On free afternoons, I like to stay in cafés. I don’t particularly go there for the coffee — I’m not much of a coffee snob, though I do drink coffee on the regular, unfortunately — I go there for a place to sit, for the ambiance. The drink and dessert are just a bonus. When I do this, I’m always alone. This is my alone time.
Naturally in such places, people gather. It’s where friends meet up to have a conversation. It’s where families stay for a short break in between their shopping or outing. Therefore, it’s always noisy. For the most part, though, the noise just becomes white noise, really. It’s just part of the background, along with all the other noises. But there are times, sometimes when my table is closer to another group’s table, or when someone’s voice is particularly loud, that the noise is no longer white. I become part of the conversation against my will.
During these times, I can’t not listen. I’m not quite sure if this is a recent development or if I have always been this way, but I noticed that it’s becoming harder for me to filter out noise around me. I end up listening in to conversations I’m not a part of. Sometimes I even end up getting emotionally invested — especially in cases where they talk about other people who aren’t there to state their case or defend themselves — or getting frustrated — such as when they’re talking about topics I’m personally familiar with or I’m opinionated about. I hate it when this happens, for the simplest reason: it’s really none of my business.
I hated it so much that I bought a pair of earplugs. But I also learned later that I don’t really like wearing earplugs — I don’t like having things inside my ears. So I went to the more obvious alternative: when I find myself in these scenarios, I listen to music.
But I’m going to be honest: if I had a choice, I prefer complete silence. Sometimes, music is noise, too.
Recently, I deliberately blocked myself from accessing the social media apps on my phone. I used my phone’s built-in App Timer to limit my access to these apps to zero minutes. This way, even if I click on them without thinking, they wouldn’t open at all.
This internal conflict is not new to me. I have this dilemma almost every other week: Should I stop using social media altogether? In the first place, I was never much of a social media user. I don’t use Facebook or Instagram. I don’t post on Twitter anymore and haven’t for years now, but I still check it on occasion to know what’s going on in my part of the world. I have a Reddit account, but I rarely post or comment on anything; I only use it to read other people’s posts and comments. The only social media platform where I actually post anything is Mastodon, but even there, my activity is sporadic. So I always end up asking myself: What’s the point in my having all these?
After restricting these apps on my phone (except Mastodon), I became conscious of how much time I actually have. Although I have always known this, I lose so much time on social media just scrolling, just reading, passively taking in, sometimes news, more often opinions, other people’s issues and problems (who’s right and who’s wrong? “Am I the asshole?” — moral questions in the form of people’s lives), absorbing all this information I don’t really need. It’s everybody else’s clutter taking up space in my mind. It’s the conversations in the café all over again, only this time it’s all mental. It doesn’t help that social media platforms are specifically designed to be addictive: it’s endless, unnecessary clutter all the way down.
I will always mourn how Twitter has fundamentally changed. After my lengthy love affair with LiveJournal, Twitter was my go-to social media platform for quite a while. It’s where I kept up with my online friends, where I read about their lives — the little things, like what they ate that day, or who pissed them off, if they did well in their exams or not. These were the things I liked reading about. There used to be so much sincerity. Nowadays, it’s snark over sincerity. Now, it’s all about the ‘gotcha’ moment, the dunking on people (no thanks to quote tweets), the snarky reply. Where has all the sincerity gone?
With the newfound time I had, instead of scrolling through social media apps, which I couldn’t open anymore, I ended up spending more time scouring the web for personal blogs. I was reading blog posts, browsing personal websites, watching informational videos about topics I’m interested in or never knew and wanted to learn about, reading essays, getting into rabbit holes. It was a deliberate action on my part; I was deliberately seeking information I wanted. And most importantly, it was quieter. No noise; no clutter.
Someone somewhere has said that we are not built to take in this much information all the time. I agree with them, and I’m going to add another thing: we are not meant to be this available to each other all the time. Or perhaps that’s just the introvert in me speaking. But it’s not just about social availability; it’s about mental and emotional availability, too. (See: empathy fatigue.)
On my own, in my daily life, I already live in my own world. If it were up to me, and if I had the resources, I would isolate myself from the world, maybe live in a quiet cabin somewhere just outside the city, where the only sounds are the leaves rustling and the wind blowing and the waves. But since things aren’t up to me, I settle with the mental version of it: I live my life with my head in the clouds.
This is beyond social media or the internet as a whole for me. The world is just so incredibly noisy.
The thing is, I’m not always in the mood to listen to music. Sometimes, I choose to withstand the noise. Through sheer will, I try to relegate the foreground voices to the background and strip them white. I even succeed sometimes. Finally then I could enjoy my book. 📖 (If only I could be this strong all of the time.)