Everyone has “their thing,” right? That one wildly unimpressive superpower they cling to like it’s a golden lasso of destiny. Some people can grill a hamburger without it disintegrating into a meat-based abstract expressionist sculpture. Some can swing a metal stick at a golf ball and make it go places on purpose. And some weird neurotypical people can talk to strangers at parties without breaking into hives or quoting prog rock lyrics.

My superpowers include:

  • Remembering the syntax to almost every computer language that fell out of favor before parachute pants did

  • Making every traffic light turn red on approach

  • Keeping every New Year’s resolution… unless it involves losing weight

Now I can already hear you rolling your eyes so hard it’s setting off seismographs: “New Year/New Me? How very 2006.” Yes, I know it’s a cliché, and you don’t need an arbitrary date to improve your life. You really only need a couple of months of bad luck, a new haircut, and/or the premature discovery of your own mortality. I know you’re thinking this because I read your post earlier, where you complained about posts like this one.  I also noted that you dislike memes, food pictures, baby spam, and inspirational quotes. So naturally, you posted a lengthy diatribe about how nobody cares what anyone posts.

Which is, technically, also a post … about posts … that nobody cares about.  Very meta of you, but I digress.

Last year around this time, I read “Your Happiness Was Hacked“ by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever, hoping—as a software engineer and media nerd—to get the inside scoop on how psychological voodoo makes social platforms addictive. I planned to use this knowledge for good: inserting subliminal messages into my podcast to hypnotize people into supporting local music.

Instead, I had an existential meltdown.

It turns out that I am the masses. I wasn’t cleverly gaming the system—I was just in it, scrolling like a dopamine-starved lab monkey. At least some of my friends had the flair to dramatically quit Facebook with a five-page farewell manifesto and list of grievances with the world in general and social media specifically, only to return a few weeks later to check their engagement, find out nobody read that post because all of their followers are total strangers who could not care less, and quietly took down their passive-aggressive cry for attention.

Me? I didn’t even try to leave. I just loitered quietly, like a demon watching its own exorcism being performed on the wrong girl.

Fast-forward to this past holiday season. I read Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips’ “The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World.” I expected more “how we got here” and less “what we do next.” Instead, it was a surprisingly optimistic glimpse of how tech could foster compassion, especially in virtual reality, where I spend much of my day job trying not to barf during MBSE design simulations.

The intro hit me hard: a confirmation that yes, the “collapse of compassion” isn’t just me being cranky. It’s a thing. Even my most harmless posts, consisting mostly of pictures of my kid, a witty one-liner somebody said that I wanted to credit and preserve, or praise for an album or group I discovered, somehow triggered one of three predictable reactions:

  1. Someone I’ve never met misinterprets my joke as a personal attack.
  2. Someone explains at length why my post is insensitive to some subset of people who will never meet me or read my socials (“How dare you make a joke like that, knowing there are descendants of left-handed Malaysian survivors of the Tamil Tiger massacres out there in the world!?”).
  3. Someone accuses me of being a “MAGA fascist” who wants to see all Cuban immigrants waterboarded with buckets of their own vomit because I promoted an album from an Australian dream-pop band called Miami Horror (seriously happened).

No matter what I said, someone would declare me either a libtard cuck or a crypto-fascist and suggest a few anatomically impossible feats for me to perform, so I stopped commenting on other people’s posts. On my own timeline, I stuck to one-liners crafted to be aggressively inoffensive and delightfully bland so as not to unintentionally offend any known religion, ethnicity, or musical subgenre.

I abandoned fan groups altogether. Even Yes fan groups, if you can believe that.  Yes is my favorite band, mainly because the music is famously devoid of politics, negative emotion, and controversy, and while you might think a band that named themselves after the most positive word they could think of and writes music that is 97% composed of harmonized space whalesong should have a fanbase of like-minded individuals.  You could not be more completely and utterly wrong, however.  You see, there are currently two bands calling themselves “Yes,” and their fans treat this as a theological schism. Where once we built lovingly curated 24-disc Yesoteric box sets, now we wage war over which version of the band is “canon.” It’s all gotten very Dune, if Dune were about Rick Wakeman’s cape collection and Steve Howe’s guitar string metallurgy. It takes a lot of reading to keep up, and all of it is watched and critiqued by a third faction, the “Yuppets,” who maintain that everything the band did after 1979 is crap, and therefore by a ship of Theseus argument, Yes doesn’t even exist anymore.

