting is a disease.

She was talking about an influencer who got into trouble for posting about getting a haircut during the height of the pandemic when everything was supposed to be under lockdown.

Aside from what you may think about that person breaking quarantine, the bigger question seemed to be--

Why would you post about it?

This person knows she has a large following.

She knew what she was doing was wrong.

She must have known she'd get dragged for it.

So why post?

Because posting is a disease.

When the entire world came to a halt, I remember hearing about how liquor stores needed to stay open, because otherwise alcoholics would have withdrawals and need to go to hospitals and it was easier just to let them continue on with their addiction since we didn't have time to address the problem in any other way.

All right, I thought, but what about attention addicts?

What are we going to do about them?

If you think I'm being flippant, I'm not.  I realize equating substance abuse with needing to document every moment of your life might rub you the wrong way, but I would counter that by saying the addictions society has deemed acceptable are always going to be far more troubling than the ones we think call for treatment.

Have you noticed some of your friends acting stranger than usual lately?

As someone who is admittedly wildly addicted to having people pay attention to me, finding out that all the usual outlets for me to get that attention were being shut down definitely sent me into a spiral.

Luckily, I had enough people (virtually) slap me around and point me towards healthier ways of finding validation during this time (please listen to my new podcast "I Have Things To Say And I Need You To Agree with Me with Kevin Broccoli" dropping on Crooked Media next week), but clearly, not everyone was so lucky.

All of the things we saw people do in the early days--the bread baking, the surge in Tik Tok sign-ups, the various hair coloring (guilty)--all seemed to be an effort to say "Yeah, I know there's a pandemic, but you can't get me used to acquiring all my self-worth from social media, then tell me those platforms need to be exclusively about things that matter now."

When we saw BLM protests happening all over the country, some people were calling out those who weren't posting about it, and instead, kept putting up selfies and pictures of their dogs.

If you want to see people absolutely lose their mind in 2020, make a suggestion about what they should post on their pages.

Even the most reasonable person will lose their damn mind right in front of you.

I SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO POST WHAT I WANT.

Okay, fine, Steve, but the bigger question is--

What would happen if you didn't?

Would it really be that bad?

Who is it that you think wants to see photos of you and your wife on a boat with the caption "Nice weather! Wish Janice was here. Hey Janice! Where's my lobster?"

(Also, please learn what a DM is.)

If your answer to "Who cares?" is--

The people who like and comment on the stuff I post, then I can assure you, those people do not care.

They like and comment, because when they post stuff, they want you to like and comment on their stuff.

It's mutual assured confidence boosting, and it's destroying us all.

Most of us would probably be embarrassed to admit that we need to post things, and yet, isn't that what we're insinuating when we get mad at people who ask us to refrain from doing it?

The issue isn't "Why aren't I allowed to post this selfie without people attacking me?"

The issue is "Why do you feel compelled to post it at all?  Ever?"

And I'm speaking about myself as well.  I can't resist good lighting and a nice wall color, and I'll own that, but I don't know if I'd flip out at someone if they asked me to post about something else for a change.

If you're approaching it from a free speech angle, I would recommend you don't.

Who among us would argue that when free speech became a given right of all Americans, what the people who gave us that right meant were "Yes, you're allowed to post nudes on Instagram and not have anybody make you feel bad about it."

And I'm not even arguing that you should feel bad about it.  I'm arguing that right now we have a significant number of Americans, many of them young people, who receive their identities and self-worth strictly from strangers on the Internet.

Which is, pardon my language, fucking terrifying.

Because at no point is anybody going to do anything about that.

At this point, in the throes of a pandemic, anything that doesn't kill you or leave you incapacitated is not on any list of vital problems we need to solve, but we've also essentially given up the war on connectivity.  On getting people away from their screens.  On prioritizing human interaction.

In other words, we're letting the liquor stores stay open 24/7 and twice a day, everything is marked half off.

We're not just putting a pin in the problem, we're allowing it to get exponentially worse.

