Ask The Galaxy Brains
Each lunar cycle, a human will be allowed to ask The Galaxy Brains a question. In this session, the human will have a choice of answers to consume from three different Galaxy Brains. Please send all questions, be they advise, desire for human-life coaching, knowledge of future or past, or merely interesting recipes, to, to mm@michaelmurray.ca.
HUMAN QUESTION:
I feel drowned by social media. How do I find a balance?
ANSWER #1 FROM GALAXY BRAIN PETER SIMPSON:
Dear Question Asker,
I have never drowned, though I’ve heard it’s a pleasant way to die. One supposes there’s no truly “pleasant” way to die, so it may be more tenable to suggest that drowning is the least unpleasant way to die, especially if you’re drowning in chocolate pudding. Which leads to the question, what is the relationship between the weight displacement of the drownee and the surface tension of the pudding? More importantly, is the sort of person whose habits can lead them to a situation wherein they theoretically can drown in chocolate pudding likely to have too much weight to displace and be more likely to merely float on the tense top of the pudding like a big, pink cherry?
Social media can probably answer these questions. There’s probably a group for arguing over relative pudding tensions, and there’s probably a group for mocking people with competitive weight displacements. Social media can bring disparate thinkers together. Glory be, let us bless the small, encouraging push toward greater knowledge that social media gives us in those scant moments before it punches every other aspect of our lives square in the face.
You ask how to find balance with social media, but there is no such balance to be found because social media is by nature awful. Social media is an echo chamber that throbs and writhes with a hellacious clamour. While there can be reasonable disagreement on many points in life, such as whether drowning is a pleasant/not unpleasant death, there can be no doubt that social media is, on the Official Scale of Pleasantness/Not Unpleasantness, just behind debilitating paper cuts and just ahead of being an advice columnist in an age when everyone is an expert.
There is no balance for you, no matter how earnestly you try to yell, scream, crawl, scrape, insult, bully, humiliate, libel, race-bait and threaten your way to whatever sad pretence of Potemkin balance could be constructed. You have two viable options . . .
Option 1: Once, while in Venice, we dined next to a young couple who revealed to us, over many glasses of over-priced touristica wine, that they could not fight with one another, even if they wanted to. He was from Sweden and she was from France and the language of their marriage was English, and neither spoke the other’s mother tongue. If either got angry they would, like most people, revert to their mother tongue, because there lies a larger arsenal of swear words. Fortunately, the person being sworn at didn’t understand a word of it, so fighting was ineffective.
Therefore, you should delete your current profiles on social media and open new profiles based in a region with an alphabet that you can’t use and a language you can’t speak — Sanskrit, perhaps, or Dothraki. You will understand nothing you see and nobody will understand anything you say, and soon your new indecipherable social media friends and you will be getting along like a slightly drunk French-Swedish couple.
Option 2: Your only other choice is to admit that social media is an inalterably unbalanced contract between reckless corporate monoliths and hapless, witless users, and that it is best regarded warily from afar as a sort of zoo for unbalanced people. After you slap yourself upside the head for ever believing otherwise, you quit social media entirely and get a hobby. Learning to swim, for example, has many benefits.
ANSWER #2 FROM GALAXY BRAIN JANE WILSON:
ANSWER #3 FROM GALAXY BRAIN KATHRYN McLEOD:
Okay, let me begin by paraphrasing John Waters, who said of Christmas, “You can love it or you can hate it but you can’t ignore it”.
John Waters loves Christmas (of course) because Christmas is a holiday, as in holy day, that can be made tacky and irreverent, and there is nothing John Waters loves more than making holy things tacky and irreverent.
I suppose I should point out here that when I ran my John Waters paraphrase past my blond companion, he asked, “Don’t we ignore Christmas though?” Then we got into it a bit because he thinks we ignore Christmas just because we don’t buy each other presents or stuff our faces with suet on Christmas day. But Christmas day isn’t Christmas. Christmas is a two month grotesquery of schmaltz leading up to Christmas day that we hate. Christmas day means Christmas is over for another ten months. We love Christmas day.
Which brings us back to you, my drowning and unbalanced friend, and my point, which is – John Waters doesn’t work for Christmas, Christmas works for John Waters. You, on the other hand, not only work for social media, you do it for free – even though it makes you miserable! And you do it while these two billionaire Peter Pans (featured below exactly as illustrated) laugh all the way to bank or satellite bunker or wherever billionaire Peter Pans stash their ill-gotten gains these days:
Why?!
No, not why are the two billionaire Peter Pans laughing all the way to the bank/satellite bunker, because we know why – they’re getting obscenely rich off their deliberately addicti-
Aha!
You’re an addict! That’s why you’re drowning and unbalanced! Addiction! And no wonder – social media is a 24/7-open-mic-cyberspace-soap-opera.
And like Christmas, you can love social media or you can hate it but you can’t ignore it.
Look, I feel you. You get up in the morning, check in on social media and for the first little while it’s a pleasant dip. But hours later you feel – exactly – like you’re drowning in it. Because you are. Meanwhile, all sorts of other people get up in the morning, check in on social media, have a pleasant dip, and then get off social media and go about their day without feeling any need to check in again, never mind two seconds later. Those people love social media. It works for them because they’re not addicts.
You, though, you are an addict. Social media doesn’t work for you. For you it’s #BigSocialMedia.
Now, what to do. Well, let’s start with the fact that it’s not your fault. Because it’s not. Social media was designed to be addictive, you’re an addict, and so, of course you find yourself drowning and unbalanced whenever you go on it.
However, just because it isn’t your fault, doesn’t mean it isn’t your responsibility. Because it is, it is your responsibility. Like any addictive behaviour, it’s not just you being harmed by it, although it’s mostly you, it’s everybody around you, too.
But here’s where it gets tricky because social media addiction falls somewhere between an alcohol addiction, and you can just quit drinking alcohol to find balance with an alcohol addiction, and a food addiction, because you can’t just quit eating food to find balance with a food addiction. What I mean by that is, sure, you can not go on social media, but chances are you’ll still need to go on the internet, where social media is just a click away.
Still, count yourself one of the lucky addicts in this hybrid cyber/real world we’ve stuck ourselves in, because a social media addiction isn’t nearly as bad as an online gambling addiction, which is also just a click away every time you go on the internet.
Anyway, there’s no balance to be found for you on social media, my drowning and unbalanced friend. You’re an addict. The only way you’ll find balance is by not going on it.
The Galaxy Brains
ATTENTION! WHAT’S YOUR NAME, SOLDIER?
Sir, yes, sir! Peter Simpson, sir!
RANK?
Often before showers, sir.
STATE YOUR HOME BASE, SMART GUY!
Downtown Ottawa with wife and cats, sir!
WELL AREN’T YOU A CAPITAL BOY! SOME KIND OF FEDERAL APPARATCHIK, I SUPPOSE!
Sir, no, sir! Long-time arts writer for newspapers, with dalliances in opinion and sports, sir!
AND WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’RE IN ANY WAY QUALIFIED TO WRITE AN ADVICE COLUMN?
Sir! I’m an aging, straight, middle-class white male so I have opinions on most everything and an insatiable need to share them freely, sir, so it was either this advice column or yelling on street corners sir!
One terrible night in 1984 she asked a non-pregnant woman when her baby was due. The horror of that moment lives with her still and she has never forgotten it. She thinks some worries are useful lessons, but most are just crap.
The humans put the money in the money basket -- so that all contributors may become plump with their labour.