What Am I Even Doing?

 Winters are...hard. I have four sections to teach; I am a varsity head coach (at least for a few more weeks before stepping down); it's New England; being a parent is always hard no matter what time of year it is.

All of this is to say that I'm routinely exhausted from December through the end of the wrestling season. I have to prep classes, prep practices, run both, grade papers and there's a lot of extraneous stuff surrounding wrestling. For instance, we are hosting the league tournament this year.

So when I finish my work at the end of the day, I'm freaking done. My brain is cooked. 

All of which leads me to social media.

Of all the aspects of social media, I don't think we pay enough attention to the brevity of most experiences. YouTube and Facebook can have longer videos, but generally speaking, your interactions with TikTok, Twitter and (I presume) Instagram are measured in seconds, not minutes. It is perfect, therefore, for the exhausted brain. There's no commitment to a video on TikTok or a Twitter thread, and you can bounce lightly from one to another.

Now that Twitter is effectively broken,  I spend my braindead time on TikTok. It's...nice. Twitter was rarely "nice," but TikTok lets me see dog videos and cool music "stitches" and heartwarming stories. On Twitter, I had a couple of Tweets mildly explode, and that was an incredibly endorphin rush, but TikTok just provides me with a stream of things that make me vaguely happy.

And it's destroying my brain. Increasingly, if I am trying to decide between watching a two hour movie, a few 30 minute TV shows or scrolling through TikTok, I'll pick the latter. It's the mental equivalent of fast food - empty of nourishment but tasty. It's scientifically constructed to make me consume it without deciding to consume it or thinking about what I'm consuming.

I still get some information from Twitter, but since it's no longer "fun" I likely won't delete it. I think I might need to delete TikTok. I don't want to turn my brain to mush.