on social media: hey! remember when i said i'm struggling to remove myself from social media? yeah, i've done that, except youtube and spotify (if one counts those). i expected to miss it but surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, i don't. one thing that altered my brain chemistry a few years ago was when someone commented under a youtube video about how social media gives you a little too much access into the lives of acquaintances and strangers you otherwise wouldn't have access to. that person said, "before social media we'd meet someone from afar and become friends, but once we got home, we focused on the people physically around us." which is in hindsight obvious, but my closest friends are far away from me. my workaround for this is keeping in touch in group chats and, with those i'm not that close with but still miss every once in a while, i just text them personally. i've deepened friendships with the people around me. it feels very freeing.

on info lost to time: something i think about every once in a while are the physical servers around the world that hold our data. what do you do when they get destroyed or phase out over time? what do you do when all that information goes away? it's like the burning of the library of alexandria. so many forums, blog hosting sites, image hosting services, etc have shut down. i had a phase in high school where i would watch as many classic films as possible separated by decade. there were silent films i wanted to watch that i couldn't watch. a lot of the more obscure ones were on Turner Classic Movies which was great! however there are still so many films lost to time because they weren't deemed culturally significant enough to archive. what i'm trying to say is i'm thinking of time in terms of infinity and not just for tomorrow.

on the loneliness epidemic: i've been binging this fiction podcast called Case 63 again (it came out in 2022, the original is spanish - by the way, they don't have an english version of season 3, so i'm learning spanish for it) and there's a scene where the time traveler explains that his generation was called the "interpandemic generation", marked by waves of virus strain after virus strain. the children would grow up glued to screens. people kept to themselves. he said about relationships, "a simple kiss became an act of faith." and.. that just sounds like our generation. maybe not waves of viruses that much anymore, but the loneliness epidemic is very much real. someone said, in defense of AI, that AI can give you chatbots which give you someone to talk to or vent to... which is just sad. i want things made by real people for real people, real connections formed, an identity not dependent on what the algorithm feeds you.

lately the algo's been feeding me the ideology of "rejecting convenience". youtube videos about people who've turned away from technology (albeit not completely - it's still a necessity in the modern day) and focused more on consuming physical media. it's not very surprising given how the past decade has been marked by nostalgia and only has been snowballing since then. companies have often profited from nostalgia bait but it's only gotten so much worse, with big-name ones refusing to put out quality, more original ideas in favor of a quick buck from something more familiar. the same thing with fashion cycles rapidly shortening. there used to be a 20-year gap from when one fashion trend would end and reemerge, and now it only takes a few months. last year people were really into y2k, and then briefly the 2010s tumblr era, and i don't know, imagine a few months from now 2016 instagram block eyebrows come back. it seems as though everyone is always reaching for the past now more than ever, when in the 50s-00s people were looking to the future. i mean, come on! back to the future 2, anyone? (also the scene about Jaws 19?) the rise of people consuming physical media makes sense because everything is a subscription, streaming services, buying for access to a product instead of actually owning the product.

but back to the main point: rejecting convenience: going out and buying/renting physical movies (libraries!), shows (box sets!), buying/borrowing physical copies of books, burning CDs, listening on vinyl instead of a streaming service, the whole allure of neocities being wanting to go back to a time when the internet wasn't so corporate. then i saw videos on how tech just doesn't seem fun anymore. it used to be so exciting! new consoles, new phone models. now they're churning out three different models in the same year with little to no difference in its capabilities.

so that brings me to now. i can't fully reject convenience. it's not practical for my situation, and especially in the modern day. but i'd like to do it gradually. same thing with social media. i've stepped away from instagram for a while now but i have some really great friends i met in other states that i'm not in any group chats with and i want to keep in touch. social media kinda feels like a necessity, but i had to do something about doomscrolling.