Practices of Coping During Hard Times in the USA
Acknowledging the bad, and finding practices to recenter and retain sanity in an era of precarity and tumult
Hi everyone, it’s been a while. After a few abortive, unpublished starts at writing new posts for this newsletter over the past year, I decided to just send it. Literally and figuratively.
I’m planning on picking this back up. One of my True Dreams is still to make my living as a writer. I’m setting the goal to publish twice a month, even weekly, if I get into a groove.
To subscribers of Things That Should Exist, old and new, thank you for giving me space in your inbox. I will do my best to publish interesting writing and share cool things I’ve come across twice per month. At least.
Alright, I’ll admit it.
I’m worried.
I’m worried about the state of this country and my place in it. Money worries, loneliness, the “slow cancellation of the future”–it all sucks.
My goal is publishing this piece is not to make you worried too. Per the title, it’s to share how I’m coping and continually re-centering myself in this dark chapter of American history.
I think it’s important to acknowledge that everything sucks right now. It’s important to acknowledge that fact in order to orient ourselves.
Another observation: if the internet is a firehose of information, it’s coming out hot these days. It’s not only too much information at once any time I open a social app on my computer or phone. It also burns. Maybe it’s more toxic than it is temperature-hot.
It seems like the internet was still fun, even up until 2-3 years ago.
I would say that Elon buying Twitter and the release of ChatGPT version 3 heralded this new era of A Shittier Internet. Most of the fun parts of the internet have been bought up, shut down, co-opted, or in the case of ChatGPT, illegally copied. Legally, you could say the IP that fed ChatGPT’s model was “stolen” by OpenAI and their web scrapers.
Our glorious digital commons have, for the most part, been captured and enclosed.
We still have open source software on Github, the Internet Archive, open datasets, public APIs, and Wikipedia. These things still exist, but there are less open datasets, Twitter and Reddit now charge for API access. Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are under constant financial threat and quasi-legal challenges from corporate and GoP actors and organizations.
I say that our digital commons have mostly been captured because of Twitter being bought and turned into a toxic right-wing echo chamber, Meta censoring pro-Palestine and Black Lives Matter posts on Facebook and the expansion of police and US intelligence monitoring of the internet. Look up how Flock is sharing license plate reader data from Home Depots around the country with local police or, Palantir’s database-in-progress cataloguing and creating a profile of every single American, and so on.
But like I said. I’m not here to make you worry.
Perhaps I’m doing a terrible job of that.
Hey, nobody’s perfect, and we need to acknowledge all the bad before I can tell you about how I am keeping my mind from unraveling completely.
Or you can just skip to the heading titled, “An Incomplete and Current List of Copes”.
What’s Bad? The Internet Is Bad, Phone Is Bad
As software continues to eat the world(annoying but true) and the enshittification of the internet continues(they’re related), there is certainly an argument based on the position the “internet is bad”, meaning it is actually, structurally bad at this point.
This two-month old article from the Guardian presents a survey in which 46% of the 16-to-21 year-olds surveyed “would rather be young in a world without the internet altogether.
68% percent of survey respondents said that they felt that the time they spent online “was detrimental to their mental health”.
I will take this opportunity to once again mention that we still don’t really know how bad social media and habitual internet use is for our mental and physical health. Please correct me if I’m wrong–it’s not like I scour the internet for studies on this topic. However, if they did exist, I feel like I would’ve come across them by now.
It was published an ancient 12 years ago, but I highly recommend 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, by Jonathon Crary. It’s been probably the best and most conclusive book I’ve read on the effects of daily, habitual internet use on individuals and groups.
Phone Bad
You may have already come across the “phone bad” meme, which is catchier, easier to say, and more or less expresses the same sentiment, as “daily, habitual use of the internet is making us less happy, healthy, and emotionally connected to each other”.
I actually couldn’t find a link for the “phone bad” meme, but just trust me bro. It’s a meme.
The closest proof of “phone bad” being a real and common sentiment among the internet-faring public was a cringe subreddit where each post shared a meme like the one below, with no description text.
Maybe the internet itself was a mistake? Sadly, it seems the cat is out of the bag and there’s no turning back now.
Think the Amish would take me?
