Help me

I don’t think I can look at computers as a source of leisure right now. Even this is an addiction: it’s like a narcotic. I just read Avital Ronnell’s Crack Wars. She’s a sexual assaulter whose career was ruined by her actions. My space bar is sticky. Right now there’s a lot of friction when I use computers, and I don’t know anymore how to do simple things, or have to think carefully about them.

My girlfriend and I are in an awkward place right now where we’re both overwhelmed because mania sucks and we both have family members who are disregulated and destroying themselves, their relationships, and their loved ones; we’re both travelling to care for those affected as best as we can. But I’m struggling to take care of myself, and I feel like everything I say pisses her off; I think we’re both irritated. I don’t know if she’s going to read this; probably not unless I tell her there’s a new post, frankly. That’s alright: it’s easier to write for nobody except me in the future.

I have to finish this program. I don’t want to touch a computer again for a long time. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t learn to program. If it were a standard part of our education the way driving and ideology are then we’d not have the bullshit we have now. Or something: it wouldn’t make a difference, since programming isn’t for everyone any more than anything else is. I guess. I don’t know whether there is something that’s for everyone. I think there isn’t, but a lot of people have examples of things that are for everyone. Maybe thinking that there’s something that’s for everyone isn’t for everyone.

This is an attempt to serialize as a string what’s happening in me right now. It’s a hard thing to do. I’ve come back to the post after some time off. Anne and I were on the phone today comparing our concert archives, and she’s seen more concerts than me. This is a fact I knew vaguely but didn’t have a quantity for; and seeing it on the screen in a public venue struck me with a crushing sense of inadequacy and humiliation. I said as much, quickly, and moved on. I was nervous because I had recommended it as a way to track concerts, but it takes a little while to figure out how to do things on it, and I kept saying that there was no point. I don’t know what’s wrong with me and why I get fixated on things; I felt such certainty that I was inferior and not good enough to be her partner.

Now she would be angry that I think this lowly of her: I don’t think this lowly of her in a rational assessment, but I have prejudices and judgements that I didn’t even know I was obsessed with. I feel like computer-mediated interaction, particularly computer-mediated multimodal interaction via social networks, makes me depressed and pushes down my self-esteem. I have always found it stressful to post on social media and never really have posted on it: I think I’ve posted about four times on Facebook, there were about five pictures I posted to Instagram when I tried it for a while in high school, I don’t think I ever tweeted when I had a Twitter account (though I never used much Twitter at all).

I feel like it’s abnormal for a person to find social media as stressful as I do. It feels like a phobia or a limitation that is constraining my ability to socialize. I, however, don’t know how much it’s actually limiting my ability to socialize; it’s the thinking about it that’s the worst. For someone who doesn’t use social media I spend a lot of time thinking about it, which is a hallmark of addiction by the way. Maybe it’s because people around are frequently opening it (on transit, for example), and that social media network badges are all over packaging, adverstiements, emails, and websites. I crave the positive feedback of making posts that are reacted to well, but I don’t want the negative pain of feeling inadequate compared to other people’s posts.

I know rationally that everyone self-filters etc., but that doesn’t help me much with my initial emotional response. I feel like chosing not to use social media platforms is a reasonable choice that our society should permit, and I feel like people are reasonable about it, but I also find that people want to interact with one another using the platforms and that I miss out because I find it hard. I don’t know why I find it miserable but I just do. I wish I didn’t, but I don’t know. I wish I could just ignore the existence of them like I did before, but as I spend more time with people I’m more exposed to them because people are constantly talking about stuff they saw on them.

I really don’t want to hear any more about things that people saw on Instagram or TikTok or a TV show they watched: it’s widely known to be tedious to listen to people talk about what happened in an RPG campaign you played in; recapping some post you saw is strictly as tedious to me. I wish I weren’t so judgemental. I wish to sit impassibly.