Social Media, Weed, and Anxiety
You can’t escape the built-in loneliness feature that comes free with being a person. Social media somehow manages to be anxiety-inducing, addictive, and ubiquitous. Fun!
And it is definitely not going away. People are going to keep using it until the next love simulator comes along. Or, governments determine that it is doing more harm than good and they ban it, in which case people would probably complain their way back onto it and into misery.
Mr. Bo Burnham’s feelings about TikTok resemble my own. It feels wrong to be fed videos of teenage girls in skimpy clothing dancing in their bedroom. It feels wrong to have access to thousands and thousands of hours of video of children filming the most intimate details of their lives. Even more so, it feels wrong to know that the simulated reality that exists on their TikTok feed is the way in which millions of children are experiencing their childhood. All at once. And not all the kids, just the ones whose parents aren’t educated or attentive enough to stop them. I’m not saying these are bad people, or even bad parents, it’s more likely that they’re busy or tired or uneducated or poor (or more likely, all of the above).
Imagine what being a parent of a young kid is like right now. I can’t imagine why someone would have a kid right now, or why someone would ever have a kid, but there are a huge amount of people who have been trying to raise their kids in the midst of social media and the iPhone and TikTok and all the crazy shit that exists on the internet. And to be diligent enough to make sure your child isn’t scarred or preyed on or scammed you must have to spend a huge amount of your precious time monitoring them. And your kid will probably hate you for it. You can’t stop them from talking to their friends, or at least you shouldn’t, because it’ll make them weird, but if you don’t, you’re subject to whatever bullshit is in those other kids’ heads, and hopefully their parents are taking care of them as well as you are or they’re going to fuck your kid up. And how do you plan around that? You put them in a private school in small classes where they get a lot of personal attention and are only surrounded by other well-to-do boys and girls. Well that would be great if you had money. And most people don’t, so most people just leave their kids at the mercy of whatever the hell happens to land on their TikTok feed that day.
Maybe it will inspire them! Maybe it will show them something they’ve never seen before! Maybe. Maybe it will make them feel ugly and insignificant when they compare their online presence to their heroes and maybe it’ll rewire their brains to reject delayed gratification and destroy their ability to focus on difficult tasks.
If anyone reads this, I hope they don’t get the impression that I think I know everything, or that I think I know anything, actually, because I don’t. I don’t even know if that sentence was correctly punctuated, but I doubt it. I am constantly perplexed by the amount of assumptions I have to make in order to simply say anything. They fly by in verbal conversation, where usually nobody’s thinking too hard about exactly what’s being said and why. People walk away from conversations and all other in-person happenings with their own version of what occurred there anyway. When writing, every word I choose sits on the page with a boldness that makes me uncomfortable. The reader knows exactly what you said and can refer back to it because it’s right there staring back at them. In person, who knows what anyone actually said? Did Marie Antoinette even really say “Let them eat cake” or did some French peasant just think it would really rile people up if they thought she said that? Or was he just in the area and heard her say something about bread and that’s just the way he remembered it?
This used to come up in my relationship. We would remember things in completely different ways all the time. And when we did, I could usually understand why but it seemed like she could not fathom it and so her reaction was that I must be lying about my recollection of the thing in question. How did I get here, to the fact that everyone lives in their own head? Oh yes, I was trying to write and assert things. Perhaps this is what stops me from writing. I know that I am just as clueless as everyone else and that my words mean just as little as theirs do.
Listening to Bo Burnham talk about weed makes me want to be less high. I used to get high a lot more before the pandemic when I made commitments to show up to social things and then the situation would present itself and I’d think oh shit I don’t want to talk to any of these people about anything but then I’d just get a little high and suddenly be very interested and interesting and even theatrical. Because that’s the version of me that I wanted people to see and I knew that it would only come out if I was high. And you can pontificate that it was all in my head and I could’ve been that person without the weed but then I would direct you to the image of the person I was socially before I tried it.
Before weed I avoided other human beings like they were the plague. If there was a way to get what I wanted at any particular time without having to interact with another soul to get it, I would choose that option. I never looked anyone, even my closest friends, straight in the eyes, ever, period. I guess I thought that if I looked somewhere else they would look somewhere else too and not notice how ugly I was. Are these memories I should be writing in a blog post or divulging to a therapist? Whatever, it doesn’t matter, I’m not like that now. Partially because of weed.
