Over the summer, my quite-old-but-not-that-old phone ate all my text messages and became almost thrillingly unreliable. Ever since then, I pick it up not with the usual subconscious rat-excitement, but with something like dread — it’s so clearly an addiction to something which, beyond podcasts and the camera, offers me far more hassle than pleasure or use, as is the way with anything one becomes addicted to. (Oh, and maps, occasionally.)

I absolutely loathe it, and once I’ve submitted this current big project, my next fairly dull task will be to try and wean myself off it almost entirely. Keep it in the office, plug the landline in somewhere more accessible and use that more, not have to check before I leave one room and walk into another than my phone is in my hand. God, it’s horrible. (Yes, also, music on the phone, also good. Christ.)

I realised the other night that my own anxiety and weariness comes from a sense that absolutely every choice I make these days feels like a battle for my soul. (Ugh, and the period-tracking app is useful. UGH.) It doesn’t feel like merely existing, it feels like living, heavy with some kind of extra-gravitational moral weight: did I turn off the lights/should I turn on the heating/is this food environmentally damaging/can I recycle this/are the children growing up to be vocal about the right things/but not so vocal that they increase division in society/it feels right to keep them off the internet/but will they be prepared when they are free-range on there/it’s great they’re all keen readers/but modern popular children’s books are almost universally awful. This isn’t parenting, or being an adult. This is living in an era where we are facing mass extinction either through climate change or mass conflict, fuelled and fired by those agencies which benefit from conflict and fear: arms manufacturers, politicians, media companies, product-makers, internet figures fashioning themselves into products.

If you are the product, what does that do to your soul? If your daily life, your family, children, friends and colleagues are the backdrop and the context for your self, sold and packaged to consumers or employers, do you gain more than you lose? If your most passionate conversations and throwaway jokes are all equally public, equally up for scrutiny, how does that ensure a fair life for you? If everything you ever say can come back and bite you — my primary reason to wish all children and teens weren’t ever allowed to say or write or do anything on a screen — how does that shape your life?

If you are a female MP, trying hard to improve lives around you, do you deserve to get hundreds upon hundreds of messages describing brutal sexual assault and violence against you and your family? You’re a public figure! That’s the price! If you’re a beauty journalist, having months of harassment and bullying by vicious internet trolls, how do you find the strength to speak up in a moving instagram video?

But. What if the source of that latter bullying seems to be — unless the source mentioned was not correct, unless something else is going on, which is of course more than possible, because nothing can be trusted on the internet — fairly calm critiques of your working practices both on- and offline? What if the trolls who have attacked your children in fact only mentioned them once, in the context of you promising never to use them in your social media? What if those board users were asking questions about your transparency and correct use of Ad and Gifted tags, and only when you set the internet against them does that board start screen-grabbing your own systematic and extremely public bullying (sometimes over long, long months) of other women in the media, attacking their looks, abilities, work and parenting? What if all your friends suddenly start deleting their old tweets (as you have already done) because your accusations have shone a bright light on a forum that at worst, matches tonally exactly the conversations you and media friends have on twitter, and at best are supportive spaces discussing dementia, cancer, cleansing routines, and their own experiences of bullying and unpleasantness at the hands of blue-tickers?

How does that make those female MPs feel? How does that make the women and men, boys and girls who have been harassed, doxxed, bullied and intimidated feel? I wonder what that does to your soul, when every mistake is so public? 

Running to the river now is in the dark; even when we climb out we do so by torch light. I hope you can all find something like this for yourselves, something calm and quiet and personal and fulfilling.

I come home and peel off my cold wet clothes, and look forward to more moments without my phone. 

1. I really, really loved this essay on introducing hope back into a nihilist world. It captures my own struggles with the messiness of everything – if this, then that, so which is worse? – and how everyone seems to be struggling with genuine, literal existential crises. But hope! And weight-lifting! I’ve been doing weights since the start of the summer and every time I lift it’s like a fucking joy injection. If you can start lifting heavy stuff, I massively recommend it. 

2. I want to post a link to the Pop Culture Happy Hour review of Todd Phillips’ Joker film, but I also want to be a better person than that, so I won’t. But Ready or Not is great fun, so maybe watch that instead! 

3. Here are some excellent children’s books series, if you want them: The Dark is Rising series, His Dark Materials, The Murder Most Unladylike books, The Sinclair’s Mysteries, the Tiffany Aching books… is that it? Always looking for more suggestions if you have them, please. 

