You're allowed to not post

Like everyone else, I’ve been thinking a lot this week about what’s happening in the news. So this week’s tip for paying subscribers is less that and more some thoughts on how to think about the world and our place in it right now. 

When you write for a living, you will eventually face the conundrum of publishing something at a moment that feels starkly different in tone or mood from the moment when you actually wrote it. 

These days, a difference of just 24 to 36 hours can change everything. That is more or less what happened last week when I was editing and putting together my interview with environmental activist Sally Burtt-Jones about the role of activism in a meaningful life and the power of “picking one thing.”

While working on it, I was relieved to be exploring a topic I’ve long been thinking about, and of course, to share that with readers. But when it came time to publish it last Friday, I wondered whether it would chafe alongside the accelerating news cycle. Here I was advocating the idea that we cannot possibly care/understand/organize/post about everything happening all over the world, all of the time. And yet here is the entire internet — or at least, most everyone I follow on every feed I look at — posting about the thing that had captured global attention seemingly overnight. 

Of course, there are reasons why the invasion of Ukraine has sparked such a global response and collective alarm. Some of those reasons are valid (the prospect of nuclear war is pretty scary) others, not so much (It’s happening in Europe! The refugees are white people this time!). But if I’m being honest, long before this particular news cycle, I have frequently felt deep discomfort around what has been called the “fandomification of global conflict” as played out on social media.  

To be clear, I’m not judging people for caring about this issue or any other, or even being affected by it emotionally. That all makes perfect sense. Being alive right now is relentless, and if you’re a sensitive person it’s doubly hard to take all this tragedy in. However, I worry about what this content circus has done to our brains, and by extension, to our capacity to go beyond posting about something to actually doing something in the physical world. Or even to our belief that we can do something.

Internet culture reporter Ryan Broderick summarized my fears so well in his Garbage Day newsletter that I sighed with relief when I read it: 

“There are a lot of internet users who, after a decade of exposure to viral media, have had their minds so thoroughly warped by trending content that they believe that reacting to popular internet culture is not just a replacement for a personality, but some kind of moral duty. It seems social platforms have not only eroded newsrooms by decimating the ad industry, but they have also, in the process, turned everyone into emotional trauma gig workers, convincing hundreds of thousands of average people to carry the burdens that used to be reserved for the few who wished to become journalists and accept the horrors that come with that job.”

This expectation to know about all the things all the time at a moment’s notice is a big part of the reason why I had to stop being a reporter. It made me feel deeply cynical, crushed my nervous system, and started to erode my spirit and belief that anything could ever change. (I’m not saying it does that to everyone, but that was its effect on me after a decade.) So I worry when I see people doing that willingly, not for paycheck, whether it’s Ukraine or Afghanistan or whatever legislative horrors are unfolding in Texas or Florida this week. We are simply not built — intellectually or otherwise — to take this much in all of the time.

And, by the way, when you ask yourself who is really benefiting from a content-turned-dystopian-entertainment cycle where everyone is watching and posting in horror all the time, paralyzed into inaction by fear and sadness and nervous system dis-regulation? The answer to that is Mark Zuckerberg & co.

Paying attention to what’s going on in the world, processing it, talking about it with people you know, donating to causes if you feel called and are able to — these are all baseline things we can and should be doing as engaged citizens. Please don’t tune it all out! But the creeping expectation that we also perform these things online, one after the other, and that we have a moral duty to never sit one out, exacts a tremendous cost on our brains, our energy levels, and indeed our spirits.

So if there is any advice in this post, it would be to pay close attention to this cost. Could you be using that energy elsewhere, on something more productive or closer to home, on something that doesn’t buttress Meta’s quarterly earnings calls. Could you try to, as Burtt-Jones put it, “move towards the things that give you energy,” even if that means paying attention to certain causes while purposely not forming an opinion on others? Could you do the quiet, committed work of following and working on a single issue over time, rather than the loud work of knowing about every issue all the time?

You’re allowed not to post. Figuring out what you do with the energy you gain from that is the more important question to focus on. It’s certainly what I’m trying to focus on as the world seems to get worse.

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