• GreenShimada@lemmy.world
    511·
    5 days ago

    You know, for about a decade, everyone was pushed to share everything they did on social media. It was a mistake. It was a mistake on the scale of cigarettes and smoking inside and in airplanes and in hospitals and in schools. No one thought it was a stupid idea, and a lot of people pushed it as the only way to get jobs and show you’re a clever chimp that can internet so hard because interneting hard was the cool new thing.

    Lower right is the hangover from that. Anyone I didn’t find or didn’t find me between 2008 and 2018 wasn’t ever worth connecting with. The people that did find me were nice to hear from once, and we haven’t talked ever again, despite being connected, for 10+ years.

    My grandparents and their parents, etc. went their whole lives never seeing people again and not knowing what happened to them because they moved one time and they didn’t know their new address. Whole movies were about that. Elvis had a song about that. The last episode of the first season of The Real World ended with everyone moving out of the apartment, and once that landline and address no longer went to those people, it was 100% possible that those people would be gone from each others’ lives forever.

    Y’all, we’re not supposed to collect and keep 27,000 casual contacts throughout our lives. It’s unnatural. Our brains are not built for it. We’re made to have a few dozen up to 100-ish close connections that mean something, including family you don’t pick.

    Email some old friends you don’t text with daily. Send anyone you truly care about an email to say hi. If they respond, then great. If not, don’t worry about it. Enjoy high fidelity communications with those who mater to you.

    • eusousuperior@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      5 days ago

      We are not built to drink milk beyond infancy, yet we do. We are not built to cross oceans in a few hours, wake up in one time zone and fall asleep in another, yet we do. We are not built to eat ice cream on a scorching summer afternoon or preserve food for months and experience flavors from far away, yet we do.

      The argument that something is “unnatural” has always struck me as incomplete, because humanity’s defining trait is that we are not merely shaped by nature, we reshape our relationship with it. We build tools, cultures, institutions, and technologies that allow us to transcend many of the constraints our ancestors lived under.

      That does not mean every new capability is wise or healthy. Some inventions enrich our lives; others burden us in ways we only understand decades later. But the fact that something exceeds the limits of our evolutionary past is not, by itself, an argument against it.

      Human flourishing has always depended less on the number of people we can reach and more on the depth of the few relationships that truly matter. I miss having many Facebook friends (some I have never physically met) and seeing their life updates every once in a while, because now we all think Facebook is no longer cool.

      • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
        3·
        5 days ago

        Fair points, though, maybe more so in the abstract. To be fair, when I go try and fix or adjust or tweak something, I do always tell myself “we’re humans, we change our environment to suit our needs.”

        Though I think you’re excusing burnout and BS social media hustle culture when some people simply don’t want to do that. If you want to post everything on IG, go for it. But people shouldn’t feel shame for falling into the lower right square. It’s a decision some people make consciously, and others less so. Which, for me, feels like loss. We had this nice thing where it was great to see what my friends from 20 years ago were up to. And now I can’t participate in it because it harvests my data, and I would tell them the same. The infrastructure found us, friction-free. And when it turned out that pipes were to suck us dry, the gap was real, and the previous infrastructure not up to the task of casually serving up information. Now it (barely) takes work to say hello to someone and has to be meaningful again. People should be allowed to be OK with that.

        Which is to say that my evolution argument is that we have, within a generation, taxed the limits of a part of us that hasn’t gradually worked up to a universal higher capacity. Better weapons have extinguished genetic lines with no regard for adaptation or evolutionary traits other than what country someone was born into. Given 30 generations, we don’t physically adapt to having bombs dropped on us. We aren’t selecting for terminally online people to reproduce more and be more successful in the species, either. Maybe we are and I’m so far out of it that I can’t tell.

    • moseschrute@lemmy.world
      6·
      5 days ago

      Gen Z here. Burnt out of social media. Deleted every mainstream social media app. If you want the fastest way to never ever hear from me, it would be email. That shits incredibly overwhelming. I check my physical mailbox more than I check my email. The goal is to get away from the computer.

  • Simon_Shitewood@lemmy.ml
    14·
    5 days ago

    Aww man, I got

    Constantly working (not into it)

    Be gay

    Always playing map painting games

    And

    Declared a terrorist by UK government

  • NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world
    541·
    6 days ago

    Proud member of the bottom right. Oddly, it has made me a big topic of conversation among my friends, and I don’t get that at all.

  • Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.orgEnglish
    54·
    6 days ago

    Cant disappear from social media if you really weren’t there to begin with.

    Though i fall in the bottom left corner, always training, though not for something. Training just to train more.

  • DigDoug@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    5 days ago

    Where’s

    Work

    Come home too exhausted to do anything worthwhile

    Sleep

    Work

    I don’t think it falls into the first category because I really don’t give a shit about my job. I just have no energy.

    • zuana@lemmy.world
      1·
      5 days ago

      I don’t mean to be snide or clever, but it sounds like you care about your job a lot. At the very least what would happen if you did not have that job. I feel for that and it sounds like you might need to talk to someone. Could be over analyzing a small comment on the internet but your short lines of text felt… raw.

      Good luck buck.

      • DigDoug@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        5 days ago

        I think a lot of it is Long Covid, to be honest. After I had Covid I started sleeping really poorly, and I still do. I also really need to lose weight.

        As far as my job goes it’s actually pretty cushy. Of course, if I could find a way to survive without it, I’d quit in a heartbeat - as I imagine many people would.

  • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
    33·
    6 days ago

    I know a guy who is three of these things. Goes to the gym 6 days a week, works in a hospital, starting a business, has a wife and a kid, and he still manages to have time to hang out once or twice a week. Man is as successful as I am not

    • uin@lemmy.world
      35·
      6 days ago

      As someone who is some of those things as well, I would love to know what the wife and/or child are doing during all those activities. Because something has to give when you’re doing that much.

      In my experience, that balance is really hard, and even in the most hospitable, high-quality-of-life places, that balance is not exactly always something that is nurtured and valued by the systems in place.

      • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
        9·
        6 days ago

        I think he really is just built different. I’m good friends with both parents, and knew his wife long before he did. Both of them are working on higher education, kid goes to daycare most days every week. It’s not like he never sees his son either. Usually when I hang out, we’re watching his boy while we play BG3, which is nice because he can just walk away for a minute whenever a diaper needs changed

        Having recieved a large sum of life insurance money after his father passed away certainly helped with the house buying and the car maintaining and the education pursuing, but his time management is pure skill

        • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
          5·
          6 days ago

          I wonder if your friend can sleep only five hours and still function to the maximum. Apparently it is genetics. Napoleon and Thatcher could sleep less than 7 hours and could still think sharp and be fresh as a daisy.

          • kossa@feddit.org
            5·
            5 days ago

            Welp, don’t know about Napoleon, but Thatcher pulled some stupid and evil shit.

            Maybe if she had slept more, we could have had a better world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • abbadon420@sh.itjust.works
    38·
    6 days ago

    No, I must disagree. Most of my friends are right in the centre. Many are starting families, but are also working on careers and are well intentioned gym goers who I speak to less and less because life is too busy.

      • terranoid@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        9·
        6 days ago

        Work means surviving. You either have the energy for it or you’re fucked.

        “Training” can be a fancy way of saying you are very focused on one aspect of athleticism for your health, and you’ll discover that you have more energy for other things if you maintain your health and exercise. At first you feel like you don’t have the energy for it, then you do it, then you have the energy for that and more.

        Also many sleep way better after getting healthier, so it builds upon itself even more. Some people struggle with sleep apnea and shit like that, and one reason is the tongue holds a lot of fat. Lose weight and you sleep better. Sleep better and it’s easier to lose weight and have energy to do other stuff. It’s the opposite of a downward spiral.

        • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
          46·
          6 days ago

          Discipline, also known as ignoring basic needs until one burns out with a whole bunch of different outcomes from addictions to suicide

            • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
              3·
              6 days ago

              Sadly no, i had - and still have to - reduce it. I’ve always been proud of my discipline, but i never used it to take care of myself, but instead used to push myself harder than i was able to sustain long term (runs in the family too). Too much discipline isn’t a good thing, it becomes selfdestructive.

              • teslasaur@lemmy.world
                1·
                5 days ago

                Discipline is a form of self care. I think you are conflating a method with outcome in that case. I’d argue that it takes discipline to take care of yourself AND others.

                • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
                  1·
                  5 days ago

                  The only difference is the amount of self-worth someone has - if you deem yourself not important, then discipline comes at a cost.

    • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
      8·
      6 days ago

      This is my experience, as well. It sounds like I’m a few years older than you, but almost everyone in my larger friend group is/was doing all of these things, particularly so if the bottom left is just “intensely focused on some new niche hobby.”