An Introduction

I'm twenty two years old. I don't use Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Every once in awhile, I log into Reddit to access the Keto community, the members of which have been kind, supportive, and very very helpful with my issues surrounding food and body image. I like Reddit because it's simple and doesn't try too hard. The psychological value of using it outweighs the manipulation inherent in most social networks. If you ask me about social media, usually it inspires a rant of impressive proportions. The widespread social, psychological, and economic reliance on digital corporations is baffling to me. Do people not realize that they're being used?

I had a conversation with a friend a couple years back. She had just come back to the west coast Canadian town I live in to visit her grandmother, having driven up from Tennessee. She told me, in a little cafe in the small downtown of this 'city' of 20,000, that she'd had a hard time finding me. She had to contact another mutual friend through Facebook in order to get my phone number. I smiled. Later in that same meeting, I told her why I didn't use social media anymore; I found I was susceptible to crippling envy, constant comparison, and basically, I was angrier, more entitled, and out of touch with reality when subjected to a constant news stream and on-demand access to the projected digital lives of people I thought I knew, expertly curated to exclude the real, all encompassing details of true existence on Earth.

She thought about that for a second.

Then she said "Sometimes I don't know whether I'm doing things because I actually enjoy it, or because I want to post it to my Instagram and Facebook".

So, to me, the problem of social media is multilayered. There is the psycho-spiritual perspective that we are actually becoming removed from our own experience of living, by putting projection first and reality last. There's the privacy abuse, the fact that the extra business we gain through having a FB page is negated silently by the profits that are made off our participation. There's the increasing narcissism of the 'millenials', fueled by constant attention and 'likes', and the time, energy, and focus it requires to keep that attention positive and ongoing (and the subsequent downward slope the ego takes when that positivity is replaced with negativity, or even gasp the realization that no one cares about your all-important life.)

So, why am I here?

Well, to write.

Because I like the investment angle to Steem, because it sound like the creators of this platform are informed by human values and an egalitarian outlook, and because I'm a little hopeful that maybe the online landscape I ran from two + years ago isn't all bad.

Hi.
My name is Sage.
Nice to meet you. Really.