Something about wanting to fall out of touch and privacy and Spring Cleaning, but in no particular order

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Unlike most writers, Rohin Guha is not terribly afraid of pop music. In fact, he pens the Pop For Skeptics column for Flavorwire. He also does a bit of online content production and social media development and if you want his help on that, go here for more details. This is his vanity blog. He would love to hear from you. Honest.

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April 20, 2011

Something about wanting to fall out of touch and privacy and Spring Cleaning, but in no particular order

Not too long ago, I was staring at a constant flood of ridiculous status updates, each trying in vain to one-up the last; I was party to that hysteria; I was fighting a losing battle against aggressive DJs, clueless publicists so wrapped up in themselves they don’t realize that I quit freelancing a year-and-change ago, and too many other people inviting me to crap events.

Competing with all of that was anxiety-inducing. It fragments the way you think. You’re thinking in status updates. You’re trying to be clever all the time. You feel this pressing need to be switched ON, especially if you’re romancing a suitor or potential employer. You’re suffering wildly from that fear of missing out—and for no good reason. Elizabeth Spiers said it best, “Realistically, failing to go to the right party will not affect your professional life, and no excuses you make about “needing” to go will ever convince me otherwise. And if it somehow affects your personal life, you probably need new friends.”

So suddenly you have this artificially-inflated sense of self, that somehow if you have 600+ friends, at least a fourth of them should be paying attention to you, right? It’s an arbitrary number, but the proportion seems right, so why not! And when no one’s paying attention to you, are they sick of you? If you’re scrolling through their photographs and you’re not in them, are you suddenly uncool in their estimation? I mean, I imagine it’s a very microcosmic version of the type of insecurity celebrities must feel every minute of their lives.

It’s even worse when you’re looking at that “600+ friends” count and you tell yourself, “I only really care about 100 of these people and everyone else is a troll.”

And then there was the concern of paying to use a service with information about my life, with no refunds possible. Worse was this: Finding a friend at a party and saying, “Hey! Conversational topics X, Y, and Z!” and having him say, “Oh yeah, I noticed that online and quickly liked it!” Like what the hell kind of conversation is that?

A lot of people blather on about Spring Cleaning and deleting friends you’re falling out of touch with, but I figure I’d just hit the big switch and see who trickles back offline. The best part of this process was having a best friend in Montréal phone me six hours later asking me if I was okay because I had quietly disappeared and I assured her that I was.

When you’re spending your idle time trying to quell the anxiety associated with FOMO, it’s time for a change. Odd was that within a couple days, I was even sleeping better, thinking clearer, and started writing regularly again. Which isn’t to say that I’m in a fight with social media, it’s to say that when something appears to outlive its usefulness for anyone, we shouldn’t continue to use it out of habit, we should probably reassess why we continue to use it.

I’m on here because I enjoy blogging. And I’m on Twitter because I enjoy tweeting at my favorite pop stars.

Also, it’s nice being in the dark about what is happening on a Saturday night because, you guys? The Monday-Friday grind is challenging enough without turning weekend plans into a competitive sport. Also, it’s a great feeling to have a friend ask you what your plans are and would you like to go out for a drink instead of assuming you already had plans because you wrote on a mutual friend’s wall. Who makes plans based on things that they weren’t party to anyway?