4. Next time I get an invoice paid I am 400% getting this for the pup. The cold is mean to these feeble, speedy hounds. She is extreme excite. 

All links mentioned are clustered at the end, if you’d like to read/listen to them too.

I’ve never been one for the middle road, in habits, emotions or tendencies, but if there’s one thing 2016 has taught me — I hope — it’s that it’s possible for me. At last. I’ve been more willing, as I’ve grown fractionally older, to welcome the change of heart that time and experience bring; I’ve been more likely to say, ‘Well, this is how I feel at the moment, but who knows,’ rather than, ‘No! Never! Impossible!’ Only there have been some hold-outs from this: some political groups, some voting histories, some educational choices, anti-freedom groups, hate groups. Thankfully, they could all be bundled up in my mind as Big Bads, so I didn’t need to ever fear that I could be wrong about any of them: and if someone had expressed those choices, even once, even in error or misunderstanding or drunkenness or foolishness, or ever been associated with anyone who’d expressed those choices, then great! Into the barrel of doom with them, and good riddance!

I have loved so much of social media, so much of the quickness of thought to make the jokes, dark or otherwise, because that’s how I see the world. The kindness, too: those people who tap a “xxx” or a digital embrace to someone suffering. I’ve been at both ends of that, and it feels good.

2016, however, and everything we’re seeing unfold from that and the last few years before it, has made me wonder at the meaningfulness of these interactions. Other people than me have written about this, probably better than me, and research can show whatever we want it to (also known as ‘2016’s catchphrase’) but some gut instinct in me has hollered louder and louder than social media does nothing, for me, in quite a major way. I’m sure anyone who’s reading this can give me some counter arguments — friendships, business contacts, social and political movements — but there is a hollowness to my life on there. On here, I suppose I should say. Having been mostly off it for several months now, I can see with greater clarity that the time I spend with friends and family on sofas and bar stools and around kitchen tables, without photos, or hashtags, or tagging, or comments, just ephemeral conversation and moments that are gone forever: these times have been better for me, and have filled some deeper need.

And of course social media can be an educational, fascinating place. It’s hilarious to suggest otherwise. So congratulations and a big shiny medal to me if I now understand that Black Lives Matter, or grasp the violence that faces the average transgender man or woman, or see that even the most supportive, feminist man occasionally uses language and jokes that chip away at the average woman. Those fights are easy to understand and easier to engage in. 

But – and here’s the tricky bit – how much time did I give, really, to thinking about why someone would support and vote and fight and hurt people for beliefs opposite to mine? It’s not comfortable to defend these people, to acknowledge that they are human and have family they love and interests they believe to be best. It’s not easy to say, in my circles, But What About Straight White Men, when we’ve had such a bloody great time turning them into the butt of every smart, knowing, accurate, deserved joke. But the number of people I know on social media who are actively trying to make the world better (could count on two hands) rather than just spitting into someone’s online soup (thousands) is worth my consideration, if I’m spending hours a day with them. And the things we’ve hated in those hours! We hate this film. This politician is trash. That TV programme is shit — look at this gif about it! The readers of those newspapers are just a dumpster fire of burning garbage.

So this is what I’ve concluded, after much thinking and reading and listening: that there are two issues here. Two things that tie my feelings about social media and my feelings about what’s on social media together: firstly, nuance, and secondly, opportunity versus morality.

