relationship to self

this spoke to how i’ve been feeling about social media and a longing to connect to people.

i would like to be in the position to delete all social media platforms and simply exist in ‘reality’ - whatever that really means - however i do believe there is joy in sharing experiences on the internet. i’m lucky enough to go through substack today and find writings about similar experiences to mine and to find comfort in this, and inspiration to write something in response.

could this also be found through books? absolutely, and i still have every intention to seek the same things through books and through conversations with others, but it is lovely how these moments and writings can be documented and returned to such as on this platform, allowing curiosity to grow, and something to potentially be created at the end of this delving into things.

but i suppose that is more about research and writing as opposed to the initially intended use of social media to keep in touch with friends and family. to be quite honest, places like instagram make me feel a sense of indebtedness to keep following people i’m not particularly really friends with. i need to show an interest in their lives because we had some arbitrary shared experience such as attending the same university, although we never really connected with each other in any other way than digitally, and also although what they are sharing is not even their actually lives, it’s simply a snippet of what they are choosing to post.

i reckon i could genuinely delete instagram. i would really like to. it would be very interesting to try doing this.

i don’t want to just delude myself though that moving over to substack and using sublime is not at all social media. it isn’t but there are still similar elements. if all of my friends began using substack then i would probably feel a similar sense of duty to keep up to date with whatever it was they were writing. although perhaps writing is different. i don’t know yet