Midwit Questions On the Whether the Internet Was a Mistake
I should probably just excise this section from this post. It’s kind of dumb.
But I’m not afraid to be dumb, or to look dumb.
I am accountable to you, and only you, dear reader.
Here are some questions I had, I’d like to pose to you, for consideration in regard to how you use and consume information for The Internet.
How many hours has social media stolen from your life?
Likely it’d be weeks or years, if you tallied it all up.
How many bookstores, supermarkets, small hardware stores in your locale have closed because they couldn’t compete with Amazon?
Many.
How many jobs have been lost, to-date, because of AI?
Also many.
These are big, hard-to-answer questions. I don’t have the answers.
We could napkin math these questions with moderate effort. The answers aren’t the most interesting part.
Intuitively, I can feel the impacts of the internet on my life, in the context of these questions.
And it is heavy.
Frankly, it’s hard enough to get out of bed some days.
To illustrate this, every so often I wake up in the morning, look at my phone, and exclaim, “Noooo”, and faceplant back into my pillow.
Let’s Make a List of The Bad Stuff–Ya Know, For Fun
Here’s a partial list:
Abysmal job market thanks to AI, US austerity measures, continued corporate cost-cutting and wealth transfer to shareholder class
Trump’s daily assault on human rights and the Constitution
ICE kidnappings
GOP attempt to gerrymander Texas and other states
Attacking university funding
Defunding Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Attacking LGBTQ rights
Working to defund Medicaid and Social Security
Deployment of National Guard to LA and now DC
Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people
Probably not even a complete list.
Based on this list, it seems the best we can do right now is cope.
Here’s what I’ve been doing to cope during these “interesting times”.
All of this long-winded preamble is to lead up to this main point:
I am starting to really limit my exposure to the internet and my phone.
I see it, my phone and social apps, more and more, as a well of misery.
I’m also realizing that internet/phone has shaped me over the past 20 years or so.
I can’t blame the internet entirely for my anxiety and depression, but my chronic internet use has definitely made it worse. I agree with the Guardian survey-kiddies.
So now I find myself mitigating the effects of 20 years of 4-9 hours per day of internet use: the panic, anxiety, and depression caused by that habit, and ingesting, emotionally processing, and trying to make sense of the bad news the continues crashing through, usually in one burst per day, or in drips as I come across it on Reddit.
Undoing of the habit of social media use is a real challenge. I do think it’s an addiction. I find myself having a hard time trying to fill the hole of “what do I do now that I don’t have my phone?”
How do I find my friends? How do I find out what is going on in the world?
An Incomplete and Current List of Copes
Cope: Delete Social Media
I’ve come to the conclusion that social media itself is an infohazard.
An infohazard, if you’re not familiar with the term, is information or news that causes harm.
Toxic social media trends are a kind of infohazard(Mr. Beast). The dissemination of propaganda through social media is another kind.
Advertising spreads it’s own types of infohazard by ruthlessly grabbing your attention with loud, annoying ads trying to use all manner of emotional triggers to sell you shit you don’t need.
I’ve deleted my social media–mostly. I deleted my Twitter account because it’s all tech people and Nazis–with much overlap between the two. And it’s gotten even worse with the advent of AI slop.
I’ve deleted the Instagram and Facebook apps from my phone. I need to delete those accounts but I need to check in with a few friends and move those conversations to text before I delete.
I will miss my I Draw Billionaires account :(
Check it out here while it’s still up.
I still have Youtube, Reddit, and Substack. I consider these social media as well.
I’m starting to come to the conclusion that they are all trash as well. Reddit is being flooded with GPT slop, and promotes the most salacious Subreddits and posts to the top of my feed.
Youtube is not terrible. I watch a lot of interviews with artists and videos about psychology there. The worst part of Youtube is how it sneaks mainstream news stories into a carousel between videos. The news there is without exception, always bad.
Substack has become sloppified, as liberals have left Twitter. Substack has become a three-way tie between what it used to be, Twitter, and Instagram.
That’s ok I guess. I’ll stick with it for now. I’m expecting Substack to get enshittified just like every other platform.
