Every year, there is a common strain of internet culture that likes to joke that “X was the worst year ever.” While I think this reached peak contrivance in 2020, the effort to diminish any 12 month period into its worst features always felt distasteful to me. In hindsight, there have been a significant number of days that qualify as dark or unpleasant. However, there is this lack of introspection to write off your life as being one long miserable experience. Yes, bad things happen. In my personal opinion, the next four years are going to be rough. It will be on a federal level and also from the sarcastic cruelty that people will use to cope. As it stands, 2024 is a year where I became fixated on “dead internet theory” and what a creative career even means in the A.I. media era. It makes you wonder how soon until we toss out our computers and return to snail mail just to feel human connection again.
This is all to say that it’s hard not to feel like America is culturally in a stagnant place right now. If you try to culminate a hard-fast document on the major events of this year, a lot of them share a morbidity that makes me curious what the generations further down the line will think. When they see people cracking dark jokes over people’s mortality, what will they think of their grandparents? I’m sure there will be historians who know how to phrase it better, but will that even be a valid career to make a living wage from? I’m watching the aspirational models of journalism fall to corporate overlords and, even then, losing audiences when they can’t partake in their right to freedom of the press. Given that the next administration will have two social media platforms to espouse their agenda, how will we be able to confront truth when it’s reshaped in sexier packaging?
On some level, this has been a year of constant worry about where we are and where things are going. While this is not a new concept, watching the fallout of ideas I saw planted within the past decade (notably the fake news movement) really disappoints me. The validation of harmful rhetoric feels antithetical to lessons I was taught, and of which I worry as the next generation will be formed by whatever censored language they’re provided.
I say all this because the worry has been in the back of my mind this whole year. Maybe it’s the byproduct of feeling some certain inevitability with the presidential election, but it gives you time to comb through everything and pray that things will work this time. Having lived through 2016, having watched the Jan. 6 terrorist attacks live, I’m less jaded than I was at 25. Even then, I was hoping that I’d reach the back half of my 30s and not have to be burdened by whatever policies have weighed on us for the past eight years. By the next primary, I will be 39. I know that this isn’t unique to my struggle, but it’s hard not to feel some sense of your life ticking away as everything you held dear fades away to something shinier and less interesting.
And yet, I can’t endorse this narrative that 2024 was the worst year ever. Without pointing a finger to any candidate, I’d argue that very few deserve that honor. Even if there is this concern that we’re losing something magical, I think it’s to ignore our personal journeys along the way. For me personally, there has been a lot to qualify as low points. My cat slowly died of cancer. I suffered a panic attack on Independence Day. My anxiety led me to self-harm as I struggled with writer’s block. Beyond the election, I had these small episodes of doubt that make you question what the point of anything is. This is all to say that my year wasn’t any more perfect than yours. However, I must ask everyone to consider the good alongside it.
Life is too precious to intentionally make your life miserable. For as much as can be manipulated by systems outside your control, there are small ways that you can grow and become the person you want to be. Anxiety doesn’t last forever. Questioning doubt will hopefully lead to ways to change as a person. There are ways to leave your mark on this Earth and have it mean something substantial. Maybe you will be drowned in A.I. bots, but the upside is that there’s already a considerable backlash to services like Chat GPT. So long as we hold onto humanity, there will always be a market for your truth. The upside to social media is that it still has the power to connect. You just need to find the best route.
I’m not saying that this will be overnight or always convenient. I still believe we’re entering an even more uncertain time than the period before. However, I do think there’s value in figuring out the best way to handle it. This isn’t going to be an essay persuading you to follow my path, but more to say: Don’t give up. Think of those moments this year that made you smile and gave everything meaning. I understand it may be worse for those more impacted by the bully empire taking root in government buildings, but I hope even you know that you are not alone. Things will be rough but, hopefully, things will get better. There are strength in numbers. Never forget.
Among the final accomplishments in 2024 was leaving Twitter behind. Given that it’s a website that was home to a lot of personal experiences over the past 15 years, it was initially bittersweet. Even now, I’m still a bit saddened by the connections I’ve lost in clicking that deactivation button. The dopamine rush isn’t there yet on Bluesky and it makes the website substantially less attractive so far. I think it’s lead to a small uptick in watching TikTok videos, though even that is a minor thrill.
And yet, I don’t regret the decision. For anyone who has been following my website since 2021, I’ve talked at length about how Twitter has housed a lot of triggers for personal anxiety. While it has been counterbalanced by positive relationships, there has been a push towards spending fewer days there. I think my record for last year was being logged off for a cumulative six months. While this wasn’t without experiencing “the shakes” a few times, there has been a revelation that I’ve been happier as I’ve grown less dependent on Twitter especially. Part of it may just be of the famed mass exodus that came this past November.
While I don’t think of myself as doing much out of stringent political beliefs (for example, I’m still a regular user of Spotify), leaving Twitter felt crucial. Part of this was because it lacked the excitement it did even three years ago. Having watched a cat slowly die of cancer for nine months, the curiosity to watch Twitter lose everything that made it special quickly became depressing. I could only take so much negativity and self-aware mockery of the failing algorithm.
That, and I’ve grown to absolutely loathe Elon Musk as a person. I contemplated just yelling at him to see if that would accelerate the removal of my account. He remains the existential study of how money can’t buy you happiness or even empathy. If anything, it makes you more miserable and lonely, needing the internet for quick hits of dopamine that I’m sure disappear quickly. You’ll build the world you want, but it’s unlikely to be inhabited by the people who are grateful for it. Beyond all this, my early days being a full-time Bluesky user has revealed that Musk has been in the midst of a mental breakdown. Whereas this would’ve caused me to spiral in 2021, now it just reads as an amusing glimpse at how your ex is doing.
I do worry that everything with Bluesky will just crumble and that I’ll never recapture the small level of success I had on Twitter. Even then, it felt like things weren’t getting any better. For as much as I struggle not to enter regressive mindsets, there are still days where I hear that Spacehey is trying to redo Myspace and get curious to see if I could feel that rush again. I’m not saying I won’t, but at the same time the tragedy is realizing that Myspace was 20 years ago. What am I going to get out of a clone of a website I used in high school? There is a need to progress forward, and one can hope the next era of social media is a lot more “user friendly” than where things took me in 2024. It's too early to determine whether I am all that happier without Twitter on my mind. Part of this is because the two weeks since have been distracted by holiday havoc.
Though speaking of progressing, this was a great year for my creativity. I have completed a few more drafts of my next novel (release date TBD 2025) and am very proud of how it’s turning out. After years of wanting to experiment with video production, I produced a few YouTube videos that may be amateurish and probably have poor audio mixing, but they fulfill an itch I’ve had for the longest time. They’re not great, but I enjoy the puzzle-making nature of playing with different features to see how things will play out. While I haven’t met my goal of doing them more regularly, I’m still proud to at least be trying.
The same can be said for my Patreon, which has been a dream I’ve had for even longer. For years, I’ve wondered what I could produce to make it worth subscribing to. As a result, I’ve relaunched Failed Oscar Campaigns, which is a column I started on The Oscar Buzz and have been trying to find a home for ever since its end in 2021. My hope is to build a substantial back catalog before starting to regularly promote it. Right now, I’m really enjoying the effort and am happy to get things back to where they used to be. I would like to think that I’ll expand my reach in 2025, but right now this small leap forward has brought a small bit of joy into my life.
As I get ready to say goodbye to 2024, I am happy to say that for a year that was overwhelmingly bad in a lot of respects, it’s still one that made me feel invigorated again. My creative endeavors have been a lot more challenging and fulfilling. Even for the days where it felt like I’d never tap down another key, there was the reality that all I needed was time to think about what it is I wanted to say. I’m not saying you will only have good days, but try not to get caught up in the bad ones. Keep finding your purpose. Maybe it’s cutting toxic social media. Maybe it’s taking risks you’ve been putting off for a long time. Whatever you do, just know that somebody out there will care so long as you’re being honest. It’s going to be a rough few years going forward. Why not try to have some fun along the way?
Comments
Post a Comment