Nowhere Place

In my entire life, I’m sure I only needed to read one post about a lost remote control. After that, they all seem the same. The “unpopular opinions” that resonate with thousands of people are actually popular opinions. Does anyone gain anything from social media posts complaining about gasoline prices or traffic? I don’t think so. Almost two decades ago, when microblogging gained its initial popularity, many of us posted exactly like people do today. We shared what we were eating or doing, the tiniest details of our lives, a shower thought, or some internal monologue. However, as we enter our third decade of social media, I’m not certain we’ve solved the biggest problem with it: almost none of this is interesting at a global scale. By bringing the entire world’s population together and connecting each other, the result is not just incredibly noisy; it’s also dreadfully stale. Throughout the day, every day, millions of people feel the urge to blurt out anything and everything that comes to mind. Because it’s so effortless to post, everyone does it without thinking much of it. Very few people are engaging meaningfully. Superficial posts are followed up with drive-by replies. And no one likes that, I’m fairly certain. I’m not immune to this. I’ve been doing exactly this for as long as I can remember. But last month, I decided to stop posting on social media, because I realized that if I want to say something, I’ll write a blog post about it. If I lack the energy to go through that process, then it’s not really worth sharing. I wonder if everyone would be just as satisfied if they typed something into a box, hit post, and it went nowhere at all. How much of the reason people instinctively post is just catharsis? Is it just that we need somewhere for those thoughts to go so we can let go of them? And if so, is there a nowhere place we can send them instead?