Quiet quitting Social Media!

Breaking!

I've decided to quiet quit social media w.e.f. tomorrow!

Quiet quitting means I'll be present in SM but will not be tweeting/posting. I'll just restrict myself to posting photos I shoot. No textual tweets. None.

Few random thoughts.......

SM is taking up quite a lot of my time and I realized that the returns aren't proportional to the time I'm spending there. Some of you might have noticed that I've drastically reduced my tweeting/posting of late. I'm spending the time saved on off line life and greatly enjoying it. Quiet quitting will give me more of that life.

By the way I always wonder how some employees are such a prolific tweeters whereas I being self employed can't find that kind of time to tweet!

And though in general people are nice Twitter gives anonymity for people and few of them take advantage of it and comment using unparliamentary language. They are totally unaware of BNBR (Be Nice. Be Respectful) . I don't mind them tweeting using words of their choice but it hurts when they use abuse words in comments to my tweets.

And more often than not they are commenting in a harsh manner because either they don't enjoy/ understand the humor in my tweets and take things literally or they can't appreciate what I write with their very limited knowledge of Telugu (or English) sayings, culture or traditions. Or as I'm fond of saying they are shaving the egg with a Gillette Mach 4 razor! And most of them don't know what give and take respect means. No matter what the reason, reading such abusive language does leave a bad taste in the mouth. And my upbringing is restraining me from paying them back with the same coin and this is causing me stress. And responding to them is like throwing stone in the mud. They are the mud and any sensible person would better avoid mud! My objection is not against criticism or comments but only against the language and tone of them.

I don't NEED to suffer their uncivilized behavior and hence this decision.

One of my shareable passions is writing, mostly in Telugu and also in English. Over a period of more than 3 decades I've developed a certain style of writing and just can't or rather don't want to change. In 80's and 90's I was writing on and off but decided to give it a pause when I became self employed in 1996.

My unpublished writings are more than the published ones till then as I didn't bother to send majority of them to publications because they aren't "stories" per se and the main stream magazines will not publish them! Incidentally I haven't published them even in SM.

But the growing popularity of SM gave me the opportunity to self publish. And I slowly started to write. The advantage of FB and Twitter is that we need not write stories. We can write anything and it could be one sentence or ten pages!

I enjoyed writing in the last decade.

But now I got to "kill" my passion for writing. Writing is difficult, not writing isn't! Or I'll write and keep them to myself like I did in the last millennium but will miss the pleasure of sharing them with you all.

I'm not a professional writer meaning I can't write at will. I write ONLY when I get a line of thought and In the recent past I noticed that I'm not getting that spark of inspiration to write unlike in the distant past. May be age is catching up or something else. And so semi quitting doesn't really make a difference as I'm hardly writing these days.

In Facebook no one will miss me! I'm hardly posting there and FB's algorithm is such that if we post infrequently it hardly shows up in any one's TL! Which is exactly happening right now. No one is seeing my posts there of late!

I've another passion too which I can share in SM i.e., photography! In fact I was shooting from 1975 but till the advent of digital photography those photos because of high cost were limited to functions and people and obviously majority of them aren't for sharing with the public.

But digital photography changed it all. And I found real pleasure in shooting at sight, so to say! And sharing them in SM.

So from now onwards I'll only be posting my photos and nothing else. And hope no one finds them offensive enough to use abusive disrespectful language. No more general text tweets. That's quiet quitting!

I'm also spending lot of time screen gazing be it mobile, laptop or TV. Being a senior citizen cataract is developing and it's better to reduce my screen time.

Of course I'll also be using SM to interact with companies to get my issues resolved about their products or services.

Long ago I've turned on notifications for all tweets of people I admire. There's a lot of learning and enjoyment in following those person's tweets. And I'll continue to see them but will not react. I'll not be seeing any other's tweets.

We all change our minds over time and perhaps I too might change my decision in future, if circumstances so warrant, and may come back. Hope it doesn't happen.

And finally if you are wondering why I don't quit SM completely here's the answer. SM helps me in my business and in fact got me few very very good clients. Now you know!

I made very good connections thanks to SM and some became friends who can always get in touch with me off line through phone.

So sayonara. Till our paths cross again.