Social Media

I think I've managed to more or less avoid the pitfalls of social media. Maybe I'm giving myself too much credit -- I've definitely done my fair share of Twitter scrolling -- but I definitely haven't gotten that deep. I've used Facebook to play Words with Friends for a week or two, and if you asked me about TikTok, or Instagram, or Snapchat, you'd be talking a different language than the one I know.

I think the main thing is I use it as a detached observer more than anything.I started using it to deeply follow a competitive scene I was interested in, so at this point I get a feed of a thousand fairly ordinary people I don't personally know. I've got some friends on there too, but I very rarely put out something there myself otherwise and I usually have better ways to interact with them. It's not much of an exaggeration to say I've phased into a cute animal retweet bot at this point; I've probably followed hundreds of accounts dedicated to various specific animal niches by now, such as @CapybaraLand (the official account of a capybara petting zoo in Yokohama, Japan), @BlairBraverman (an author who raises and mushes sled dogs) or @IvePetThatDog (I'll let you guess on that one).

There was maybe a point where I took it a little more seriously (still as an observer though), but these days I'm pretty happy with my usage of it. I just skim it for a few minutes in my downtime periods for some brief entertainment, and maybe send something I think is exceptionally funny or cute. It does make me happy when one of my friends likes a retweet I made, but I'll probably mash that button on 5 to 10 things on any browsing session that really made me smile or laugh. There's not really any expectation of a response or anything..
 

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