I love seeing the names of humans I admire in so many places. There’s a certain hopeful agnosticism some writers have toward social media platforms. And what a thrill it is, the way we carry ourselves into the rooms where new friends might be. 

There’s no overkill in these digital spaces.

Writing is an act of connection. That’s one of my theories. I’m a scavenger and I like to assemble some parts to see what results. And it’s not to everyone’s taste, but nothing ever could be. I don’t bake, because I’d never stop. But I can write forever without making myself sick. My stomach knows things about me.

My stomach doesn’t know so much about social media. The dopamine is part of it. I get how this digital thing wants to flood some system in me, a feedback loop to keep me tethered to it. It interrupts the system that is fed by writing.

It may also be true that I’ve been overthinking the particulars. I made up more rules to help force the systems to work for me. I thought I was a fixer in a room full of bosses.

I unfriended my future husband at least once on Facebook before the connection stuck. Is this a story about my gut and my guts? Should I have figured out what he did, sooner? Or had I just not decided yet?

Is this about listening or acting or both or neither? 

Something strikes me lately about the platforms themselves. None of it is all-or-nothing, and none of it is forever. A hammer isn’t evil or righteous or anything in between. That’s my human problem, this baggage.

Maybe it’s more primal than algorithms. I guess the question isn’t about right and wrong. And it’s beside the point. We don’t get to decide whether we’re part of the problem or part of the solution, because that’s too many layers on top of the thing that’s happening.

Don’t let the bullies separate you.

Maybe that’s the best and only guidance for digital life I can get my head around right now. I can go where I think I need to be. I can leave where I think I oughtn’t be. So much of what I think of as life’s rules have only been part of human life for a few decades and maybe two centuries at most. Aren’t we industrious, aren’t we thoughtful? I don’t think we have any way of knowing.

And what a relief. I can’t bring myself to sweat the details, because there’s no way I could parse out what’s important. I don’t have the vision for that. I can see my chipped teeth and the pores of your nose and my daughter’s tangles, and I feel the dopamine rush and my pulse, and then it’s all over. And wasn’t it beautiful, along the way? We tried. There’s a theory for it, we tried.

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