Nuance, as Jon Ronson (a man who’s had his share of online kickings) says on the Guys We’ve Fucked podcast*, is wildly unfashionable now. Pick a side! Quickly! Don’t worry about circumstance, or history, or mis-readings, or context! Just go go go get our boots on and pile in! My online bubble that I’ve been happy to cosy up in seems the same: straight white guys: be quiet. Leave voters: racists. Republicans: racist misogynist climate-change deniers who should also be quiet. It doesn’t matter why they feel that way. Let’s just remind them as forcibly as we can that they are hateful humans we don’t want to dirty our hands with, and that’ll teach them a lesson they’ll never forget! After seeing our scorching memes, they’ll be thinking like we do in no time! Except: they are actual people. Everyone’s frightened of something, and whether or not I agree with the veracity of the source of that fear, they’re still feeling afraid. They still have goals, which I may or may not agree with, but those goals won’t change if I tell them their goals are trash. In an episode of the Invisibilia podcast* called Flip the Script, Hanna Rosin visits Aarhus to talk to the police who decided to stop prosecuting young Muslim men travelling to Syria to fight for Isis, and instead engaged with them, offering them care and support, employment and housing. They made them feel like they were welcome in Denmark, that this was their home, and in 2015, even when traffic was spiking from Europe, only one individual left Aarhus to fight. In the programme, Jamal, a young Danish muslim, says of his feelings before this positive intervention received him, ‘I thought: they call me terrorist? I will give them a terrorist.’ Treat those we disagree with as racists, as misogynists, as bigots, as fascists, and guess how they’ll be tempted to behave. (Side note: It’s also really worth listening to the Adam Buxton conversations* with Richard Ayoade, Iain Lee and Jon Ronson (again!) talking from various different angles about kindness, nuance, context, and how it feels to be a Woody Allen fan these days. Also, there’s a stand-up routine by Louis CK – helloooo, problematic public figure – which also covers nicely the idea of correctly using The Right Terms but having not great goals with it, and being pummelled for using Incorrect Language but wanting to communicate positive ideas. I can’t link to it as it autoplayed on Netflix while I was painting the hall, but the thought was pretty smart.)

As Oliver Burkeman said in his This Column Will Change Your Life piece*, it’s moderation that’s key to a better world, not battling for victory. No one really ever wins a war. As This American Life’s podcast* on Reconsideration showed, it’s giving people a chance to be listened to that offers that chance to change minds, not shouting them down with facts that will only make them dig their heels in harder. Anger is a vital political tool, but my anger too often feels like hatred, or disdain, or dismissal. It serves no purpose. It’s a toxic, pixelled sledgehammer. It makes the world worse. I’ve really been doing a shitty job at making things nicer, guys. 

Secondly: opportunity versus morality. As part of my feminist beliefs, I’ve been pro-Instagram; why should some dude tell me what I can and can’t photograph? If people like my lunch pic, what’s wrong with that? If I look great and want to record and share it, what the hell is your problem? Only suddenly, as I’ve been using it less and less, Instagram looks so lonely to me. I think of the humans at the end of Wall-E, tapping their screens and never looking up, and that’s how it feels: I like the sunset someone else has photographed while I’m missing it because I’m looking at my phone. And even if I’m snapping it myself to share — what am I missing by not just looking at the damn thing, and letting it pass through me, a beautiful gift to warm my soul? Do I really believe the tech ads about how much better a father’s night in the woods is with his kid because he brought their tablet along? I know the feeling in me when I pick up my phone to take a picture of something with the intention of sharing it, and it feels like a greasy, dizzy dilution. For me, it’s not about the over-curation of our perfect online lives, but about the inability to live in my offline life without outside approval. I’m not having real fun until 20, 50, 1000 people have liked it too! 

And putting that smartphone opportunity up against my moral code: just because we can do something, should we? If I can live-tweet a couple arguing on a train journey, does that make it not nightmarishly intrusive? If I Instagram a photo of someone in a terrible outfit, does that make me a warrior for underprivileged rights? If I pause every lunch with friends to take photos to post online for others to view and like or not like, am I connecting more, or less? Am I making the world a more claustrophobic, judgemental, short-sighted place if I collude in this weird global surveillance?

And god knows, I’m a hypocrite. I’ve been mean as mean can be, online and off-, about people whose political views I disagree with. I’ve Instagrammed my Christmas day lunches, my children’s artwork, my brunches with friends, my views from a train. But why have I interrupted the flow of conversation or silence before the play started to post a picture of the theatre stage and ceiling? Why have I unintentionally asked my family to hold off from eating because I wanted a picture of the meal I’ve just made? Why did I stop thinking about whatever I was thinking about just to snap an image of the sky? I’ve thought and thought and can’t get any further than Because other people might like it. Which is, to me, right now, at this moment, fathomlessly sad. (But who knows how I’ll feel next week, a year from now, twenty years from now?)

