Bad Habits

“I delete Instagram unless I am traveling,” my friend “Lucy” told me. She went on to say that she wanted to be more present in the moment. I am amused by this because this friend is the type to ask questions that could only be asked by someone that is very attentive to their companions. She misses nothing. Her questions make you think she was inspecting your soul and found something questionable behind your kidneys while she was at it. You have no choice but to come clean. She would have made an excellent nun.

Lucy and I met about 13 years ago through our coach as we were preparing to qualify for the Olympic trials. We bonded as two people do over a prolonged and painful endeavor. It was our personal Everest but without the frostbite. Since then we have remained a consistent presence in each other’s lives as we navigated the landmarks of adulthood: graduations, her pregnancy, moves and relationships. Due to a plot twist, we now see each other more in Europe than we do stateside but she was back in Arizona for a break.

“I feel like I should do the same,” I said. Too often I find myself escaping into the parade of nonsense. I can sit down with 15 or 20 minutes to kill and I have a better grasp of what is going on with the pandas in China than I do my own mother.

Still, I found it interesting that vacation was her choice of time to participate in social media. Wouldn’t that in fact do the opposite? But for her, social media is a modern way of sharing with others what she is up to. She uses it the puritanical manner that social media was intended for decades ago.

Honestly, I have made a stab at extracting myself from social media by deleting Facebook. It was remarkably freeing having one less thing to do each day, like discovering I didn’t have to make my bed anymore. I did not have the moral conflict over whether or not I should unfriend someone for their offensive tirades or practice apathy and pretend I didn’t see. For a while I deleted my Instagram accounts as well. The effect made me feel superior to others. But honestly this is like listening to a victrola and riding a unicycle to work. It’s a performance but not exactly convenient. Far too many people use it as a formal means of announcing deaths, births and weddings. Ultimately, the gesture made me feel like a hermit but I still had to sit in traffic and go to the grocery store.

Our conversation took place on the patio of her AirBnb where she had invited friends over for an informal gathering. It was February but the evening was unusually warm. I looked around at people huddled in various groupings and appreciated the fact that it didn’t appear that anyone was on their phone. Everyone was engaged in conversation as most of these people were old friends or at least acquaintances. The gathering was alcohol free which I still feel uncertain if that contributed to the quality of the discussion but it did leave me with a crystal clear recollection of it. I can fully recall my awkward attempts to keep the dialogue going. Unlike Lucy, I am not great at probing questions unless you are my patient and sober people are never keen to open up about their sexual history and drug use.

“You are more of a lurker,” she accused me while sipping her blueberry flavored soda.

As usual, she was right so I bit into my pizza to avoid confessing my sins. I stay on social media because I like to see what others are up. I want to cheer people on but what I find disappointing about social media is that I don’t get to see the really juicy moments. It’s hard to take pictures of a bad day, a disastrous date, anxious waiting, a guilty conscious, or passive aggression. I am an ER doc. I am a writer. I want drama, not just a happy ending.

It is rare that I post on social media because somehow I never feel that I am doing something worthy of an announcement. The joy I feel about an event is overshadowed by the snot running down my face or the disturbing look of distress I have while running. Even the post run selfie is nothing I want recorded. I look at these and think, there is really nothing that suggests what I am doing is fun or enviable. If I have a brand, it is masochism.

Plus, it takes so much effort to remember to record the moment. My feed is full of runners looking very skinny and fast. I watch these people video themselves at arm’s length while commenting on their workout. This is the last thing I am thinking about in the middle of a run. I envy their ease and affability. While running common themes I think about are food, water, death and revenge and not necessarily in that order. This is not me at my best. These are not impressions I want to release into the world for strangers to find.

“I just don’t feel good about myself after scrolling,” Lucy went on.

Lucy has always been my role model for health. She avoids alcohol and meditates daily even if just for one minute. She tends to read a lot of psychology and self-help and then actually applies them to her life. For this reason, she doesn’t monitor her sleep or have her day ruined by a bad run. She is the type that started drinking beet juice and activating her glutes before runs long before her body required it just to get out of bed. Most days I want to be more like her but it has been harder to give up my monitors than to give up social media. I am a woman that wants an A even while asleep. So instead of turning the monitor off and focusing on one thing at a time, I check my sleep score while doing yoga and think, “Close enough.”