Of course people are doing dumb shit and documenting it even though they know they're going to get in trouble.

What is trouble anymore anyway?

It's getting cancelled?

Do you realize that cancelling someone might mean "forcing them not to look at their social media accounts unless they want to feel bad" and...that's about it.

I mean, sure, if they're a big enough celebrity, you could cost them a few endorsements and money from future gigs, but if they've already been a celebrity for awhile, I doubt that's affecting them all that much.

One recently cancelled celebrity told a friend "I'll just wait a year or two and then come back."

And, yeah, that'll probably work.

I mean, by then, we'll all be living in underground bunkers anyway, but if any of us have phones and Twitter, we'll most likely say--

What did we cancel her for again?  Oh, you know what?  It doesn't matter.  The nuclear fallout has me growing a third arm.  I have bigger things to worry about.

You're probably seeing the word "performative" used a lot lately.

This accusation that people are posting about important things because they want attention and, right now, that's the way to get it.

But I wonder--how can a generation that's been trained to perform by YouTube and Vine and a million other platforms that have been replaced by even more mindless ones expect to be anything but performative?

If you slapped a child every time the child smelled pizza, imagine one day screaming at them "Jesus, Emily, can you not freak out every time we pass a Domino's?"

That ship sailed, ladies and gentlemen.  It is halfway across the world and the compass is broken.

Here's my suggestion--

Unfollow everyone you follow on social media that you DO NOT KNOW PERSONALLY.

Right now, we need to be checking in on our friends and loved ones.  Not finding out what Kelly Ripa is eating for breakfast.

If you're like me and you use social media to get insight or information, make that the filter to weed people out.

Do not follow people who are famous and yet have no discernible skills.

In fact, if they call themselves famous, and your parents don't know who they are, they are not famous.

Your parents are not out-of-touch just because they don't care that someone doing make-up tutorials on YouTube has a hundred million subscribers.

Being famous used to mean being in movies, having a television show, writing books, or being onstage.

While I'm open to the idea of finding new platforms upon which people's voices can be heard, we need a total reset on everything, so let's start with social media, because I think it's safe to say--

Things have gotten totally out of control.

It seems possible to me that the reason you're seeing so many people sabotaging themselves and their--I use this word loosely--careers right now is because it's exhausting and it isn't real.  

Their fame isn't real, their existence isn't real, and their lives are miserable having to stay relevant at a time when reality has thrown perception into a burlap sack and flung it over a cliff.

The rush you see to condemn everyone is, yes, partially because some people have been getting away with murder for too long, but it's also an intense feeling we all have that social media, like most other institutions, needs to be burned down and rebuilt.

And no, I'm not looking forward to the withdrawal when that happened.

When Instagram suggested it would stop showing you how many followers someone had and how many likes they get on their posts, you would have thought they were threatening to show up at these people's houses and steal their pets.

Why?

Why would they care?

Isn't it all about self-expression?

What do likes and followers have to do with expressing yourself?

Once upon a time, people used to keep diaries, and the whole point was NOT allowing people to read them.

You expressed yourself and you spent your entire life working up the courage to show mayyyybe two other people the result of that expression.

While I'm glad that we now have so many more brave artists in the world, we also have even more uninhibited extroverts who aren't really trying to create anything, but just would very much like you to tell them how much you like their new outfit.  You know, something they could hear from their spouses or relatives, but it would really mean more coming from you, Carly-who-they've-never-met-but-who-friended-them-after-you-both-ganged-up-on-another-person-on-a-Reddit-thread-once.

If Skynet took all of us offline tomorrow, I don't think it would be a stretch to assume that you'd see people curled up in balls under their desks and on the floor of their closets tapping on a blank screen, whimpering, and wondering who was going to give them feedback on their mustache.

While I am one of the few people left on earth who is not advocating for social media breaks, I do think we need to get better at how we use social media and what it is we want from it.

Also, please like and share this post or I'll probably delete it, because otherwise why did I even bother writing it, right?

Thanks.