It’s Sunday night here in Japan and the long holiday weekend is coming to an end. I hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving. We got together with some great friends and had a wonderful time. The only atrocity was the fact that I neglected to get my hands on a piece of pecan pie.
I’ve been keeping my online profile low for the past week. I’m trying to separate myself from the constant stream of online outrage masturbation. Every day there is a new offense, a new outrage, a new campaign and frankly I just don’t give a fuck.
A part of me wants to just delete all my social media and get the fuck off the internet. But in between all the stupid, I have some great conversations with outstanding people, and I’ve discovered great writers, musicians, and artist through my online relationships. And of course, as an independent writer, the internet is indispensable to my work.
I’m reorienting my internet time, I’m going to only focus on social interactions centered around reading, writing, and other intellectual pursuits. Spending even seconds on idiotic flame wars or other stupidity is counterproductive and spiritually draining, so I’m going to be blocking and muting a lot of people.
To quote Jack Donovan’s latest book A More Complete Beast:
Today, the men who value Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor- the men who love being men and who want to be more of what they are- tend to become frustrated, angry and reactionary. I understand these frustrations and I understand the anger, but you can’t turn back the clock and return to some idealized version of the past. The future is all that you have ahead of you, and the best way to improve your own life is to create a positive vision for your own future and begin to shape the world around you.
My focus for the upcoming year is to continue to improve myself physically, intellectually, and spiritually. A critical task due to being a new father. I have no time for nonsense.
In other news, I’m working on the initial research on what will become my first long project. Meanwhile, I’m typing away at several short stories and have two currently out for submission.
My reading is currently focused on nonfiction. I’m reading The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson and as soon as I’m finished I’m going right into Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition. I have a rather significant backlog of reading material.
I’m absolutely on board with this. I can think of 10 people I value from social media. The rest is… well, networking to find number 11.
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Exactly, You are one of mine for sure.
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Social media would be great if we could just separate the wheat from the chaff, or raise the signal to noise ratio. But that requires constantly resisting the temptation to join in the nonsense. My biggest gripe these days are all the good people who don’t.
Say what you will about Twitter, more than almost any other forum it makes it possible to curate your own experience. I vastly prefer it to message boards for that reason.
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This is exactly my difficulty. I’m a very serious person, I hide behind my Frazetta avatars allow myself to act frivolous and engage things I shouldn’t. It’s a reason why I put my mug on there. That’s me, I manage who I am. I will fail. (Just did actually) I will be more focused on the victory of what is sound, mind and body.
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Alexandru my man, just delete Twitter. You won’t regret it for a second.
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I think he’ll eventually need it, to get the word out about his writing.
I just think of twitter as a window into an alternate reality which doesn’t reflect the world I actually live in, so the stuff there doesn’t usually get to me.
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I disagree on the marketing front. Authors I’ve spoken too, and research I’ve done, all point to twitter as mostly negligible when it comes to driving sales. Your mileage may vary, but blogs, message boards, and “gaming” the Amazon algorithm all seem to be far more effective.
Now, I totally agree with your second point. I would add that twitter is also a huge time-sink and also is run by some bad people. Better to make a clean break in my opinion.
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I understand your frustration. Internet drama is draining.
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