Have some ideas on social media changed me? Of course. People and articles have educated me hugely in ways that have hopefully made me a better person. But do those new, positive and instructive ideas warrant staying on social media? Not at the moment. Twitter is a thousand people shouting apocalypse at me, Facebook is an algorithmic sink and Instagram is an endless time-suck scroll of kids I’m not playing with, art I’m not making, trips I’m not taking, food I’m not cooking, homes I’m not helping people into, chances I’m not helping others receive, political aspirations I’m not supporting because I’m just swiping my finger along this screen tap tap tap swipe tap swipe tap swipe swipe swipe…

But right now, I’m trying to make changes. I’m off twitter, I’ve deleted my Facebook profile, I’ve turned my Instagram to private and am slowly weaning myself off it (I still hit like at what I’m seeing, but the (v good, v scary) Moment app is also making me realise how much of my day — my life — is lost to tapping a heart icon on a flat screen next to a photograph someone else has taken that ultimately means nothing to me as pixels on a screen). The cards, notes, emails and texts I’ve sent and received over the last month or two have made me realise how much more valuable these quiet interactions are to me at the moment. I think about the adults I’d like our kids to grow up into: outward-facing, forward-looking, clear-eyed, generous with their time, generous with their thoughts, independent, handy (all the way from cooking and cleaning, through to crafting and mending and building), confident, kind. And it doesn’t matter that I’m thinking of it in terms of my kids: like those men we laugh at for only finding feminism once they have a daughter (who cares why they found it! they found it! they’re engaging!) it’s not about whether or not I have children. It’s about which adults we want to share the world with. Adults we might disagree with, but whom we could hopefully rely on for respectful conversation, thoughtfulnesss, retreat on either side, apologies, space for error, learning, growth, change.

I’m not saying we should forgive anyone who asks for it — only maybe I am, because what does the alternative produce? And I’m not saying we should love everyone in the world, no matter what they’ve done in the past or continue to do in the future — only I guess, I suppose, perhaps, maybe I actually am, because hating people feels shit, does nothing, and makes the world boring and hate-filled and dead. We’ve tried that! We’ve tried telling men/cis/white women/privileged feminists/baby boomers/Tories/right-wingers/Brexit supporters/homophobes/transphobes/racists/abusers/Cameron that they’re just a crapsack, nothing but a punchline, should get pushed off their soapbox or fixie or 4x4 or youtube channel into the fiery pits of hell! We’ve let the warmth of righteous indignation warm us at night and not minded the language we use against our enemies because look at the way they’ve treated us! Look at the terrible things they’ve done! So we hurl insults and craft jokes and smash bridges with our pixel sledgehammers and wait for the likes and retweets and thumbs up and YEAH comments to flood in, and if they do then our point is proved, good work, and if they don’t then maybe we up it a bit more next time.

(Or sometimes, I wonder if it’s all a handy distraction from the way we’re treating our planet at the moment, like gum we can replace at the corner shop once we’ve chewed all the goodness from it. That’s frightening. That’s genuinely sick-in-the-night, silent panic-attack terrifying. But we buy new phones and new phone covers and charge them up and snap a picture of ourselves with them in the mirror and grind our teeth that some dude took up too much space on the tube and Steven Moffatt can’t write women. Yes! Those things might be true! But, to play the card we all dislike the most: haven’t we got other things to worry about? Not necessarily bigger things, or better things, but fractionally more pressing things? Shouldn’t we all be hurling money as hard as we can at scientists and policy makers in the hope we can stop sawing down and burning up the only home we’ve got? Shouldn’t we be campaigning against companies who design their products with built-in obsolescence, rather than grabbing those products as fast as we can so we can use them to tweet our rage at companies who use unreliable delivery companies? And I understand that climate change isn’t a stand-alone issue — capitalism, our lifestyles, our conditioned social priorities, corporate power over government, dissolution of employment rights, exploitation of workers — all of this feeds into climate change and the terrible way we’re treating our planet. I understand this. And all of it feels slightly more pressing than how I can correctly display my individualism to people who don’t or barely know me.)

The fact remains, the basic philosophies of most major religions (if we put aside meat specifics and some potentially dodgy sex/marriage stuff) throughout human civilisation probably have a point: care for the needy; practice humility; think of others; show forgiveness; show respect; love everyone.

If the future looks scary, the answer isn’t to build the wall higher and sharpen our words. It’s so painful, and it’s so difficult, and it’s so simple. Right now, if we can take the time to type our disdain and disgust, we’re in a privileged enough position to take a deep breath, dive into life, and make a better choice.

1. *Jon Ronson on Guys We’ve Fucked

2. *Invisibilia, Flip the Script

3. *Richard Ayoade on Adam Buxton 

4. *Iain Lee on Adam Buxton

5. *Jon Ronson on Adam Buxton

6. *Oliver Burkeman, ‘Moderates are the real tough guys’ 

7. *This American Life, For Your Reconsideration