bombs in bottles
previously on Molly Yeets Oligarch Tech
I am now entering my sixth month of having eliminated social media and Big Tech offerings from my life. And. Change comes at you fast.
Observations:
I'm definitely calmer day to day and more satisfied with my daily life. I'm certainly not some kind of bodhisattva. I still get angry and annoyed and fearful and all the rest of it. But those states are less common, and when they do happen, they're milder and pass more quickly. My "default" state is genuinely pretty chill - a sentence I thought I would never, ever say about myself.
(Caveat: It is also summer, and I experience not only seasonal depression in December but seasonal hypomania in June. Wait six months and we'll see what I have to say then.)
I'm spending less time at my computer than I was even a month ago. When I quit social media, I signed up for several forums (fora?), and I checked them daily; now I check weekly, if that.
Instead, I am very into my garden and chickens at the moment. Part of that is seasonal as well, but part of that is having the mental and emotional energy to put into project planning and execution. It's also having this newfound drive for real, physical activities that make real, physical changes in my world.
Today, for example, I bought a flat of marigolds on sale and planted them everywhere I could cram a plant between vegetable plantings (accounting for the expected August size of said plants). Now I can look out my window and see the safety orange marigolds in the garden. Neat.
So: Before my husband died, he and I ran a winterguard program. I tried to go back to coaching about seven months after the crash but couldn't do it; my body simply was not ready. I've been doing fall shows at the school, but nothing else.
This year, I'm ready to re-launch that program. Some of what stopped me before was grief; some was staffing; some was my health. But most of all, it was a lack of mental space and available time that prevented me doing it sooner. Those are resolved now. If anything, I have too much mental space and time. I need to spend it turning teens into better people by teaching them to throw swords, or I will get in trouble.
I'm also able to contemplate writing another book, which is something I genuinely thought I would never have the wherewithal or desire to do again. (Do I have the ability, post-accident brain damage? Let's find out, I guess!)
And I say this as someone who read 80-100 books a year BEFORE I quit social media and Big Tech.
This month's reads I recommend:
The Book of Joy - the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu
Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens - Gail Damerow
The Longing for Less - Kyle Chayka
How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell
"Under control" is in quotation marks because I don't really feel like I'm "controlling" my shopping so much as...done with it. I'm not fighting any urge to spend money, because I have no such urge to fight.
When I do spend money, it's either on essentials (food, utilities, cat and chicken needs) or on things I expect to provide a significant return on investment (garden plants). I don't care about anything else. I'm no longer allowing the Internet to beam manufactured desires into my head, so I don't have manufactured desires. Turns out my non-manufactured desires are pretty simple and not usually stuff I can buy anyway.
(Yes, I consider garden plants an "investment." Four zucchini seedlings cost me $2.99 and are going to produce all the zucchini I will need for the next calendar year - most of which I will spiralize so I don't have to buy pasta, either. Can you buy a year's worth of pasta for $2.99?)
I do still follow the news, mostly through my RSS reader and checking the AP News Wire and NPR headlines once a day. The world is still very much on fire. I have not forgotten that, nor am I ignoring it. And I definitely have not discovered a single answer to any of these problems.
That said, I feel somehow better equipped to ride them out. I'm focused on what I can do at home and among people I know, in my community. I'm doing what I can and not constantly besieged with news and mean comments from things I can't do anything about. In a world that is more uncertain than it has ever been in my lifetime, I'm somehow more peaceful than I have ever been in my lifetime.
I have more free time and mental energy to spend on things like spontaneous trips to see my niece play basketsoftvolleyfluteball (this child legit does everything), movies with friends, sudden urges to visit the bird sanctuary, and so on. It's great.
Not only do I have zero "fear of missing out" on Internet things, I am frequently annoyed when people insist on showing me the latest social media drama or viral TikTok or whatever. I just. do. not. care.
I am working on cultivating patience; these are generally people I care about in some capacity, and these things obviously matter to them. But every "hey, did you see" just reminds me why I am grateful to have left it all behind.
The past few weeks, I've been so interested in my real life that I'm even thinking about canceling my home Internet. $80 a month seems like an awful lot of money for a service I sometimes forget to turn on for days at a time.
At this point, the only things stopping me from cutting that cord are (1) the Internet Archive has a bunch of old movies I can stream when I'm in the mood and (2) I talk to my therapist via video call, as she no longer bothers with a physical office. If I could reliably hotspot those from my phone, I'd yeet my home internet along with everything else - but I don't think I can.
I still don't know if kicking my old tech habits triggered all these other changes, or if I was already changing in ways that led me to "time to kick these old tech habits" as a cairn midway along that journey. I'm not sure it matters. We're at now now.
Nothing to add here. Shopping is still boring. I still prefer cleaning the bathtub to staring at my phone. (No, really.) Everything I said in previous posts still holds, only more so.
Yeah. It's wild. I had no idea 2025 would be a year of such change for me; if you'd told me this in December 2024, I would not have believed you. Yet here I am.
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