How did we live before all of this? Dreading opening the mail app on your phone or leaving people on "read". "Watch this video for at least 15 seconds to save a life", followed by a men's motivation podcast clip splitting the phone screen with kinetic sand cutting. Was this ever not a flood?
I deleted my TikTok account in August. Deactivated Instagram in December. Social media addiction got replaced by the impulse to check the news. No, more like scrolling the website and getting too overwhelmed to read articles opened in background tabs, instead playing NRK's flash games. Last year I got a newspaper subscription. Slow news, I thought. Stopped after a month – too much to read. Hard to keep up when there's everything to keep up with.
Remember the war in Ukraine? My Ukrainian friend in Norwegian refuge is finishing their higher education here now and must go somewhere else lest they're employable in their field and fluent in Norwegian. Full-time studies while in Drammen's refugee dormitories. It's not that they even like it here. "If I could only go back to my apartment and check how my plants are doing. In my mind they're still there, in bloom." In my mind, too, and there's sun shining on them.
Went to a pro-Palestine/pro-climate/anti-Trump demonstration, a friend calls it a "demo". We're not many people, and it's cold, and I can't decipher what the proposed new jingles are, so I don't shout them. It's correct to be here, of course it is. But it feels wrong too. It's right and useless in my head somehow, and it's a shame.
Discussed "Give up activism" by Andrew X (1999). We mostly agree with the points made and none of us know how to feel. "I just want to do what makes me happy, and this political work makes me happy," a friend says. They've been in forest occupations and squats before, they know this in their heart. But I also see their misery as they once again fight with authorities that are designed to suppress and belittle. I say that maybe I am not an activist, and I feel like wincing.
Quit Spotify. Finding someone to replace me in the family plan feels like recruiting people into an MLM. It's cheap unlimited audio! Don't you want it? It's irrelevant why I quit.
Enabled extensions on my browser: Facebook Feed Eradicator, Distraction-Free YouTube, LeechBlock for the news sites. I get sucked into everything. Enjoyment or academic and artistic curiosity are all tainted by this suffocating nature of modern life. People laugh when I admit that I sound obnoxious. It's just my quest for silence – could it be in vain?
Reading five books at a time. "Amusing ourselves to death" by Neil Postman (1985) was eye-opening. But I have read ten books since, it's been two months, so I don't remember what I was so amazed about.
Thinking of contributions I could give to a magazine I volunteer for. What is there to say? How to give attention to the important things? How to take it away from the spectacle of the American socio-political entertainment industry? How to urge empathy and solidarity when there is psychological terror coming out of every direction? Quitting the magazine.
We must have dealt with this before. Political activists and groups in struggle before us witnessed the same horrifying sight and persevered with courage. But how do we go on without getting caught up in the unmanageable stream of ragebait, guilt-trips, narcissism and doomerism? I self-isolate and it gnaws on me. I come back to the reality of our world, and it feels like terror.
Quit or don't quit. Get apathetic or try over and over again to do something good for others. One of my land's greatest poets wrote "Dievs, tava zeme deg". God, your land is burning. And here I stand, with a can of gasoline.