It wasn’t only weed, though. It was also growing up. I’m still somewhat anxious around others, probably more so than most people, but nowhere near the level that I was in high school. A common thought that eases my anxiety is that the world is a really big place with a very large amount of people. And even though interactions can and often are uncomfortable, they don’t really matter that much because you will meet so many people throughout your lifetime that it is simply irrational to care about the outcome of each and every interaction. This thought was particularly useful in dating. Somewhere along the line I realized that it really was a numbers game and it would only be a matter of time before I ran into someone lovable who loved me, or at least the version of myself I happened to be wearing that day. But you have to be vulnerable enough to give them something to love, I thought, or else no one will love you. I am using the word love too liberally. It means whatever you think it means.
But anyways, the weed made most human interactions substantially less painful. I would find myself in deep (not “deep” like whoa man that’s so deep I’m so smart and also 18, deep as in honest and provocative) conversations with people I didn’t know very well and didn’t want anything in particular from. I enjoyed conversations for their own sake. Sometimes the high version of myself would leave such a positive impression that the person I interacted with would want to know the sober version of me. Usually I didn’t care to show them, but sometimes I did. And those became my friends. And that’s how I made friends.
Sometimes I drop my phone on the floor and it makes a loud thud. I used to feel bad for the phone, like I dropped my newborn baby. Now I think, Yeah! Fuck you phone! Good! Or at least that’s what I thought a few moments ago. How long exactly is a moment? The answer: however long is convenient for the point you’re trying to make. The moment in question was a few minutes, approximately 20 thoughts, and 10 actions ago. That’s when my phone hit the ground.
I think I might feel better about myself if I were to write every day. Maybe one day I’ll write about something other than myself. I don’t necessarily have to write jokes or any particular things, just whatever words happen to fall out of my brain through my fingers on that particular day, each day, for the rest of my life. That thought made me chuckle maniacally. I wrote earlier about the horrible chains of an 18-year commitment, how can I entertain the thought of doing anything every day for the rest of my life? I’m not really considering it, I just thought it might sound good to say it. I have a feeling other people lie to themselves just as much as I do. There I go again, with the I gotta feeling… Who am I, the Black Eyed Peas?
My paragraphs tend to start in one place and then end up somewhere else entirely. I wonder if real writers who really write for real are aware of the relative significance of their paragraph the whole time as they write it, or if their mind wanders into oblivion midway through and they find themselves somewhere completely different at the end, completely disconnected from their original point. That’s how you write about nothing. But it’s so much easier to write aimlessly than it is to write with purpose. That sounds counterintuitive, but I am finding it to be true. For me, aimless feels honest. Writing an essay about why this is a good thing or that is a bad thing or why you should buy this or why this piece of art means that… feels like acting. It feels like faking because most of the time I don’t really care. I’m not exploring anything, I’m performing. These aimless paragraphs might be so unpalatable that no person but me ever reads them, but maybe that’s for the best. It is annoyingly common among artists I listen to, when talking about their creative process, to say that you should make the thing that you want to see, not the thing that you think other people want to see. The problem with that delightful soundbite is that making the thing that other people want to see is how you make money and get to be able to sustain yourself to make the thing that you want to see. And my problem is that other people want to see something that is about them in some way, but I only seem to be able to write about me. And they’re not interested in me because why should they be? I’ve written myself into a hole, how did this paragraph start?
I wrote a lot today, does that mean I can take a day off and not do it tomorrow? NO! That’s not how this should work. It should not be a chore. This is for yourself, why are you forcing yourself to do it? Social media has quite possibly trained me into a lifelong performer who only does anything in search of approval from others. Or maybe that’s just part of being human and I’m being dramatic. Probably both. I just now have realized how loud my mechanical keyboard sounds and how the other inhabitants of my apartment might be able to hear it. Maybe they’ll hear me click-clacking away on my keyboard and be so impressed with the act of me writing! What is the end result of this? If nothing else, I’ll create something that will be enjoyable for me to read in a few years.
How did all these words get here? What happened? I had no plans for what to say, no guidelines, no prompt, they’re all just there. I hate to reinforce this habit, but that’s what the ganja seems to do to me. I’m not saying that anything I’ve written is worth reading, but there are now four pages of thoughts that were not recorded before. I think I like the idea of having pages and pages and pages of this useless stupid shit for my personal amusement and therapy. When I finally go to therapy, instead of boring them with my shitty improvised life story, I can just send them these documents and they can use Ctrl+F to search for the words that they think might signify that I’m in danger.
See you again tomorrow?
