0809 hillside

0809 hillside

someone recently told me that I have "presence", socially. I hope in a good way. A stone in my shoe has presence too. He might have just been slyly criticizing my admittedly uninformed sense of fashion. If so, then fair enough. I think that's funny too. He is a friend of mine but I don't know him well enough to tell sarcasm from benign observation. I may never know, because I don't rest much importance on impressing people in social situations. I just want to be a decent fellow that people can relax with while spending time with me. That's all, really.

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I force myself to look at my social media accounts every other day for a few minutes (bc that's frankly all I can stand). I do it bc I feel like kind of a heel if I don't reciprocate attention in that way. I like my friends and since I've committed to posting my art online, it's only fair I give something back, right? The captains of tech (our apparent overlords) fully intend to leverage this guilt to trap us in this system of society they've engineered. Of course. I get it.

The algorithm is constantly figuring out what I'm interested in from day to day, but it still shows me all kinds of shit I hate. so much so that I'm convinced that algorithms are not only interested in learning what interests me - they are partly tasked with changing what interests me. 

I grew up on TV and I was all in without thinking about it until I spent 3 months away from TV when I first went to university. I was simply too busy and the campus only had TVs in dorm building lounges and similar places. Of course, this was ~15 years before smartphones. So upon returning to my childhood home during semester break, there was the family TV right where it was before I left. That was when TV shows and especially advertisements suddenly seemed wrong to me. I suddenly objected to being told what to like, think, feel, do.. all that. It was all of a sudden insulting. I've had a skeptical/cynical relationship with TV and ads ever since. 

FF to today. I get the same annoyance at social media formats now except it's 10x worse. If people say we're like this bc we're old.. yeah, that's correct. But it's not crusty obstinance and willful ignorance.. it's because the appropriate reaction to being gaslit, lied to and manipulated all in order to control our thoughts and to separate us from our money - is anger! Skepticism is the product of a functioning bullshit detector. I know people in their 20s who are even more resentful of social media than I am, but they're having a harder time of it because it's WAY harder for young people to function in society if they eschew the means by which society functions. I get it. No one cares if I don't have my finger on the pulse of all the memes and all the news that I'm supposed to be fluent in partly because my demographic is not as important from a marketing standpoint. Maybe. I don't know. I don't really care.

Anyway, what I do know is that all the time I don't spend staring at my phone is time I can truly call my own.