2️⃣061: too much information 😣
R-E-S-P-ONSIBILITY
Why are you here?
Why do you come back week after week to read what I have to say?
Does it provide you with some sort of value?
Is this email a short escape from the mundane reality of your everyday life?
Maybe you know me personally, and you enjoy my perspective Maybe we've never met (except digitally), and you're like, "Hm, I like the way that dude thinks and writes (and also, he's ridiculously good-looking)." (thank you, I know) Or maybe you know me personally and think it's just a matter of time before I write the one email that goes viral for all the wrong reasons 😈
I'm serious when I ask you: Why are you here?
With all the information and content you can choose to consume
With all the information and content you consume without having a choice
With all the ridiculous, poorly thought reshares and 5-sentence think pieces your friends share on their lame Instagram stories
You choose to come here and consume more content
My content 💖I'm genuinely grateful for that. I know it's not easy to survive. And I'm not talking about climate change or the slow unraveling of democracy into a religious state (even though we can't ignore those issues).
I'm talking about it's not easy to even get up in the morning and drive your little pollution-causing transportation machine to your little office building with nothing easily accessible within walking distance (STFU, New Yorkers, we know, we know, but it still smells like shit in the summer), while you type on your little computers and send your little emails so you can accomplish whatever meaningless task you've found as the acceptable thing for you to execute so you can survive and (barely) pay rent and then go out with your friends on the weekend to try and forget about this dreadful existence weighing over us before you have to wake up on Monday and do it all again.
All while skipping through stories and posts from the same 17 friends who have decided that almost every moment of their everyday life is worth sharing online for everyone to see.
And the worst part? We all agree it's stupid. But we all keep sharing, and we all keep consuming.
But, I was thinking, what if we didn't?
What if we thought about it a little bit more before we posted?
What if we considered it aresponsibility?
We talk a lot about freedoms in 🇺🇸, but the people who love to bring up freedoms always seem to leave out one key component of that freedom: Responsibility
You have a responsibility to others on the road when you drive a vehicle 🚗
You have a responsibility to the people around you when you're in a crowd 🤝
You have a responsibility to prevent forest fires by properly putting out your ashes and embers 🪵
What if we had a responsibility to others with what we post online?
Centuries ago, we weren't constantly bombarded with information. People didn't even know what was happening one town over. And once they found out, that's all anyone talked about for the next ten years. Things were boring, to put it lightly. Not like life was any better, but at least medieval peasants didn't have to wake up and read essays from their medieval peasant friends from the next town over about how their feudal overlord actually isn't such a bad person because their decision to drive them into a life of feudalism was allowed under the established law (laws the lord conveniently wrote themselves)(now I'm not sure if we're talking about medieval times or today)(best part about that last sentence is that five different people will agree with it for five opposite reasons, most contradicting each other).
Do you think a medieval peasant would survive in today's world? Trying to figure out what a bussy, a nussy, and an earussy are? (Mami, don't google those words, trust me).
Somewhere in a corporate office in Coral Gables, FL, one of my closest friends of all time is reading this email and thinking to himself, "How could you make poor Martha wonder what a bussy is? Shame on you!"Well, I think she'll probably take it better than a medieval peasant.
Medieval peasants run on Dunkin 🏃
Cleaning the tavern that's permanently covered in shit and puke so there's no way it can ever really be clean? Please, that's nothing. Try explaining to Anthony from Accounting why the Centurion airport lounge was charged to your company card after you missed a flight because you were too hungover. Don’t worry, I’ll wait 🥃
They might understand that one? 🕯
Try explaining to a regular person today what this fucking tweet means, they still won't understand. And if you don't know what anything in the tweet above means, you're one of the lucky ones. Keep protecting your brain and your heart 🙉
I actually think medieval peasants would be very familiar with Nancy Reagan in hell 😏
What I'm trying to get at here is that everything you share (yes, on the internet) will be consumed by someone. Whether you want it to or not. And today, with so much fucking data and content being made every single second, I think we have a responsibility to the people around us when we share.
Let's take one fact: In 2020, 500,000 new Tweets were posted every day.
That's a lot of tweets. That's a lot of information. How many of those were necessary? How many of those made the world a better place? How many of those made the world a worse place?
You might be thinking that's a subjective answer, but I don't see it this way. It's no longer just your problem (it never was). We're all in this together, and we all share the internet and the planet. And even though we go to different sites, follow different accounts, and consume different forms of content, chances are we're going to come across each other's consumption habits at one point or another. It's inevitable.
So the next time you write a tweet or post a picture, or reshare a news article from an account that every single one of your friends already follows, think to yourself:
Is this necessary?
Why am I doing this?
Will consuming this content help other people?
Am I sharing this because I want to have an impact or because I want people to see I shared it?
Listen, it's perfectly okay to share something because it's funny, or it looks cool, or it looks hot, or for no fucking reason other than because you want to. But it's also perfectly okay not to share anything at all. And when you do that, you keep a little piece of data and (mostly) useless information from being put out into the world, from potentially reaching someone's conscious brain who already has enough things to worry about than to see you sharing ignorant TurningPointUSA tweets with bad-faith arguments and people who are the living embodiment of scum on earth (kinda like feudal lords I mean crypto/stock bros I mean those five dudes on that one TikTok laughing about how they own millions of dollars in property and thousands of rental units).
A few weeks ago I didn't send an email. I had been thinking of one. I started writing, and with the little time I had, I felt like I didn't get to a place that would've been worth it. It wouldn't have been worth me taking away ten precious minutes from your whirlwind of a life to drop 8000 words about some shit that I got excited about randomly on a Saturday afternoon.
Before hitting 'Send' on that email, I read it over, thought about what anyone reading could get out of it, and asked myself:
Would it be better if I just shut the fuck up?