Offline is the new luxury

I fell down a Lucy Bellwood rabbit hole today, and it was glorious. Her financial post on going viral, and yearly income review here and here are just brilliant.

And this post on Kicking Snakes:

It makes me wonder what I have been doing, generating a feed of thoughts (on Twitter). Am I truly attempting to provide some kind of service? Or am I feeding tokens into a machine in order to keep a tiny, arbitrary bubble of numbers going up?

Lucy then led me her friend doreen dodgen-magee and her book Deviced which sounds right up my alley:

What happens when we offload our regulation to internet-enabled devices is, basically, a bait and switch. We need soothing, but we substitute stimulation. We need to get calm and centered; instead we gather more data, input, and dazzling digital experiences. This leaves us dependent on stimulation to distract us and make us think we are actually being soothed. On the contrary, being soothed results in calming and working through the feelings related to dysregulation. When we substitute simple distraction and stimulation for this developed ability, we end up amplifying the dysregulation we are already experiencing and rob ourselves of practice in the important work of bringing ourselves back to a regulated state.

Lucy continues:

My palms don’t sweat when I write things for Patreon… I don’t want to crawl out of my own skin when I blog. In these quieter spaces, sharing doesn’t come attached to the instinctual certainty that I’ve just kicked a furious ball of snakes.

Same, boo. Same.

Reading blogs by other creators just makes me itch to create.

Big love,