This Blog, Leaving Social Media, and the Nature of Evil

Yeah, the title. I know.

I’m not going to preach. I won’t tell you social media is evil. It’s not. It’s a tool. The concept of evil is just a simplified version of ‘inhumanity’ that we use as both a buzzword and because we’re all guilty of being inhuman. All of us. (Yes, even you.) There are no absolutes. Evil as an external or internal force doesn’t truly exist. Morality is a social construct. It's a gradient running from ‘things we benefit from’ to ‘things we don’t benefit from’ (notice how I didn’t say ‘like’), and all we’ve done is arbitrarily drawn a black line through that spectrum and declared, “Everything on that side of this line is evil.” Then we move it around to fit whatever argument we’re trying to make.

For example, murder. The act of killing. Is murder inhumane? Yes. Do we as a global community, disparate cultures, and individuals benefit from it? Also yes. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be wars or cellphones or coffee beans. The act of killing is both acceptable and unacceptable to all of us, depending on the context in which the killing takes place.

Social media isn’t evil or inhumane. It’s a tool.

Now that’s out of the way, I left the big social media platforms because they weren’t useful to me. I’m not a person who needs attention or a whole lot of social interaction. I don’t have or want many close friends. Honestly, I really don’t have anything valuable or impactful to add to any social discourse. For me, it was meant as a marketing platform.

Yeah. I’ve learned my lesson.

What I found was a vapid vacuum of fools doing little more than screaming into the void, “This group is superfluous and should be removed!” If any of you are familiar with Hannah Arendt’s works on understanding totalitarianism, you’ll see that even the current arguments meant to be on the “right side of history” are calling for the same inhumanity as those they’re arguing against.

This isn’t exactly conducive to my selling indie books.

Some folks have had success selling through social media. More power to them. I wish I had their level of self-control and their savvy. Maybe then I’d sell more than one book every two months. But I don’t.

What I do have is what people have dubbed an “addictive personality”. I’m a functional addict, one who’s painfully average at that. When I smoked, I smoked a pack a day—but no more. Doing that could lead to cancer. A pack a day kept me at my threshold of acceptable risk. When I drank, I didn’t drink liters of vodka, but I would drink three or four beers every day. When I smoked weed, I didn’t smoke $50 per day, but I got high every night.

Like social media, addiction and evil are banal. Their negativity is slow and creeping, shadows crawling along the floor of a dimly lit house that you were convinced was empty. Some people run from that. Some turn and fight. Others point and hope something bad happens to someone else, if only for their own entertainment. Most can’t help but scream into the aforementioned void.

I’m a social media voyeur. I like the drama. I like reading poorly constructed arguments, so I can point and laugh at how easily “smart” people are sucked into hate’s singularity. I love how I get to have all humanity’s rage and idiocy right in front of me like a shitty James Cameron film. After I had my first night terror as a child, I would pull my blankets under my nose and peer into the darkest corner of my bedroom where all the devils waited for me to fall asleep. As I got older, I realized I secretly like to lock eyes with the Abyss. Social media gives me that.

Again, not conducive to selling indie books. It’s also not great for my mental health, as you can plainly see.

Do I think I need more therapy? Yeah. I also think civilization needs a hug and an enema.

My problem isn’t with social media, it’s with my inability to control myself enough to use it as an effective sales and marketing tool. Easy distractions are one of my (squirrel!) weaknesses, and the promise of the darkness is entirely too tempting for my self-discipline to win out.

In short, I’m the reason I can’t have nice things.

This Blog

Is this a marketing platform? Not really. I don’t need to sell books; I’m compelled to daydream stories and write them down. That’s what it boils down to. I have a good job with a good salary, and I live so far below my means that I can afford to hire indie editors, cover artists, and various small businesses to help me create a product that will most likely never see the dust on a Barnes and Noble shelf. I’m good with this. Truly. It’s never been about the selling, and it never will be. Success for me is simply doing something I can be proud of. I studied Literature and writing at the post-graduate level for several years; I can recognize A+ work within the context of the craft of writing.

I’m satisfied with a C+ grade on all my writing report cards.   

Anyway, I’m not really a blogger. My blogs are going to be me talking about the zoo, my dogs, and showing you what I think of my own books—good and bad.

When I think about it, that’s me, really. I’m that all-over-the-place uncle you can count on just popping up every few Christmases bringing cool gifts, sleeping on your couch, drinking ever single one of your dad’s beer, and smoking a joint with you before doing the dishes, vacuuming the glitter off the rug, then fucking off with an Irish goodbye.

Like me, this blog is going to be consistently inconsistent.

Buy my books.