Daddy After Dark

Social Shift

We are not meant to be as connected to people as we are online.

I came to this realization the other day when, again, I dumped my account on a major social media platform. I had plenty of followers, was following plenty of people, but it was all far, far too much. I’d been seeking a way off of Instagram, much like I’d been seeking a way off Facebook a year prior, and found my way out. Instagram’s artificial intelligence, the bots tasked with filtering and flagging content as appropriate or not for the site, had determined that an image, from an account I loved and followed with joy, was hate speech. The account in question was a site dedicated to the memory of people who died from AIDS. Flagging anything on there as ”hate speech,” to my mind, was abhorrent. I had found my reason.

Now, though, a few days out, I realize the reasons I left that site are more than for one flagged post.

I have spent far too much of my adult life enjoying the ping of validation that social media sites give me. Sure, it’s fine when a person I know in real-time and real-life comments on a photo or post, or lets me know that they are thinking of me in some fashion. That’s the magic of social media, and it’s brightest moment in all of our digital lives. Where that line gets crossed, though, is when we forgo living in our actual real world, making real connections, and existing as beings on this planet, and give over too much of ourselves to the internet and all of it’s tendrils and functions.

Maybe this makes me old.

I’d like to think it’s me finding balance.

For now, it’s me, and my one Twitter account, where I’ve been more honest with who I am and how I present myself than I’ve ever been.

Which, I should add, is kind of an amazing progression from the way I came out of the closet. More on that in a future post. xx