I Got Clickbait, You Got Clickbait, All God's Children Got Clickbait

I spend way too much time on Facebook. I’m not sure I really understood the term “addiction” until I discovered that I could, at any time of the day or night, tap into a source of instant gratification both for my curious mind and my desire to talk to people and have them talk back. It interferes with my writing, with my reading, with getting enough exercise, and I’m pretty sure it has a deleterious effect on my attention span. And it is incredibly hard to stop.

            Every morning I get up with renewed intentions. I make coffee, take a few moments for the feeding/bonding ritual with Bunny the cat and Pidge the parrot, check my email and the local news to be certain things are still mostly holding together, and get to work. Or not.

            Somewhere right after email, while the coffee is kicking in, I notice the little blue “f” on my phone and something at the base of my brain makes a fizzing sound, like a bottle rocket about to go off. Even before the excuses for just havingaquicklookyouneverknowwhatmighthavehappenedwhatifsomebodysaidsomethingthatneedsareply have half formed, I tap the surface—it’s so smooth, and why does my finger feel a little numb on the tip these days?—and I’m down a rabbit hole faster than you can say “What’s Your Game of Thrones Name?” Next thing I know an hour has passed, I’ve gotten into three arguments with complete strangers and three more with people I love, and my word count ambitions have shrunk from a thousand to “I hope I just get that blog post in.” I’ve succumbed once more to my desire to know what’s going on now, and now, and how about NOW, and to talk about it to anyone who will listen and talk back. I have to crowbar myself away to do the one thing I have wanted to do since I was a child—and it wasn’t to look at baby goats. Adorable, adorable baby goats.

I know I’m not alone in being ridiculously addicted to social media, but in a lot of ways I’m its perfect rube. Some of my earliest memories are of being told that I talk too much, and that I wanted to be all up in everybody’s business. In part I think it’s genes; when I recently did a little family research I found that, back as far as I could find, my families are rife with (most recently) therapists of various kinds, police, and preachers. In other words, people who love to be all up in other peoples’ business. Those professions aren’t ones in which you punch a time clock. They’re lifestyles.

 It’s lonely being a writer. It’s not like being a musician or actor, or even a preacher or a cop, where you’re able to perform and have an audience right there with you. Lots of great “psychology of creativity” books have been written about the temporal disconnect between writer and reader. We have to make you people up in our heads as we tell you things that are dear and revelatory and irritating as chiggers under our skin. Depending on how important people from long ago responded to little, talkative kids like me, we might imagine all kinds of things about what you think of us, some kind and receptive, and all too many scathing and full of scorn. I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t have to swim a river of demons to get to the one smiling face that makes the whole thing worthwhile, or who isn’t willing to, again and again and again. That’s writing. It’s hard.

And, dammit, social media is not. For all it might push your neurotic buttons, pleasure is just a click away, and an invitation to say something shallow and reactionary with it. You click it and it clicks you. Facebook, Twitter, anywhere you can blurt out some verbal cotton candy will get you a little hit, will either confirm your worst fears about how you’re never going to be loved or convince you you’re golden, so fast and so easily you might forget all about doing something bigger, something that will make people think longer than it takes them to hit the send button and go on. It worries me. And it is so, so seductive.

And now it’s time to go share this with all y’all. Like and share. I’ll bet 99% of you won’t.