My point is, social interaction, even in traditionally friendly places, hasn’t exactly been a bastion of empathy lately.

“Your opinion is crap! You’re crap! Your mother is crap! Do us all a favor, get a job, and stop posting your worthless ideas on the Internet hoping someone will comment back after mistaking you for being smart and clever!!!”

– Me (reviewing a crab dip recipe online this morning…)

Ironically, I still scroll like a junkie. I hit “like” out of obligation. But posting? Almost nonexistent. Meanwhile, in my Notes app: a mile-long list of blog ideas, website concepts, apps I want to build, podcasts I want to start or finish, and a decade-old concept album that continues to exist exclusively in theory.

Then came November.

I signed up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and, shockingly, won. I wrote a whole novel in 30 days. More importantly, I remembered what it feels like to create something instead of endlessly doomscrolling.

Sure, I was still active on the NaNo forums and Discords, but those were glorious, empathy-filled spaces where we all trauma-bonded over caffeine and plot holes. And when December rolled around and I drifted back to “normal” social media, it hit me: I want more Novembers.

So this year’s resolution is simple: less social media, more everything else.

Now, I’m not quitting cold turkey. That’s unrealistic. I’ve got a book to promote and a podcast to keep afloat (no audience = no interaction = me shouting into the void, which I can do for free at the DMV). But I did take inventory of my accounts. Highlights:

  • MySpace: Finally gone. It’s not coming back. Let it go.
  • Plurk: Still exists!? Not anymore. It was just mirroring my Jaiku and Pownce feeds anyway.
  • Snapchat: Never understood it. Not a 16-year-old girl with daddy issues.
  • Pinterest: I cook from instinct and spite, so not necessary.
  • Tumblr: Was fun, can’t remember why. Gone.
  • WhatsApp: I only had it so I could banter with these two radio DJs in the Cayman Islands that I liked. Otherwise, it’s only purpose seems to be arranging drug pickups and meeting hookers.  Uninstalled.
  • Runtastic: LOL.
  • Foursquare/Swarm: Sorry, I need better quality of stalker. One who actually puts some effort into finding me. Gone.
  • Yoono: Literally what is this? Nuked.

Twitter stays, for now. I have my filters set just so, and I get most of my reading material there. Plus, I have $500 in Twitter stock currently worth $400, so I feel emotionally and financially obligated. However, I’ve capped the number of people I follow at 300, and only post via Buffer no more than three times per day.

LinkedIn: This is the one I’d love to delete.  Nothing but Nigerians wanting copies of my social security card for jobs that probably don’t exist and unsolicited invitations to interview for jobs identical to the one I’m trying to get out of now.

Facebook: I’d love to delete this one too, but I’ve got family there, plus the podcast page. Still, pretty much done posting for anyone but family, and the mobile app is gone, so there is no point in messaging me there.

Sites like Goodreads, Flickr, and TuneIn are safe. They’re actual tools with social elements I mostly ignore. I’ve never lost sleep over a lack of Flickr likes or the fact that no one appreciated my speed-read of a 1989 Star Trek novel.

So here we are. If you followed me somewhere weird, like Tastebuds.FM or something else that sounds like a spyware app from 2007, you won’t see much from me there anymore. If you follow me on WordPress, I apologize in advance for the lengthy, 2,000-word mental dumps like this.

Rest assured, I’m fine, so you can spare the inevitable, “I haven’t seen you on Facebook lately, are you okay?” messages. I’m not dead. I’m just busy trying to become interesting again.

And who knows? Maybe next year, when someone says, “Wow, I haven’t heard from you in forever! What have you been up to?” I can actually hand them something finished …

… even though they won’t care.