How Touching Grass is Going: An Analysis of how my life is going through a feminist lense & Assessing Technocapitalism's Affect on my Experience

A huge change I've made this year is deleting tiktok. And also, twitter and facebook. I invested a lot of my time and energy in these platforms and I have had a hard time articulating why I decided to delete tiktok. Twitter was because I got overwhelmed and flustered about Musk. Facebook because I was only connecting with family members I don't like, so it was easier to let go. I got a lot of time back after deleting those social medias. And even more when I deleted tiktok. I knew that I wasn't enjoying my time on there. I wanted to stay because I learned so much on the platform. I "met" so many cool people. I connected with people in ways I never have before. But my brain was goop. Now that it's been a while since stepping away from these platforms, I feel like this video struck a chord in why I left tiktok.

"Technocapitalism and the spectacle is integral to our understanding of beauty exhaustion. In the age of technology, beauty is mediated by images and machines. The spectacle in particular has numbed our minds to the politics of desire. So much so that we engage with desirability uncritically, reproducing and reinforcing its harm." (27:54)

The culture of optimization is very overwhelming. I feel like I spent way too much fucking time just thinking about myself. How to improve myself. Now that I've stepped away, I do feel like I spend less time thinking about myself, as Shanspeare states "I'm talking about my own obsession with changing things about myself to the point where I got tunnel vision. I couldn't live with myself. Every moment that I was me was another moment wasted." (18:19) "The chaotic pressure of self-optimization is fueled by techno capitalism and what Guy Debord calls the spectacle". I spent so much time thinking and spending time curating my identity online. It starts to consume a lot of time. It gets to the point that even "liking" a piece of media is a spectacle and a performance. A curation of your online identity. And making so many minuscule decisions on how to present myself, from what I posted or what I engaged in at what time and with who and where.

"Every moment that I was me was another moment wasted. If the holy grail I was being fed wasn't viable, I knew I was expected to spend time and attention on it instead. I had to terrorize my body by counting calories and working myself to exhaustion. I have to start 14 new brain beginning hobbies to remain interesting in culture to some unnamed viewer of my performance. I need to read 100 non-fiction books by the end of the month and I need to wake up at 4:00 a.m.

to maximize my productivity. Around every dark corner, self-optimization reared its head. The content I was consuming didn't mention how draining it would be to keep up with all of this. People beyond my screen looked perfect all of the time. And so I assume they just existed like that. Constantly beautiful and put together. I'm nothing like that in real life."

And this took up so much time. And so much energy.

I feel like I've finally emerged from drowning to gasp some air the past few months. I have more time to take care of myself. to take care of others. to connect with my friends and make new friends. to learn new things and gain new hobbies. to get my footing in navigating my local community.

I'm spending way less time thinking about myself. It feels kind of embarrassing to admit that I had spent "too much" time thinking about myself. Or rather, maybe an unflattering amount. An amount that I didn't/don't find appropriate or useful.

But tying this into the context of the internet, beauty and identity-- it makes sense to me. I don't think the internet started off the way that it is now.

I've been thinking a lot about this Taylor Lorenz video. She explains how online posting used to be different than it is now. As someone who has come of age in the age of the internet, I was a child when I joined the great experiment of posting online. It started as benign thoughts, silly jokes and random life updates. But as our online culture evolved, so did our discourse. We watch people “rise and fall”. We watched other people get canceled. We learned to post less authentically and more performatively to protect ourselves.

The algorithm seems to have slowly squeezed more and more out of me over time and I just couldn't take it anymore.

These days, I'm still online, but a lot differently. I haven't looked into the numbers, but I think I spend less time online. And for the time that I do spend online-- I've been questioning it and trying to be more intentional with it. I'm still trying to nail down what exactly works for me but I think I'm getting there :3 I have deleted social media accounts and no longer invest time in connecting with people and constructing an identity on several platforms. I am privileged enough to pay for youtube premium and ad free hulu to reduce the amount of information that I absorb in a given day. I challenge myself to directly communicate with people instead of consuming content. I have pushed myself to enter in person social spaces despite feeling scared and uncomfortable, starting to form paths for socializing and connecting beyond the social isolation of American individualism and addictive algorithms. Even this space, my digital garden, where I invite myself to publish imperfectly and partily baked, has reshaped my relationship with the internet, and I hope that I continue to figure out how to navigate this complicated existence.