Day 2 of Trump 2.0: X-Rays, Nap, Addictions

 I worked from 7:15 to 11:25. This will be a short week. I went to the Imaging Center for my lumbar x-rays. Oh, the pain of lying on that machine. I ate lunch at the Chinese restaurant across the street (Szechuan shrimp) and picked up a few items at Payless. This used up my time until the 1 pm bus arrived. When I got home, I had to lay down - flat on my mattress, the back did not hurt so much. Except it was to be an hour and came closer to four instead.

Last night, when I spoke with CC, she said she might not go back to inpatient treatment, that she might just as well go to prison, that she did not think she would live much longer, and she was not so certain about giving up her addiction. She made the point that everyone has their addictions. Frankly, I was not surprised. I have not seen her since Thanksgiving; it has been even longer since she has spent any time here. She knows she cannot use around me. I think all I can do has been done. Her answer to my question about whether her addiction is all she is, has been answered. Call it the end of an era.

However, she is correct about everyone having addictions; although we might more properly consider them obsessions.

This morning, I read Anne Helen Petersen's The Social Media Sea Change: What happens when the thing that structured so much of our lives loses its utility?. Smartphones are an addiction. My writing is an addiction. One line I heard in Aquarius applies here: some addictions are useful. Smartphones and crack cocaine are not useful addictions.

I am glad not to have a smartphone; nor do I do social media. I had enough of that with Yahoo Chat back in 2009. Ms. Petersen's essays contains the following and several reasons on why to give up on social media:

This sounds spectacularly self-centered: that you can only quit a thing, or modify your usage of it, when it fails to serve you. But if we think of our phones and social media as addictive products, which they certainly are, then the classic addiction model makes sense: you only consider quitting when the negative impacts (the dead feeling of the soft-brain scroll, the loss of attention span, the weight of comparison, the exposure to trolls, the lack of control over the algorithm) outweigh the positive benefits (the distraction, the serotonin hit, the semblance of connection, the loose ties, the business benefits).

My sense is that a lot of you are at a similar point. The amount of space these technologies take up in our lives — and their ever-diminishing utility — has brought us to a sort of cultural tipping point. I’ve sensed it over the last year, when my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands. I could feel it in the responses to my piece, last month, to Posting Less, but also in a slew of pieces from other writers, all tracing different pathways to the same conclusion: this isn’t working anymore. What if we stopped trying to make it?

I might as well write-off today. Maybe watch a little Netflix, read Gore Vidal, and get ready for another day. I feel burnt out for no good reason.

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