John’s podcasting table being used by his daughter for playing (RW210)

The table John uses to podcast is also used by his daughter to play a variety of games and when she does it she often piles LEGO or dolls or seashells on top of his computer and his audio gear. Today he was only getting one headphone of audio for a while, but now everything is squared away and he is feeling strong. His tech situation is super squared away, he got a wood recorder, some literally seashells, some Yugoslavian money all piled up against his little Focusrite, but it seems to be running.

Dan catching up with everyone else with being sad about the pandemic (RW210)

On so many levels it has been a weird few weeks for Dan and probably weirder for John than for anyone else he knows. Everything is weird now. Dan has finally caught up to everybody else who has been really unhappy because of the pandemic. For a long time he thought it was not great, but okay and he finally hit a wall and now he is just where everyone else has been this whole time, feeling deep existential sadness and dread.

Yesterday was the inauguration and everyone was really happy about it. Dan was celebrating with people as well, but other people seemed much happier than he felt about it although he is not emotionless. John heard substantial fireworks and who even has fireworks lying around?

Dan is quarantined all the time and he is not going to change that or respond by taking his mask off and running through a bowling alley. He had multiple times the same dream, but the details were different. Everyone talks about having a dream where they are sitting in class at school all of a sudden, even if they are an adult, and they realize they are not wearing any clothes. Both of Dan’s kids, 9 and 13, have had this dream before and Dan has never had it. That in and of itself is weird, but just within the last week for two or three different nights he a very high anxiety dream, the kind that you wake up from and you are grinding your teeth or your heart is racing.

Dan was out in a big box store or a mall, places that he almost never goes to. He has been to Costco maybe once in the last four years. In the dream he was surrounded by people who are very clearly sick, they are coughing, visually looking horrible and sick, and it was obvious that they have COVID and Dan didn’t have a mask. He got all this stuff in his shopping cart, and how could he get to his truck to get the mask and not lose the stuff in his cart? Maybe he could just go through the checkout line and it will probably be all right.

In the dream he was not freaking out that much, but when he woke up there was a tremendous overwhelming feeling of dread and anxiety, like he is feeling just in normal times, but it comes out in the dream. That happened around the same time that he started to hit this wall. As somebody who has struggled with OCD and germaphobia and all of that kind of stuff for a long time he feels much safer now. He used to walk around and think that people are probably sick and are spreading it around, but now for the most part everyone has a mask on and Dan actually feels better, even though he knows that there is this virus out there that would really suck and that he doesn’t want to get. People are wearing masks and washing their hands which they should have been doing all along.

Dan knows someone at the CDC, he cannot reveal anything about them and they won't be interviewed or talk or anything publicly, but whenever he has a question he can ask his epidemiologist listener friend. There is such a big misunderstanding around what things actually make you sick and what things won't make you sick. So much of what we are told is to address the lowest common denominator. For example the early advice that came out that said: ”Put your mask on right before you leave the house and don't take it off until you get home, and certainly don't touch it!” They tell you this because they know that most people will misunderstand the actual instructions around how to be safe with your mask.

It is the same reason that they say even if you get a vaccination you still need to wear a mask because there is the potential that you could be exposed to it and still spread it even if you are symptomless, because the vaccine does not keep you from getting it, it keeps you from having symptoms. They have to explain it, but they can't say too much because if they really explain it, then the message gets mixed and regular people can't understand that kind of thing. In the first few months Dan was seeing lots and lots of people in their cars with masks on while they were driving when they were alone in the car while they are driving. That is what Dr. Gupta on CNN said to do!

Dan knows somebody that has refused to go into an empty house because they were concerned that somebody before them might have gone into the house and might have had COVID and that it is still there. The droplets, regardless of their size, whether you want to call it aerosol or not, because there is debate over whether it is really aerosolized or not, they fall to the ground, they are not living in the air, circulating in the air, floating through the air at all times, but they have a weight and they fall to the ground within a very short period of time, usually seconds.

If nobody has been in the house for an hour before you, you really have nothing to worry about, even if they were only there moments before you. Someone actually said to him: ”No Dan, you don't understand. It is an airborne virus!” Droplets from a sick person who is masklessly closely talking to you is definitely projecting droplets into the air and if you are within breathing range of that person, which they say is five feet, but they tell you to stay six feet away because they want to make sure.

It is the same thing with a child seat: They tell you that all children should be in a child seat until x age, but really that might not apply to your kid if your kid is bigger or stronger or whatever, but they can't say that because then everyone will say: ”Oh, my kid seems big and they don't need the chair anymore!”They are trying to give people an instruction that they can understand and what is the greatest motivator? It is fear! If they can have you be a little bit afraid you are more likely to do the thing that they are asking you to do.

It is the same thing with the vaccine: Dan’s mom finally got her her first shot, they are doing a pretty good job down there in Florida of getting it out. She went to her local Publix to get it. They are trying to be very clear that you can still infect other people and everything else. She had to wait in line for hours and she is really happy about it. They say that the second one is where you actually can feel more sick, but the first one her arm just hurt. A lot of people are concerned about getting the vaccine because they don't know what the effects might be.

Dan compares it to peanut allergies. He doesn’t know anybody with a peanut allergy, but he knows somebody whose kid has a peanut allergy. Most people don't have a peanut allergy, would it be safe to say that peanuts are safe for most people to eat most of the time? That sounds reasonable to say that, except for some people, it will kill them. It is the same situation with the vaccine. You read that a nurse in such and such a state had a reaction to it. Well, yeah, that is because everybody is a little bit different and there is nothing that is perfectly safe for everyone all the time, but they don't want to say: ”This vaccine is probably safe for most people under most circumstances!”So what do they say? They say the vaccines are safe.

They understand that how people interpret things that are said is always a little bit different then what they are really saying because people hear something and react to the way it makes them feel, not to what was actually said. ”I feel like they said it was safe, so I feel safe!” People are so inundated with information that they don't really know what to believe, so they tend to believe the first thing that they are told: ”Oh, I heard it was an airborne virus. It is in the air!” - ”No, it is not in the air. It travels through the air briefly for a short distance and then it is gone!”, but that is not what people feel when they hear that it is airborne.

Then you have these new kinds that are more contagious. They are not more deadly, they don't lead to more hospitalizations, they don't lead to more serious symptoms, it is just more contagious. Dan read something this morning that said that because of the way that the coronavirus is mutating vaccines might not actually be foolproof after all and might not work the way that they are hoping that they are going to work. No one is talking about that because they want to get everyone vaccinated and news stories are being suppressed, It is so weird and everything is so political now! Dan just wants the real information, he wants someone to summarize the information and give it to us, even if it is bad, even if it doesn't have a direct conclusion.

John begin in Alaska for his sister’s 50th birthday, Alaska’s attitude towards the pandemic (RW210)

More or less against his will John took a trip to Alaska in the last few weeks because his sister was turning 50 years old. In their family she has been the most vigilant about the virus for the last year, the one who cracks the whip on all of them. If somebody walks too close to her in a supermarket she will make a presentation and will say: ”Excuse me! You just didn't maintain six foot of separation!” in her amazing way which is extremely confrontational and if John did it the police would be called, but that is also plausibly based in real concern and not in some ginned-up fake outrage. She sounds legitimately concerned for the person and in most cases, this is her mystery, the person apologizes and: ”Oh, you are right, I will never do it again!” It is astonishing.

She is out publicly disciplining people in addition to cracking the whip on her family. Prior to Christmas they went through a whole protocol where everybody was in 14 days strict lockdown and they got tested twice in order to have Christmas with the grandparents. After that all of a sudden her 50th birthday was on the horizon and pandemic fatigue flipped a switch in her and she was like: ”Fuck it!” and she flew to Alaska and started hanging out with her friends up there.

Because everybody is already so far apart in Alaska you get the sense that you are already in isolation, but it is also a state of complete Hee-haws who refuse to wear masks and are adamant about it. It is exactly the type of place where people are sneezing in one another's faces just to prove something. Alaska is very politically conservative now and a certain large segment of Alaskans are adamantly, aggressively dumb and they want you to know that they are dumb and put it right in your face: ”You know what? We are dumb! Don't try and make us smart! Go to hell! Get off my land!” type of thing.

The dumbness is reframed as a different kind of smart, which is true across America now. ”No, I don't need your smartness. I got a different kind of smart that comes from being resolutely dumb for decades and that makes me just as smart if not smarter than somebody who is studying and reading and paying attention!” But Alaskans more than anything just don't want anyone to tell them what to do. They will absolutely shoot themselves in the foot rather than go along with a plan that wasn't theirs, it is just the nature of the place.

John has friends up there that were bragging about how they walked around the testing station and told them that they were airport employees or whatever. One of John’s sister's good friends got COVID and went to the grocery store without a mask and when John’s sister was like: ”Are you insane?” - ”There are plenty of people that have covered that are walking around without masks. Why should I be any different?” The number of logical breakdowns happening in that logic is like a racetrack that goes out the garage and back in the garage and none of what they said makes sense, but you couldn't convince them otherwise.

John’s sister flew up there and she said: ”I am having a birthday party and all my friends are going to be there!” They had agreed to go to her birthday party a couple of months ago in a hopeful way that they started to have in the fall where it was like: ”well, maybe it is clear on the horizon. Maybe it is almost over!” and as it got closer and closer to the date of flying John was more and more anxious. The pandemic has not slowed, it has increased by every metric. In April and May of this past year John wouldn't walk past a car at a stoplight for fear that he would get COVID out of the tailpipe, and now she was suggesting that he get on an Alaska Airlines flight where they have just released a press statement saying they are going to sell middle seats now, and fly to Alaska, a place where everyone is a COVID scofflaw? John didn’t want to do this at all, this was terrible!

John was in a position where his daughter's mother, his daughter, and his sister had all for various reasons gotten very excited about the prospect of taking a trip. His kid is up for anything, her mother loves to travel and has been really hurting this past year, not able to go anywhere, and it just became a collective delusion in the family. Three days before John started getting all this conciliatory, like: ”Well John, if you don't want to go, that is fine, but we are going to go and you can stay home!” - ”So you are going to go, violate the quarantine, and then come back and give it to me? If we are in a bubble there is no ’You guys go do a thing!’ because then you come back from Alaska and I am excluded from you for two weeks while while we figure out if you have the virus?"

John had a lot going on here in the rest of the United States and he did feel like taking some kind of recuperative time. Alaska is the United States, so you are not really escaping there, but you are escaping in the sense that no one up there is paying attention to the things that people are paying attention to down here. So John went, he had two masks on, a N95 and another mask on top of it, and he got onto an airplane that was absolutely packed and every seat was filled with Alaskans, everybody in a camouflage baseball hat, everybody got Sorels or Xtratufs on except for the people that are wearing Vans with no socks.

Every single person is the largest version of that kind of person there is. A plane full of Alaskans is like a plane full of Chicagoans. Everyone is just 25% larger than they would be on any other flight. When you are in Chicago you have this experience of: ”Why is everyone so big?” These men are really big in every dimension, not tall like in Stockholm or something, but they are just large like they are made of cinder blocks. Alaska has the same quality. John was on this airplane and at no point in the last year would he have regarded this scene as anything but a complete nightmare and now he was right in the center of it.

Everybody was wearing a mask except when they take their masks down to eat their baloney sandwiches that they were carrying in their coat pocket. As they got out of the airplane they rented a car and went down to a hotel in the little town of Girdwood, which is where they went every weekend and they had a little condo there when John grew up. They were there for four nights and moved downtown and stayed at the Captain Cook Hotel for another three nights. The whole time it was very surreal, everyone was wearing a mask.

They got tired of ordering room service and it was like: ”Let's just go to a restaurant!” and they went to a restaurant that was at 25% capacity, everyone was wearing masks, three out of four tables were blocked off, but they were ordering from a server, eating their steak and broccoli, and then why not go to another? They ended up going to three different restaurants while they were there and then getting on thankfully an empty flight back home.

John is sitting here in front of the computer, pandemic raging, maybe worse than ever before, but he just did eight days of irresponsible tourism against his will, but just going along to get along, and he credits it entirely to this wishful thinking that is a product of just being finally so fed up. ”Don't tell me I have to do this for another six months! Don't tell me there is not going to be school for another six months at best!”

John doesn't know what to do about it either. He got back and the question on everybody's lips was: ”Are we going to restaurants now? We just went to restaurants and it was fine, so are we going to just start going to restaurants?” - ”No, I don't think that is the lesson that we learned. The lesson that we learned is that for the next 14 days every time I cough I am: Well… ” John doesn’t even think of himself as especially paranoid and he is not following the news, but every time he clicks on something, it is: ”More people died today than ever before!” - ”Great!”

John getting cancelled on Twitter in the beginning of 2021 (RW210)

It is a brand new year 2021 and it is is going to be a lot different for John. He had a public event the first couple of days of the year that stripped away a lot of the plastic trim that was gluing his public life together. For a long time, like everybody else, John had surveyed his Internet life and felt like it all looks like it fits and it all seems to be running, so it would require a lot of discipline for him to change it.

To change it would require that he had a better idea or that he had bravery to venture into the unknown or that he decided that he had enough or he decided that he was going to pursue some philosophy, and none of those things are are something that most of us wake up in the morning and say: ”Today is the day I am going to pursue a new philosophy of my public life!”, particularly someone John’s age who was not an Internet native, who came to the Internet already in adulthood, felt around blindly in the early years, found social media, found a lot of his friends there, made new friends, and developed a public life on social media that for the first several years felt very fruitful.

He was meeting new people, he was doing exciting things, he had been accepted into a new culture. Most of his peers age peers, his Rock music peers, his Seattle Grunge era peers, and his grow up in Anchorage in the 1970s peers did not transition as completely as he did to a new universe. John maintained a lot of contact with his old universe, but most of his high school people and Grunge era people, the best that they are is on Facebook, and they are awkward there, posting side by side what they had for dinner and about QAnon. It is not part of a life online, it is just a place they go when they turn on their computer and they have 100 friends, it is not public.

John’s record label not believing in Twitter back in 2012

John has a letter that he got from his record label in 2012 where one of the partners who at the time was very suspicious of Twitter said: ”I know you like to tweet, but since you have started tweeting you haven't done any creative work. You haven't written a song or a poem or anything, you are just tweeting!” In what was at the time a dick move, he sent John a graph of his record sales over time because he was trying to refute the idea that by being on Twitter John was helping his career, and his metric for ”Is it helping your career?” was, as it would be in the 2000s: ”Is it helping you sell records?”

This graph was a graph of a long tail: ”Here is when your last record came out. Here is when you joined Twitter and here is now!”, basically trying to show that there was no Twitter bump. His at the time 6000 followers, which seemed like a big deal, has not produced a single additional record sale as far as their graphs could tell.

Being on the Letterman show doesn’t affect your record sales

In the 2000s when one of their friends or label mates would get on the Letterman show it was always such a huge deal. And they would breathlessly sit around the reports from record stores when they came in the week following to see if there was a Letterman show bump in record sales and there never was. It was extremely confusing and there are all these theories about it. The sense was that in order to sell a single record you have to get that record into people's minds five separate times from five separate sources: A review in the local paper, the record is on the end cap at the record store, the band is on the Letterman show, they hear it on the radio, and then someone mentions it in conversation and they go: ”You know what? I am going to go buy that record!”

How Twitter slowly became everybody’s online life

John built an online life and it ended up reframing his life. Podcasting early on felt very connected to it because Merlin was online and all of John’s new friends that constituted his social and professional life were online and podcasts appeared to be also online as part of an ecosystem, but over the course of the last 10 years that ecosystem has really become a Twitter based ecosystem because all the journalists went on to Twitter. As newspapers closed and as magazines closed journalists who resisted it for a long time were like: ”Well, I guess Twitter is where I do my job!” and so Twitter became where we got our news. As the user base exploded Twitter became where we got our everything.

All other things online drafted off of the rules that were being established and constantly re-evaluated on Twitter. That was absolutely true of John’s life and for the last 10 years he has probably averaged 4 hours a day looking at Twitter, posting there, and of course over time the most pernicious effect of Twitter was an hourly game of status jockeying, light hearted on the face of it, but deeply stressful think: ”I just posted something! Let's see! Run, baby, run!” and then an hour later it only got 25 faves: ”That was a great tweet, what happened?”

Then you post another one and it got 250 faves and then one of your friends posts something that is not as smart as the thing that you posted and it got 400 faves and you are like: ”Oh wow! Back to the drawing board!”, just constantly trying to attract attention, trying to get stimulus, the extremely moment to moment up and down status feeling of: ”Am I good? Oh, I am not good. I tweeted at somebody that has higher status than I do, and they didn't tweet back. Boo!” Or: ”Someone that is a big deal on Twitter tweeted at me!” It happened 25 times a day every day for the last 10 years. John tried several times to wean himself from Twitter, to not go on there weeks at a time, but he always finds his way back there because that is where everything is happening.

Thinking that you need Twitter to stay in the conversation

You bully yourself a little bit because you say, well, you can't be off Twitter because that is where you have to promote your career and where you have to stay visible and stay part of the conversation. To feel like you are part of the conversation to put yourself there feels like being alive and being relevant and being an entertainer. Hundreds of millions of people aren't part of the conversation, but if you are on Twitter it seems like the world and it is a world, but only if you are on Twitter. If you are not on Twitter it is irrelevant, you are not even aware it is there.

The presence of journalists continues to legitimize it because they are actual writers and actual people whose job it is to investigate and disseminate information, and that is their only venue, unless you are prepared to go behind the paywall at The Washington Post.

Twitter providing a constant stress and not a growing follower base

It has been very clear for five years at least, certainly since the 2016 election, that there just wasn't anything there for John anymore that wasn't fundamentally toxic, not even the surface level toxicity of people screaming at you and waves of ignorant thought, but the next level of toxicity, which is that whatever is true right now is true and what was true 20 minutes ago is no longer true. There is no ability to see what will be true and no one has an interest in what is true 20 minutes from now, this constant updating of: ”Are you cool? Are you cool?”

The last 5 years John and everybody he knows has woken up in the morning, they open their phone, open their computer, and the first thought in their mind as they log on is: ”Please don't let something bad have happened while I was offline!” and that bad for a long time was: ”Please don't let there be a school shooting!” or something, but then in recent years it has been: ”Please don't let something devastatingly bad happen!”

At a much more personal level: ”Please don't let something bad have happened to me that I am not aware of and I am about to log on to something terrible that everybody I know is already aware of, that is waiting for me personally to log on and find that all of a sudden I have 100 messages!” Obviously, the worst of all of those is: ”Please don't let me go viral about something that I don't have control over!”

That constant stress is like having a gremlin for a pet. John hates nothing more than this place that he reflexively goes to every time he picks up his phone, that he is reflexively thinking about, and everything he sees in the world that is interesting he immediately converts into something he can post on this website in order to share it with other people, collect the praise, or collect the eyeballs, and then move on to the next experience. Effectively we are all content aggregators in our little neighborhoods: ”Look at this bug I found it under a rock!” - 250 faves! Great! John just gave that to people, so it satisfies his desire to share and to be an educator and thinker.

It was not a growing media for him for a long time, but his follower base is steady and in the main pretty strong. He has a surprisingly few number of bots and most of the people that follow him know him and follow him other places. It is not like he was growing his fan base very much or at all.

John’s life as a public persona being surrounded by a plastic trim

There was a plastic trim around the different components of his life, consisting of all the exciting things he did: ”I go to here and then I go to there, and every year I have six different festivals and things I do and all my friends are there and I make new friends and I haven't released a record in 15 years, but it doesn't matter because I am accepted here in a culture where most of the entertainers just play the same 10 songs every time they take the stage or tell the same jokes or do the same bits!”

That plastic trim was concealing a tremendous amount of rust, unanswered questions like: ”I am 52 years old and what am I doing? What is the plan here? Is this my life? None of these terms are terms that I wrote for myself or signed off on, even. I am living according to the laws of an ecosystem that I have no control over, that doesn't belong to me, that I don't like or admire, and I am doing it for base reasons, because this system has plugged into some elemental needs like: Please feed me, please love me!” There are better ways to scratch that itch!

Podcasts not really being on the Internet

John is not somebody who is coming up with 50 jokes a minute. He is a long form writer, a long arc storyteller, and gratefully it turned out that podcasting is not actually on the Internet. Podcasting is a completely separate thread of media. Most of the people that podcast are on the Internet, and so it seems like there is a lot of overlap. Most of the people that listen to podcasts are on the Internet, although not all by a long stretch. A lot of people that listen to podcasts don't have anything to do on the Internet, aren't there, and don't like it.

These shows are on completely different terms! They are long form, they are slow to bloom. John has told a lot of stories on this show about things that happened to him a year and a half ago and he wasn't interested in processing them at the time. John doesn’t like to ask for help, he doesn't like to be congratulated, and the thing about Twitter praise is that the praise is also ephemeral.

People sending John letters of support about what happened

A thing that has been very interesting during the last two weeks is that John has gotten so many wonderful letters from people, hundreds and hundreds of letters of support, and he is embarrassed by them all. He wants to reply to them, but he doesn't entirely know how, the only thing he could do is say: ”Thank you very much for your kind words!”, but some people have taken the time to write long letters of appreciation and encouragement. John is not used to having to think about that stuff.

If you listen to one of the shows where John tells a story about something really crazy that happened a year ago, and then you go back and listen to the show that he recorded the week that it happened, all he was talking about is that yesterday he went down to the store and there was some stuff there. Whatever they were talking about at the time John did not mention at all what was happening. That is true for Dan, he does these shows and he has this equilibrium that doesn't reflect at all what is going on in his life. Dan’s threshold for what he shares is at a much different level than what John’s is at.

The astonishing thing about what happened January 3rd is that John was kicked off the Internet and didn't take it personally. It felt very much like having your house hit by a tornado. No one person did it, no group of people did it, it wasn't a thing where he was targeted, no-one really accused him of anything, there wasn't a reason, but it just happened because the ecosystem is as it is. You could say that the ecosystem is out of balance, that the climate has changed so much in the ecosystem now that there are these crazy storms that devastate and then move on.

The storm destroyed John’s house, a house that he had built over a decade and that was full of tchotchkes and memories, almost exactly analogous to the actual house that John sold a couple of years ago that was crowded with stuff and in a lot of cases crowded with stuff that he had collected, but that didn't really reflect who he was, what his taste was, what his preferences were. You get friends that are very important to you that are coming from an online place and experiences, habits, and it was all destroyed in a storm.

John can't be bitter, he can't be mad. he can't rail at God. If your house gets destroyed by a tornado and your across the street neighbor's house is fine, who can you be mad at? You can't be mad at them! You can't be mad at God! It has just foreground the five big questions of life, the primary one being: ”Don't rebuild your house in the same place! Maybe this is a sign that you don't want to live in Kansas!” When the Missouri River floods for the third time, maybe don't rebuild for a fourth time. Move to a dry climate!

There is no question in anybody's mind that social media has been awful for a long time and awful for everyone. Trump leaving and the Biden administration sweeping in and rejoining the World Health Organization is not going to make Twitter fun again, it is not going to make online life fun. Online life is going to just continue to decline and be worse and worse and worse and just be a place where the angriest voices are the loudest and people are just there howling in rage and howling their pain. It is not a place that helps, it doesn't help them, it doesn't help you to watch or listen or or feel like you have something to say about any of it.

John feeling like having been reborn on January 1st 2021

It is like having a birthday on January 1st: You never have to wonder how old you were that year when you look back: ”How old was I in 6th grade? I was born on January 1st 1970, in 1980 I was ten!”, a very simple computation. Basically on January 1st of 2021 John had to start thinking about a new way to live, a new way to live that is offline, and he has no idea what that means.

For the last three weeks he walked around and 10 times a day a thought comes into his head, most of them in that family of: ”Chrissy from One Day at a Time, what did she do for a living again?”, thoughts that John has trained his brain to manufacture just for Twitter, they are not things he would even say to someone he was walking along with. In a way he has trained his brain to do it because he has learned the language of this place that he spent part of his day, but that is not what he wants to be thinking about, those aren't thoughts that are particularly native to him. Who cares what Chrissy from One Day at a Time did. Who cares what Anakin Skywalker thinks about anything!

John’s podcasts having a separate language between him and his loyal listeners

It really hammered home that podcasting is separate and the podcasts that he treasures, this one and Roderick on the Line and Omnibus with Ken are not vulnerable to the Internet because they are not on the same time scale. It is like a stop motion video or a super slow mo or something: Twitter is happening at 100 miles an hour and podcasts are happening at 5 miles an hour and there is probably nobody who really listens to any of these shows that doesn't understand John pretty darn well and if they didn't like him they stopped listening a long time ago.

John is communicating with tens of thousands of people in a very separate language. This shows are not built around: ”Hey, I was thinking, what does Chrissy from One Day at a Time do for a living?” That is not the level of conversation they have! (John is actually talking about Chrissy from Three’s Company who was a receptionist)

Trying to retrain his brain and his fingers

Just in the last three weeks John is trying to retrain not just his brain, but his fingers. He reaches for the phone, he turns it on, he looks at it, and there is nothing for him to do on it, he looks at it, and he plays Solitaire for a while because it is the only thing he can think of. He started reading a biography of Lewis and Clark, he is halfway through Moby Dick, and the danger of course is that his father's voice comes in and says: ”Well, now it is time for you to write your novel!” - ”Fuck!” It has been three weeks and John doesn’t even know what to do with his fingers. Please don't start nagging him about writing his novel!

The profound reflection that is happening really has nothing to do with reflecting on his behavior so that he can rejoin the the global community of people yelling at each other on Twitter, it is much more like reflecting on the decades left to his life, how to live them the best way he can, and how to be a creative person and how to do these things that he want, that he is, to share, to try to teach, and try to listen and learn and be a good person and father and lover and all the things. None of them are connected to his life online, none of them are improved by his life online, and he doesn’t owe online anything. The struggle is to acknowledge or to begin to live with an awareness that online isn't bringing him anything and hasn't for a long time.

Quitting his online life is like quitting doing drugs

It feels very much like quitting drugs. John was addicted to social media, it was extremely corrosive and destructive in his life, he couldn't stop, it gave him a lot of the same things that drugs did in the sense that it became the place where he lived his emotional life in a way that allowed him to not confront his emotional life. If he was happy he posted, if he was sad he posted, if he thought of something funny he posted, if he thought of something deep he posted. It became the place where his emotional life was being played, but that is not the same as as having those emotions and sitting with them. It was the same with drugs: If he was happy he got high, if he was sad he got high.

When John quit doing drugs he left a whole life behind. It has been very easy for him over the years to say: ”Well, I knew a lot of thieves and scumbags and muggers, and I left them all behind when I quit doing drugs!”, but the actual fact is that he also knew a lot of good people, good friends, people that were decent and honorable, they just happened to be thieves and muggers and drug addicts. He was not grateful or relieved to lose all those people when he stopped doing drugs, he just had to stop doing drugs and the consequence was that he lost his life.

That is the hardest part about quitting doing drugs: You do it and then month four after you have done it you are like: ”What am I supposed to be? I don't know what to do with my hands! I don't have nobody to talk to! I don't even know what I am supposed to do!”, but seven months after he quit doing drugs he met a new group of people and they didn't do drugs and they were interesting and he started a new life and all of the things that he used to do, all the ways that he had an emotional life were gone and he had to rebuild them, and he rebuilt them in a better place in a better way.

John tried to quit doing drugs and quit drinking for years and never had the ability, kept doing the same thing he did with social media, which was: ”Well, it is New Year's Eve, I should just go check in. I can have a glass of champagne, I could go to Twitter on New Year's Eve just to see what is going on!” and then sucked back in. ”Wow, it only took me 10 days and I am here for five hours again all of a sudden!” John was forced to quit drinking and doing drugs by dramatic sickness and existential dread, by sure knowledge that his life was teetering in the balance and then a religious experience, and he had a similar set of circumstances with his online life.

Starting anew with optimism

Now John is looking into a completely clouded future and has no idea what he is supposed to do an hour from now when he gets off this call with Dan, let alone how he is supposed to plan who he is going to be, but he is very confident that this is going to be a life-changing and overwhelmingly positive experience. In the same way that if his house had been hit by a tornado and he lost everything he would be able to put his stuff into a bag and move away and start anew, maybe in a better place.

We have all come to think that online life is life and that social media is where we live. Not being on Twitter is not going to affect John’s career, and people are not going to stop listening to his shows that were not about growing a listenership exponentially. Whenever you start a podcast you think: ”Maybe this one will have a million listeners!”, but every one of John’s shows has a very stable, loyal, supportive, and surprisingly intelligent and intuitive fan base and those are people that aren't blown by the hourly winds.

These are the people John is talking to. He is not talking to the Internet, he is talking to his listeners who understand satire and understand his writerly voice and the slow nature, the deliberative attempts, the hopes, and the optimism that pervades the way he tries to navigate the world. What else could he ask for? What more could he need?

This will redouble John’s efforts to become content with his life, it is potentially the thing that is causing him to say: ”None of the accolades, none of the faves, none of the metrics have ever made you happy! The only things that have ever made you happy are the small gratitudes, and yet you never seem to be able to apply that lesson to the way that you talk to yourself and think about your life. You are always out seeking, thinking that if you get on just one increment larger of a stage you will be finally happy, and it has never happened!” All of that just makes John unhappier! What does make him happy?

The challenge is trying to find a small life, trying to see himself as a regular-sized person. Now he really has to do that and appreciate that he is normal sized and that his people, his friends, made themselves known. It is a big group of people and a great group. He lost a few along the way here, but that is the cost. He has to be grateful!