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Month: August 2024

Dear social media, it’s you, not me

Dear social media, it’s you, not me

After seeing the most eye-rolling, terminally online crap hot take this week, I made a decision: Instagram was next up on the list of shit that had to go.

I went ahead and deactivated Instagram and deleted the app from my phone. I discovered I was picking my phone up way too much to be distracted by videos and memes. Social Media has become a content regurgitation factory where so much of the content I am served is gleaned from twitter, threads, reddit and tiktok. I figure about 1/3 of it is also things I’ve already seen. So I am going to try this for a bit (maybe a month?) and see how it works out. Like most people, I use the phone when I am bored and anxious and Insta is my go-to (because I am old and don’t have tiktok).

Like many people, I am also wrestling with how social media fits into my life. I was reading this Spyglass article and this quote really stuck with me:

“People have long joked (and not joked!) that using social media makes them feel worse… Yes, there are funny tweets, but that’s increasingly because the network is a hive of stolen meme content from elsewhere (or other Xitter users). You see the same things that get engagement pop up over and over again just completely ripped off by other users. So even funny things feel bad!”

(The Bloomberg piece it references also is worth reading: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X)

I will be honest: as soon as I retired from the working world I deleted both Twitter and LinkedIn. But I am so emmeshed into the Meta properties that I find it difficult to extract myself. My Instagram use is pretty high even though I have seen the same funny videos, the same screenshots of funny tweets, reddit posts and the same hot takes over and over and over again. Because our personal social media account is a microcosm, I find so much content is shared and re-shared by many of my friends. So I may see the same video in different people’s stories 3+ times a day. That’s harmless when it’s a cute cat but how many times do I need to see violent or political content? Probably not that much. I probably don’t even need to see the cute cat that much, if I am honest. I figure since there is so much regurgitation in the things I see, maybe up to 1/3 of my time is spent rewatching things I have seen over-and-over-and-over again. I realized when I was going through my facebook memories that I had seen the same meme make the rounds again in the past week. I don’t even remember posting it the first time! That’s how many there are roaming around and 99% of them have the same qualities: funny but forgettable.

As for Facebook, I would completely divest but Nextdoor hasn’t really taken off in my area so all of my community info is gleaned from Facebook. Also, it still is the best way to organize events and sell things locally. I do however find myself de-coupling as much as possible. I have gone back through my memories and made as many as I can private posts and now I make anything I do post private within 24 hours. But I am posting rarely as facebook is just basically an address book to me now – and it shows. I have seen the reach of my posts plummet over the past few years the less I post. I also find I am not getting notifications like I used to. Sure, facebook used to hold back some notifications so that when you came back later it would show that you had a little red circle in the notification corner (from hours ago) and therefore you’d get more addicted to it. But the less you engage with the platform the less it seems to bother to tell you that you have anything at all. If I am waiting for a reply, it’s best to go to the post in question to see if there is one because facebook rarely tells me about it. It seems to be ghosting me as much as I am ghosting it.

Hilariously, as I was writing this a friend of mine posted this article to facebook (natch!) about the AI spamming happening on Meta’s platforms: Where facebook’s AI slop comes from. So another nail in the enshittification coffin for social media.

So now I have no social media on my phone at all and no Instagram accounts available to even access via browser. It is insidious though: since deleting the app, I find my fingers automatically go right to the place that the button once was. Muscle memory is pretty strong so I figure it may be a while until my brain finds no reward there and stops trying. Until then, I find myself staring down at my phone wondering why I opened the blur tool for photos.

Tucker and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month

Tucker and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month

Ok, I am using a bit of hyperbole there! But July has been a mish-mash of both good and bad. But it started terribly.

On July 1st – Canada Day – as our backyard was filling up with friends and neighbours, Mr. Tucker was pulled into a work call: they were laying off 50% of the company, effective immediately. I won’t bury the lede here: Mr. Tucker was not one of the people they let go. However, he was the only one left on his team. Most teams at his company are down to one, maybe two people. So his workload would be increasing exponentially – just as he was leaving on two weeks of vacation. It was absolute chaos at his company and it was absolute chaos at home as we speculated about what the future would hold. Of course, there are a ton of rumours flying around about the profitability of the company and whether or not there are more cuts to come (or worse, bankruptcy). This is very common when major changes occur at an organization and it’s hard to figure out what is speculation and rumour and what is the truth.

As I mentioned in The End Game all would be well if the condo had sold. It hasn’t. In fact, only 10 condos have sold in the area since January. Truly abysmal. Without the condo selling, we can’t afford to have Mr. Tucker retire so at least he kept his job. However, that puts us in the position of now preparing for the worst-case scenario, which is what we are doing. Currently on the agenda:

Reduce the interest rate on the mortgage: the mortgage is small but I took an open mortgage a> in an attempt to not get penalized should we sell and need to break it; and b> to wait for the prime rate to go down. The latter seems a bit silly but I knew that there was a chance that if the condo didn’t sell that we would need to rent the condo instead. Not ideal, but it was an option. So I did the math and figured that if the condo sold within six months of my renewal in June, the open mortgage would be less than the penalty I’d have to pay to break the mortgage. However, if we decided to rent the condo, we would renegotiate the mortgage at a lower rate. Considering the prime rate went down to 4.5% from 5%, it will be lower.

Rent it: we are looking to perhaps rent to a student or someone else who would like a shorter-term rental (but above 6 months, as per the condo rules).

Stuff more money into savings: the plan is to have at least 6 months of condo expenses in the bank in case something does go wrong and Mr. Tucker ends up losing his job. It would give us some more breathing room.

It feels like we just settled into spending more money and treating ourselves a little more when this all went down! Whomp, whomp or Sad Trombone is appropriate here. Still, while the news is bad we still have a lot to be grateful for: we can pay our bills, keep a roof over our heads, and food in our bellies. We even have money for extras – not as much as we once did – but definitely extras. We are in a far better position than a lot of people and I am grateful for that. We spent a lot of time building up our savings and paying down our house in case something like this would happen and while it hasn’t happened yet, it’s good to know that most of the worst crises could be averted.

I am genuinely upset for Mr. Tucker who was looking forward to a Staycation of taking up oil painting again, swimming in the pool with a few beers and making music. Instead, he spent a lot of his time ruminating about how it all went down, chatting with colleagues and people who were laid off and generally speculating about the future. It was such crap. So he didn’t even get to really relax on his vacation (that’s twice this year!).

In the end, we came out the other side relatively unscathed. After the dust cleared and we got out of PANIC mode, we realized that we would have been fine even if he had been laid off. Sure, the condo scenario sucks but it showed me that there was a small hole in our planning and that we do need a wee bit more savings to cover a loss for the condo. Because we anticipated that it would be already sold by now, we hadn’t expected to carry it this long and so we didn’t plan for it. But we should have! So now we plan a bit better and move forward. As Robbie Burns most famously said, “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley” (The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry).