for the love of craft

good morning (8:16am EST). i am looking up from this screen and grounding myself between thoughts and feelings. i am sitting on the back porch, tip-typing away while the birds sing and the rain dribbles. this is where i am and i am grateful for it right now and forever. it feels safe and stable, even if my future is uncertain. i am here and breathing and coexisting with lizards, song-birds, and the squirrels taking refuge in the trees around me. it’s peaceful and i will relish it. i hope you’re feeling safe and grounded where you are at in this moment, too.

i am 30 years old. i spent many hours of my childhood on the family computer playing neopets, reading all sorts of shōjo manga, and roleplaying on myspace. maybe you did too! let me pick your brain a little about this…

my perception is that i was an artist and a curator, if you will. within these spaces, i was making something new. i was not browsing endlessly all the time… i was genuinely interacting with people, building friendships across forums and even learning basic html and css at the ripe age of 9 years old. i was not staring at an advertisement every-other second. looking back, did myspace even run advertisements when i was active there…? (i looked it up. yes, they did, although they would increase the number of ads later, which probably contributed to their downfall… wild to think that people went to facebook because it wasn’t ‘cluttered’ like myspace. i hope that, what goes around, comes around!)

the surface level of the web in the early to late 2000’s was just, more engaging to me. it’s funny (not funny) that the buzzwords ‘social media engagement’ are so instilled in the current zeitgeist when the ‘engagement’ isn’t even … engagement, truly. the content we consume goes in and goes out pretty quickly, because - in general - we don’t sit with the image or video for long. maybe 2-10 seconds, each. and it isn’t our fault. these apps are designed this way, but i think we need to collectively begin resisting this.

you’ve heard it before- we live in an attention economy. every influencer, corporation, and small business, trying to get us to look at their post, their stories, their advertisements. maybe even their ideologies/beliefs that are not based on factual and accurate information! (*^_^*) love it here!

what we give our attention to in online spaces might not even say a lot about us, since much of this attention is coerced by marketing and algorithms, which are orchestrated by capitalists. i am trying to become more self-aware so that i can get better at stopping myself before falling into the infinite scrolling machine, namely on the dreadful app, instagram- my only social media app besides youtube, reddit, and substack. i used to have tik tak (yeah i am calling it that) but i deleted it on january 18 and then just didn’t even try to redownload it because that pop-up message, just hours after the “ban",” was wild. anyway, not the point of this essay…

instagram is different than those other apps, though: it is the app that i engage with compulsively.

tech billionaires strive to instill Fear Of Missing Out into us, creating an artificial environment where we stay and keep scrolling so that we don’t miss anything. the catch is that you’ll never see it all. there’s too many advertisements and promotions in between the posts that are actually added by the people you chose to follow and ‘engage’ with.

think of the last time you scrolled. do you remember what you saw?

maybe you remember one of two videos or images, maybe a flier from a local org or collective, or maybe you remember the video you shared with your friend because sending it to someone makes your brain think about it for a little longer than something you like and then scroll away from.

the longer we stay on these apps, the more money it makes for the owners of these apps: mainly speaking on the owners of meta and x.

another lie that we have been fooled into believing is that we look at these apps to relax and connect, but i don’t think i feel relaxed or connected to people at all when i’m on my phone for too long. i feel stressed and overwhelmed, actually! flashes of the most polarizing news and people will fill the timeline, sprinkled throughout the advertisements and memes that contain one-line straw-man arguments edited over top of a skeleton riding a motorcycle.

these app owners and developers know that all of this bullshit will make them money. the more enraged we are, the more ‘engaged’ we are, the more we stay on the app. they get richer either way. they are just fine, palling-around with other rich people who might even be nazi’s! did i mention i LOVE it here.

i don’t know that we should disengage completely from online ‘social’ spaces, because they can be a bridge for accessing REAL social spaces. i am simply asking that we truly engage in a meaningful way… “liking” a news article is not meaningful engagement! awareness is not enough. praxis is the answer.

i want to sustain myself and the people around me. i want to repair my clothes and teach people how to repair theirs so that we don’t consume more than we need. i want to grow food for us sp we can be less reliant on the agriculture death machine created by the u.s. amerikkkan government. and, i definitely don’t want to spend more than an hour on my phone each day…

sometimes, i just wanna watch a silly or educational video from some of my favorite creators, the people who are actually making these platforms be what they can be, to their full potential of educating and connecting people. so, a video or two, and i’ll get on with my day. it’s shitty because, i’m having a little bit of fun on my silly phone but at what cost (i got the phone second-hand but it was probably unethically manufactured, and i’m on an app controlled by authoritarian oligarchs)???

if - and when - i catch myself scrolling for too long (i’d say that ‘too long’ is at the 15-20 minute mark), i try to redirect.

there are times when i notice the compulsive behavior and come to the conclusion that i ‘don’t care.’ when this happens, i’m usually in a deeper state of depression. i don’t want to think because my thoughts are unhelpful and ultimately harmful, so i scroll. it’s definitely a form of coping, but also a form of self-sabotage.

instead of grasping for those continuous dopamine hits that i know will never end, i am encouraging myself to opt for activities that require more of my attention and do not give me that *instant* gratification.

things like hand-sewing, gardening, and printing the same design 50 times over, are at surface level… BORING.

instead of seeing 100 unique posts within a five minute span, i spend an hour sewing one patch onto my pants. the needle goes in, out, in, out- creating several small stitches that will join together and create a bond between two pieces of fabric. over and over again, until i end up where i started. i feel the fabric between my fingers and i accidently prick myself with the needle, reminding me that i have a fleshy body existing in space, in real time. after awhile, i find myself in a flow or meditative state. whichever vocabulary word you prefer. it is stimulating, just in a different way than the constant barrage of stimulation that the stereo-typical social media apps give.

out in my little food plot, there are sunflowers. i planted them from seed 60-70 days ago. since then, i’ve checked in on them, watered them, and tickled them (almost) every day. now, all ten of them have grown taller and taller, reaching 3-4 feet tall right now. i took these photos 10 days apart from each other:

i’m glad that i wore the same shirt so you can really compare the growth!

and since central “florida” area was HOT last week, one of them is beginning to bud:

this was absolutely the opposite of instant gratification… but has been incredibly satisfying, in a way that getting xxx likes on a post will never be.

coding my website and building my webstore (i am using snipcart) has been a mix of both instant and delayed (long-term) gratification. i am able to *instantly* see the improvements i make in the code, but creating the entire website is a looong game. i have to take product photos, measurements, inventory… i have to write descriptions and try to think about ‘branding’ (ugh lol). i have to think of how i want to organize the store and create separate pages for each category. once i have all the pieces, then next is to design the layout and learn while i do it… i have probably put in 30+ hours into my webstore, and it hasn’t even launched yet. (〒▽〒)~ but, i am so close…

as excruciating as it feels sometimes, each chunk that i create and complete feels like solid, foundational building-blocks. i am truly engaging my mind by researching, testing, re-doing, testing again, and seeing my efforts (eventually) pay off. same goes for my garden, for my mending projects, and for my IN REAL LIFE relationships.

the less and less i look at my phone, the more and more i feel human. probably because these little pocket computers only just became available to the masses 20-or-so years ago, and before then, we just had to spend our time offline… reading, writing, sewing, gardening, listening… and, doing these things in community, too.

i am striving to live a fuller life, as much as i can with what i have. my little adhd brain is learning to be disciplined and not give into compulsions.

it (my brain) ain’t perfect but it’s trying. (´･ω･`)

thanks for reading.

-mia