So while I have not abandoned the social media bandwagon, I made a conscious decision to find a more productive way to waste time. It’s what Lucy would do. I put full force not into eliminating my addiction but redirecting it. If I was going to have a distraction, I wanted to learn something. I want to be able to humble brag about my sloth. I settled on doing the New York Times Crossword.

I have never been one to waste time playing games. Pay for games? Not in a million years. There was a brief period in middle school where I was pretty excited about Tetris on a Gameboy but our relationship was undermined by the fact the Gameboy belonged to my brother. I did not move on when new and more exciting graphics emerged. When popular games came online such as solitaire, Bejeweled or Words with Friends, I never bit. I don’t know if my hand eye coordination was not good enough to feel successful or if the plot was just too redundant. Either way, there was just not enough positive reinforcement to satisfy my need for validation.

The Times crossword was the perfect answer. I was going to waste time but I was going to do brain teasers so I didn’t get dementia. It seemed like the perfect anti-social media drug. I started with the mini crossword. This is the baby version. Not only did I start with the mini, I turned on autocorrect so that I could have immediate feedback if I was on the right track or not. This was like getting a gold star for every correct letter: incredibly satisfying. The mini is manageable with maybe four to six letter words. It will include simple clues like ‘the only state with one syllable’ or ‘the sky is the ___’. Lake Erie is popular as it has lots of usable letters where as x-ray less so since it requires a mutual x. Many of the words get repeated over time so I have developed an arsenal large enough that I can get through without the autocorrect.

Since I was done with the mini in a few minutes, it wasn’t really replacing the need for some long term distraction like making it through a full day of work. So I decided to brave the full cross-word. I was very proud of myself for getting the crossword done in about 20 minutes. I learned the meaning of drek and creative definitions of crank. The next day it took me about 45 minutes. I was forced to look up old blues singers I had never heard of and some current actors I probably should know. By Wednesday it was more of a slog. I couldn’t finish. I looked at my depressing results Friday and decided I was a dunce. It took two or three weeks of this cycle to understand that the Monday cross word is in fact easier and gets harder as it goes.

The crossword has a little timer at the top so you know exactly how long you have spent on each puzzle. This was disturbing. I wanted to waste time but I didn’t necessarily want instantaneous feedback in this regard. As the Sunday timer ticked past an hour and 45 minutes, I decided that perhaps 20 minutes of looking at pictures of puppies and monkeys was not so detrimental to my day.

I would happily return to the good old days of letters, even emails, but my cohort doesn’t respond to this. I find myself at a crossroads. I both need social media and I am trying to quit it. To get a book deal, you must already have an audience. This means that you must show that you have a million or so followers that might be interested in purchasing your words. This is like saying that you must be famous before you get famous. At least in high school I knew I wasn’t popular because I didn’t wear Doc Martens or Gap. Now an algorithm decides which feels both democratic and impossible.

I was lamenting the fact it is difficult to build an audience that likes to read and my brother suggested that I do videos as they are more popular. This is absolutely true. But being nine years younger, he is full Millennial while I am not just an elder Millennial but ancient Millennial. I am basically the Gandalf of Millennials. Videos are not my natural language. I am a writer for the same reason I am not posting on Instagram. I am used to the good old days when I didn’t need to have my hair done to answer the phone.

I tried to make a video but got distracted by Instagram. When I caught myself, I switched to my new habit and pick away at the crossword. By the time I got back to the video, I had lost interest in the whole project. At that point I found myself relieved I had had so few followers that it was completely irrelevant. This is a success story of wasting enough time to come to my senses.

Lucy flew back home after a week of running and reminiscing about the good old days. Reliably, on her way home she posted on Instagram about what a great trip it was. Of course I didn’t manage to take any pictures during our time together so if you want to know what I was up to last week, you will have to check Lucy’s account. There is our post run selfie out there for all the world to see. My hair is a mess. There is snot on my face. I am smiling with my two best running partners. Our little running group was back together. It was the best thing I have seen on Instagram since Punch the monkey which is why my bad habit lives to see another day.

Proof I am an ancient Millenial