That title will need the following eight paragraphs to unravel its potency on you, and hopefully you will profit from your having read that far.
I deleted my accounts on two major and rival social network platforms, this time, I hope for good, and, out of sound faith in my reasons for doing so.
In some fleeting moments of clarity one is aware of a sort of cognitive discomfort where, when you know you have got nothing to do with your time, you desperately seek to plug the discomfort by doing something, just any damn thing, in the misplaced hope that the given activity brings some relief from the pain of boredom; only in retrospect does it dawn that the activity was meaningless and distracting. An example from a previous era hits the point home: elderly gentlemen would read the day's newspaper over and over again, all the while muttering,
"there is nothing new in the newspaper today."
Their hope of being relieved of their boredom was repeatedly belied. That same trait is at work- with some significant differences - when one connects to the social network: seeking relief from the desperation of boredom. The rest of this post is about those differences.
I deleted my accounts on two major and rival social network platforms, this time, I hope for good, and, out of sound faith in my reasons for doing so.
In some fleeting moments of clarity one is aware of a sort of cognitive discomfort where, when you know you have got nothing to do with your time, you desperately seek to plug the discomfort by doing something, just any damn thing, in the misplaced hope that the given activity brings some relief from the pain of boredom; only in retrospect does it dawn that the activity was meaningless and distracting. An example from a previous era hits the point home: elderly gentlemen would read the day's newspaper over and over again, all the while muttering,
"there is nothing new in the newspaper today."
Their hope of being relieved of their boredom was repeatedly belied. That same trait is at work- with some significant differences - when one connects to the social network: seeking relief from the desperation of boredom. The rest of this post is about those differences.
