#4 Balls to the wall busy on social media

Welcome to Men on Fire, a podcast about what it means to be a man. All right, mate, we're back. We're back for another episode. Had a little break, a few weeks, and then they don't need to know that. No, they know we're regular as clockwork. Yeah. Every week  we have to do sort of little bulk things because we both get so busy, which might not be a bad thing to talk about. Busyness, busyness. A good thing for your mental health or sometimes. Depends, doesn't it? Depends. If it's busy to overwhelm and you burn out, that's not a good busy.  I think you can also, like, you can make yourself busy, but you're not actually dealing with something sometimes as well. So that can be busy, busy, busy. Everyone's saying, oh, we're busy all the time, and are you actually getting stuff done or are you just busy? Yeah, well, I'm a nightmare for that. Doing ten things at once and not achieving any of them. Yeah, I think I'm.  That would be an interesting one to talk about, although we did say we were going to have a theme of social media but kind of gone off on a tangent already. But that can happen. Yeah, you can be busy on social media as well and you can be perceived to be busy on social media when you're not. You can be quiet on social media when you're absolutely balls to the wall busy and not having time to post. So, yeah, sort of fits with that a bit as well, I guess. Juicy  because some people listening to this might want ideas or things to do. And I certainly think something that's helped me sort of in later life is to recognise which activities are something I can be busy in, that are going to make me feel better afterwards. And they're something that's going to add stress and pressure. And by kind of identifying those, you can kind of use them at times when you are struggling or where you do need a bit of an escape. Things like barbecue is a good example of that, where you can busy yourself on making a dish but actually you're kind of escaping from everything. But going back to social media, what you just said there oh, you can appear a certain way and not appear a certain way. I think that's really important and something that people can easily forget. I know it, but I forget sometimes that actually what people are putting on social media is probably not their life. It's not. And that can, I think, create a sort of. A frame of observation where you're kind of looking at all these people doing these amazing things and think like shit, what am I doing with my life? It's not as good, it's not as cool. Are you much of a scroller? Are you someone that looks at what other people are doing much? I don't look at what other people are doing really. I sometimes just doom scroll and just a little bit of escapism. So for me, me, social media is a bit of a double edged sword. It's my work. A lot of people see what I do and if I create something new, I want people to see it. I need social media but I hate it as well. You sat there sometimes just scrolling away load of crap and you think what am I doing here? You just wasted an hour. You called it doom scrolling but then you said it gave it your escapism and I think that's the double edged sword, isn't it? People back in the day used to watch emmerdale they used to have I'm sure people still do or neighbours or something. They get home from work and they'd have that decompressed time. For me that's probably on social media doing that sort of similar thing. I'm not interested in watching like soaps and things and watching TV for stuff like that but I know some people need that and for me that's just kind of wasted energy but then just scrolling. On online. It's the boundaries between what's work and what's not work online that really I think I struggle with is that I am working most of the time, even when I'm just sort of looking to see some ideas and see what's going on out there and see what people are interested with. Barbecue there's, manage&am