As an example, here are more Nazis than ever on Substack. It’s funny how the right-wingers are never satisfied just to have their own shitty right-wing apps. They have to buy Twitter or invade Substack. Instagram is a bit more insidious. I don’t see any overt Nazi-posting in my feed, but my For You page is all slop, and inevitably some of it leads to right-wing brainrot content.
Sometimes It’s Ok to Complain
If the above is a bit of complaining, or a bit of a yap, let me offer my Two Rules of When It’s Ok to Complain:
It’s ok to complain if you’re artful, funny, clever. Think kvetching.
It’s ok to complain if you offer a solution.
I’m not going to try and fool myself, or you, that the above complaints about social media were artful, funny, clever. I will however make an attempt at offering a solution, even it’s merely just Another Dumb App Idea.
Thing That Should Exist: Nutritional Facts for Apps
Yes, this is an aside, and kind of a silly idea. I’m including it here because it’s in the spirit of this newsletter. And I want to obey my new rule of “you can complain if you offer a solution”. Even if it’s a sort of cheesy one that I have no intention of building.
Here, I humbly offer this idea to any builders reading this newsletter.
Here’s a Thing That Should Exist: Nutritional Facts for Apps.
Ideally, there would be a label when you open an app, that shows you the main ingredients of an algorithm. Perhaps there’s some sort of calorie intake metric that shows you that healthy use of the app does not exceed 20 minutes per day.
I’m thinking of how a Starbucks Frappuccino has 40 grams of sugar, and a toxic amount of sugar is 60 grams or more per day.
Don’t tell me this isn’t doable! Yes, it is wishful thinking to hope that apps like Tik Tok and Instagram would implement a Nutritional Facts label in the short term, but there could be a separate app that catalogues the nutritional facts stats for each app.
If one were to prototype this, I would take the screen time app, and then make my best guesses on how to quantify the cognitive effects of social media use, based on available research.
There could also be a feature that would prompt users with a single question before and after they close an app, “On a scale of 1-10, how do you feel?”. 10 is “happy, motivated, agentic” and 1 is “depressed, stuck, apathetic”.
So the app would draw from available academic research to form an initial framework, and then would use tech industry standard behavioral testing methods(so-called “UX design”) to gauge the impact of social media on the brain.
Some Other Load-Bearing Copes
Cope: Transcendental Meditation (Daily)
Becoming more and more important to me as a daily practice. I do it twice a day for a minimum of 20 minutes each time.
I got back into meditation because I’ve recently become obsessed with David Lynch, after watching Twin Peaks: The Return on a lark, after a friend mentioned that he was watching it.
I used to do a sort-of Vipassana meditation every day, which had a more subtle effect. I was faithful to this practice for a decade, with some good daily streaks in there. I found that silent meditation like this produces insights and helps me regulate my emotions. I’m not sure I felt any transformative or positive-change effects from it.
Transcendental Meditation involves chanting. It seems to help more. I chant “Aum” as my mantra. You’re supposed to go to a TM center and pay money to receive your mantra, but I just use Aum.
Here’s David Lynch explaining how it works.
I love this video. I love the way he speaks and communicates information.
Cope: Long Walks
I shoot for 4 miles a few times per week. 4 miles is 10,000 steps. According to TCM, walking is good for your liver and your heart. I also find it helps my back.
After walking the first two 2 miles, I can feel my energy shift, and negative feelings start to fall away.
I try to walk every day if I can, but realistically, it’s 2-3 times per week.
Runner Up Cope: Call your friends and family
I will admit, I suck at calling the people that I love.
I still believe that we are going to need each other more in the coming years.
We are going to be forced to rely on each other.
Related: I recently realized that I check all of the boxes for being an Avoidant personality. It makes a bit more sense how I find it excruciating to reach out to friends and family.
It’s something I’m learning about, and working on.
Runner Up Cope: Watching a movie every day
Movies are dreams. We are in desperate need of good dreams while living in a time of nightmares.
Escapism can be a crutch, or it can be a release valve.
As I mentioned above, I recently have gotten really into the work of fellow Capricorn David Lynch.
Here’s what he had to say about dreams, and the power of cinema:
How are you coping during this American Apocalypse?
Let me know in the comments.