Forgive me for a bit of oversharing.
From last Wednesday night to somewhere around Sunday afternoon, I was sick. A stomach bug has been going around and I was lucky enough to catch it. Monday through Wednesday of this week, I was swamped with some responsibilities at my workplace, completely keeping me off the grid where the politics of the day are concerned.
Even today, I haven’t been terribly motivated to dive right back in. Politics is can be exhausting when there is so much negativity involved. That’s why you guys will sometimes get recipes or topics unrelated to politics in these emails. Almost everyone who must consume this all day, every day, ends up broken.
Erick Erickson is someone I consider a good friend. He’s the reason I am where I am now in terms of political writing, and while I am not as far to the right as he is, I have found his style of ideology-backed analysis is a far more effective model than bomb-throwing rhetoric that is out there. During his radio show yesterday, the opening monologue to his second hour was, I think, a really good reminder of where we are as a society and why things seem so grim. It’s the first 15 minutes or so in this clip.
I spend quite a lot of time on Twitter, which is about as mentally taxing as you can imagine. Twitter is what you make of it as a site. If you spend a lot of time focusing on politics, it is miserable. If you like to tweet about cultural stuff, it can be a headache. If you tweet about cooking, then you get more pleasant interactions.
So, naturally, I divide my time between the misery and the pleasant, and because I haven’t really paid attention to anything political, it hasn’t made me miserable in quite a while.
There are people who publicly announce a hiatus from social media, that they’re deleting their accounts, or whatever, only to just disable them and come back later. Chrissy Teigen (model, cookbook writer, TV host) has famously done this. She has had a very toxic presence on Twitter in the past, and seems to be recovering by not trying to share her misery as much as she did.
The problem with Twitter is that it is very easy to trap yourself in a bubble and think that all the voices you see agreeing with you make your opinion the majority opinion. I have friends on the left and the right who are trapped within their bubbles and cannot accept that opposing views are numerous enough to matter. Bubbles on social media tend to lead to the dehumanization of the opposition, and when both major political parties have allowed social media to dictate their direction, things go from bad to worse.
As Erickson mentions in his monologue, our mental health, individually and as a society, has eroded. What we see in our public discourse isn’t healthy, and while I am not as evangelical as he is, I do think there is some truth to the idea that there is a societal void where religion once helped kind of dictate the direction of cultural morality. As that religious direction faded, that void grew and was filled with the devaluing of humanity to the point where we excuse violent protests and property damage, lighting American cities on fire, and violence directed against people who simply disagree with us.
Many Americans who spend too much time on social media, including the media class and the political class, have taken this to an extreme. They have internalized these ideas about the other side not just being their opponents, but actual enemies who are guilty of crimes against democracy and humanity and need to be removed from society at all costs. That isn’t healthy psychological behavior, and things will continue to spiral out of control because we can’t start treating each other, and the political process, in a healthier way.
But at the same time, social media does not represent us as a society, so the problems are amplified in the eyes of those of us who spend a lot of time there, and yet they can seem largely invisible to people who are not there nearly as often. I try very hard not to write about things based solely on what’s happening on social media because social media isn’t real life. If someone notable is saying something that has major implications, it’s one thing. But the worse form of journalism today is one that writes solely on social media reactions to a story, and that is not something I wish to inflict on all of you.
A lot of people suffer from being very online all the time, and it’s affecting their mental health in ways I don’t think we are really capable of measuring yet. But what we’re seeing isn’t healthy behavior from a lot of people, from our neighbors to the people running the country. They are engaged in such unhealthy online behavior and it’s started spilling over into the physical world in dangerous ways.