The New Year is a good time to take a clear-eyed look at your past and relive your many failures. It’s a time to regret what you have done, a time for guilt and bitterness, but no matter how badly you screwed things up the preceding year the New Year is also a chance to make things right. The New Year is like a fresh tub of store-brand guacamole, its smooth machine-made surface waiting for that first nacho chip. Full of promise, the New Year is a blank slate upon which to write your opus of good intentions. This is your moment, this is your time: don’t blow it by double dipping.
Making resolutions in real life often requires some effort on our part to accomplish. Things like losing weight or getting stronger, maybe to change into clean underwear, or foolishly, to drink less. These are hard things to do which is why so many New Year’s resolutions lie broken and forgotten by February. Social media resolutions are much easier to keep. In fact, most of them only require you to pause, to not do, to disengage. With that here are my five social media resolutions for 2022.
Social Media Resolution Number 1: I will stop informing Internet grifters… I mean sellers that the price they are asking for their well-used sale item (without shipping) exceeds the price of a brand new, duplicate item with shipping included. I don’t know why I have chosen to be Mr. Price Check on various forums but it needs to stop. If Joe Blow wants to list a rusty old Yamaha gas cap for three times more money than a new one from Yamaha who am I to post a link to the cheaper new item? Why do I care? Am I really trying to warn other idiots of the price gouging or am I a Bob Barker-like crusader for the frigging Price Is Right? From now on I vow to stay out of the grifter’s deal and let the buyer beware. Unless it’s a basket case JT1 Mini Enduro for 2800 dollars; then I have to pipe up.
Social Media Resolution Number 2: When some tasteless, classless, skill-deprived person puts up a photograph of their sad, pipe-wrapped, loop-butchered, Brat style motorcycle and then asks the hive mind what do we think about it, I vow to stop telling the builder what I think about it. It does the builder, and I use that term loosely, no good to list all the horrible things he has done to what was a pretty cool vintage Japanese bike. I promise to stop telling the idiots who vandalize a decent motorcycle that the bike is worthless now and they should give their 4-inch angle grinder to a chimpanzee because the average chimp has a better grasp of style and tool usage than the so-called builder. Look, if Brat builders had any chance of turning around their lives I’d go along with the god-awful mess as just a phase. I’d try to steer them in the right direction, you know? But that’s not going to happen. The Brat builder’s bad taste will only grow progressively worse, going from butchering Japanese bikes to big wheel baggers constructed entirely of Bondo to huge, jacked-up diesel pickup trucks with those 28-inch rims. Regardless, I will never comment on the Brat’s topic from this day forward.
Social Media Resolution Number 3: I will stop blocking people who answer, “Google is your friend” or “use the search function” in response to questions on a brand-specific motorcycle owner’s forum. Unlike these paragons of efficiency, you and I understand that owner’s groups exist for more than the just the facts. The owner’s group fosters camaraderie, and a sort of gallows humor develops regarding your particular motorcycle’s consistent failures. It’s reassuring to know that you’re not alone when your swing arm breaks. The search bar does not provide real-time condolences. After sufficient time any owner’s group will have covered all known problems and these issues will have been exhaustively discussed. At that advanced state of know-how answering a query with conventional wisdom becomes almost like a chant. Chanting is good for the soul; it wipes the mind clean, if only for a moment. I approach a Zen-like state when I repeat, “remove the sway bars” to a Jeep YJ owner for the 1000th time.
Social Media Resolution Number 4: I will stop trying to figure out Facebook. My Facebook account is slowly losing functionality. One by one, little features disappear. Facebook Messenger went away a few years ago. I can’t access the messages, but Messenger still sends me notices that a friend has left a message. I can no longer post videos unless I download them to YouTube first then paste a link on my page. YouTube uploads slowly with my weak Internet connection. A 5-minute video might take 8 hours to upload. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I’m no longer in control of some Facebook pages I created. Group settings are changing and I didn’t change them. I used to shake my fist at Facebook and rail against the Face-less algorithms that keep eroding my online presence. For 2022 I’m going to let the anger go. I’m going to stop bitching about Facebook and let its perverse tentacles unwind themselves from my life at whatever pace their little robot-minds care to proceed. I have found that my opinion of humanity varies in an inverse proportion to how much I use the service: lots of time on Facebook depresses me, less time on Facebook and my outlook improves. Maybe human beings were never meant to know so much intimate detail about each other’s lives. In the past it took active agency to find out who was a jerk. Now people tell you they are jerks 10 or 15 times a day. In writing.
I now know jerks in every country of the world. I know jerks in India, I know jerks in Saudi Arabia, I know jerks in China, and I know jerks in every state of these United States and its territories. Before the Internet was created there was no way I could I dislike so many people. It’s a little overwhelming. I don’t believe we have evolved enough to cope with so many jerks all at once. Handing us a phone and an Internet connection is like taking a pre-contact tribesman from the Amazon jungle and dropping him off in the middle of the Las Vegas strip with a bag of halcyon-days meth and 7500 dollars cash. It’s too much, too soon and I’m going to stop trying to sort it all out.
These four social media resolutions seem eminently keepable to me. They seem like actions that will improve my life at absolutely no cost in time or effort on my part. I like that. What are your social media New Year’s resolutions?
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