THE ENGAGEMENT REHAB
by Ploum on 2025-02-27
https://ploum.net/2025-02-27-engagement-rehab.html
I’ve written extensively, in French, about my quest to break my
"connection addiction" by doing what I called "disconnections". At
first, it was only doing three months without major news media and
social networks. Then I tried to do one full year where I would only
connect once a day.
This proved to be too ambitious and failed around May when the amount of
stuff that required me to be online (banking, travel booking, online
meetings, …) became too high.
À la recherche de la déconnexion parfaite (ploum.net)
https://ploum.net/2025-02-11-deconnexion_parfaite.html
But I’m not giving up. I started 2025 by buying a new office chair and
pledging to never be connected in that chair. I disabled Wifi in the
Bios of my laptop. To be online, I now need to use my laptop on my
standing desk which has a RJ-45 cable.
This means I can be connected whenever I want but I’m physically feeling
the connection as standing up. There’s now a clear physical difference
between "being online" and "being in my offline bubble".
This doesn’t mean that I’m as super productive as I was dreaming.
Instead of working on my current book project, I do lots of work on
Offpunk, I draft blog posts like this one. Not great but, at least, I
feel I’ve accomplished something at the end of the day.
Hush is addicted to YouTube and reflects on spending 28 days without it.
Like myself, they found themselves not that much productive but, at the
very least, not feeling like shit at the end of the day.
Reflection on Four Weeks without YouTube (hush)
gemini://tilde.town/~hush/gemlog/2025-02-26.gmi
I’ve read that post because being truly disconnected forces me to read
more of what is in my Offpunk. My RSS feeds, my toread list and many
gemlogs. This is basically how I start every day:
Ploum’s workflow with Offpunk
gemini://offpunk.net/workflow_ploum.gmi
I’ve discovered that between 20 and 25% of what I read from online
sources is from Gemini. It appears that I like "content" on Gemini.
Historically, people were complaining that there was no content on
Gemini, that most posts were about the protocol itself.
There Is No Content on Gemini (ploum.net)
https://ploum.net/2022-10-05-there-is-no-content-on-gemini.html
Then there was a frenzy of posts about why social media were bad. And
those are subtly replaced by some kind of self-reflection about our own
habits, our owns addictions. Like this one about addiction to analytics:
analytics are risky business (drmollytov.flounder.online)
gemini://drmollytov.flounder.online/gemlog/2025-02-27.gmi
That’s when it struck me: we are all addicted to engagement. On both
sides. We like being engaged. We like seeing engagement on our own
content. Gemini is an engagement rehab!
While reading Gemini posts, I feel that I’m not alone being addicted to
engagement, suffering from it and trying to find a solution.
And when people in the real world starts, out of the blue, asking my
opinion about Elon Musk’s latest declaration, it reminds me that the
engagement addiction is not an individual problem but a societal one.
Anyway, welcome to Gemini, welcome to rehab! I’m Ploum and I’m addicted
to engagement.
