personal thoughts on using social media, long-ish post so slapping behind a read more.
realizing over time that i never really broke most of the habits that gave me such an unhealthy relationship with social media in the first place. sure, things like demetrification have helped with the skinner box Number Get Bigger mentality, but a lot of core habits that were ok when i was just Some Guy have scaled horribly now that i am (and i swear i'm not trying to sound self-important here) a Prominent Poster. and a lot of these issues didn't even really make themselves clear until we hit a critical mass of Active Users (probably around 5k, and we're at over 4x that now) and have only become less sustainable since then.
i have always been the sort to post about My Life. for the last few years, a terrifyingly large part of My Life has been My Job. i spent the majority of my time either working or thinking about work. this means that if i'm posting about My Life, it makes sense to also post about My Job, since that's such a massive component.
this really doesn't scale when you're posting on the platform that is your job. i've had to make the conscious effort to completely stop posting about work beyond rebugging @staff posts, which means i don't post a lot, because so much of my life is my job. (this is, on its own, not especially healthy either but i haven't figured out how to fix that). actively not posting about work is good and has helped prevent some of the more personal-psychic-damage causing shit that makes me miserable, but it is still impossible for me to fully disengage as long as i am using the website that is my job to maintain.
as i've said before, i really wish there were still something my friends were on that wasn't my job. twitter was, overall, unhealthy and bad, but my friends were there and that helped make it mostly tolerable. this is no longer the case.
the fix to "i can't disengage from work if i'm using cohost in any capacity" is probably "stop using cohost" but i mostly like using cohost and would rather not. i built it for myself just as much as for anyone else. i'm selfish and don't want to give that up.
i've thought about making a separate fully incognito account under a pseudonym to try and make it possible to use the site like a normal person, but i don't think this would actually help much. my "thinking about work" isn't just caused by seeing shit tagged "#cohost meta", it's caused by using the website at all and observing all the problems that i haven't yet fixed. it feels like a personal failure that there are still so many of those. pretending to be someone else doesn't fix that unfortunately.
idk! shit's hard! i've been having Website-Induced Brain Problems since last october and i've figured out a solution to almost none of it. i've tried to just not talk about it but that's hard too. ah well.

