QUITTERS R US
Saturday, November 5, 2022
I decided to quit.
How many times have we all made that statement, or at least had that thought?
In recent years we’ve seen line-cutters (nixing landlines to go cell-only; most think it’s fine again, but during the recent days-long Rogers outage in Canada, many were borrowing phones, re-learning how to Skype or reconnecting by VOIP); but as service resumed those impulses waned, though the outage remains insufficiently explained, and risk issues continue – none of it solved by full-page apologies and firing some executives who were on their way out already …
Our memories are fairly reliable, but our societal/group-think memory is short – a lemming-esque crowd in search of a cliff.
For example, a short while ago, do you recall everyone was hoarding flour for baking and toilet tissue for toileting as if there was no other option and as if the pandemic would last for years?
Store shelves are overflowing with flour and TP, and most of us have a package in our pantry, Skip the Dishes knows our address … and there were no runs (pardon my pun) on bidet inventories.
And the pandemic ran for years.
But in terms of quitting, to quit, to want to quit, I’m inviting readers to focus for a minute on the nature of quitting.
To quit, or not to quit - an interesting question worth pondering, don’t you agree?
Everyone understands quitting because we have so much experience with quitting – we’ve quit jobs, relationships, smoking, drinking, or eating things we shouldn’t be eating.
Some people have gotten so good at it that they’ve quit some things many times over, and each time realize that if they quit something a second time, they hadn’t really quit the first time …
Every time we ponder our expenses, look to next year’s budget, and rising costs – we feel more motivated to examine all expenses to conserve funds, and then we get to figure out what to do with all the time and money we saved.
Great in theory, or for a few days of writing things down, because we know we can live with less, live for less, and live without a storage room full of TP. And most of us have never used a bidet, let alone hired someone to install one.
We struggle with this because it encourages us to examine what we do, what it costs, what value we want /need, and what we are willing to pay for things. We are walking-talking contradictions; we go cheap on some things and then spend extravagantly on others. Because we can, because that freedom is ours, to spend our money as we wish. Or, as aggressive marketers know, we can be faked out, convinced it was our idea …
Seriously how many streaming services, ISPs, phone lines, services, apps, and auto-things are we prepared to cut?
How many do we need?
And, once we’ve made those decisions, how careful are we to find the best deal, lowest cost, and convincing economics ~ vis-à-vis the smoothest effortless products and services?
We’ve become so used to commercials in the ancient traditional TV space that our behaviour is now another marketing tool; we can improve our experience by paying more for ‘not seeing the ads’; this is old hat in the YouTube-sphere and now a Wall Street pleaser for Netflix shareholders as they will offer to charge less if you see the ads, and charge you more not to see them.
If we rethink every expenditure driven only by economics – we’ll save money.
For those short on money, it’s simply part of their life, their reality.
For everyone else, it’s managing what kind of consumer you are or want to be. Quitting culture has given some people much more time to examine these issues unless they are streaming a TEDtalk on whether binge-streaming is a constructive mental-health activity.
Let’s narrow the focus for today to a hot topic in the news, in the twitter-sphere – Twitter.
Many advertisers, users and exiting employees are dumping all over the latest Musk moves. The only ones smiling, aside from media outlets play-by-play on Twit-stuff, are Wall Street financiers breathing easier expecting their loans are safer, and Twitter quitters, of which I am one in progress.
Leaving Twitter, ‘your reason’ is probably as varied as the reasons users became Twitter-folk in the first place. This is a different kind of quitting. To tweet, to follow, to retweet – these were things that never became a focus or habit for me. I set up an account because I was convinced to do them all to build my online presence, for marketing, etc.
I never got ‘into it’ as many have, didn’t build a large following there, and didn’t go down that rabbit hole of checking where each thread led very often but spending time on other rabbit hole distractions du jour …
I can’t solve all my wasteful distractions and time wasters at once, but the first one I’m doubly motivated to expunge from daily activities is anything to do with Twitter.
Yes, I am quitting Twitter.
I have quit.
The quitting decision was made, and action was taken – but they are tricky and a bit complicated system to leave; my first try failed, but now I believe I’m ‘as good as gone’ that I can manage.
There is a why, a how, a how-to not to, and a re-try to disconnect completely and knowing that some of my data will remain in the bowels of Twitter servers, I’ll remove myself as much as possible.
Musk is visionary, rich and powerful – realizing he can (except when he can’t) move the needle; he’s not the first and won’t be the last of the uber-rich who want to go beyond what they’ve made their money doing in order to force changes in the world with a blunt instrument of capital leveraged to magnify their sense of power and entitlement.
Some do it for ego, some for reputation-repair, and some simply because they can.
I decided to quit Twitter.
But it is not easy. Finding how to delete is tricky – and what I realized after I thought I had deleted – was realizing I’d only deactivated. And when you return to the site to verify that you’ve done it correctly, you must re-activate.
Once I reactivated and found the appropriate instructions again, I learned the only way to delete successfully is to deactivate and then stay inactive for 30 days and then I’ll be deleted …
Can that be trusted?
I’ve little faith in things like this, much less now that Mr. Musk is running things. To be clear, I made this decision before his latest announcements of advertiser losses and cutting their staff by half, I had already made my decision to quit the twit-world. The daily announcements reinforce that.
I’m waiting for the time to pass, so I’ll be permanently deleted, done, and deactivated.
One more thing not to do each day, one more set of daily notifications from them about new things or messages I won’t have to waste time looking at or deleting, and for the handful of people I was following, no more notices of every inane thing they retweet.
If I take this approach to other things that eat time without creating value, I wonder how much time I’ll free up for focusing on starting, and finishing things that matter far more to me.
Quitting anything for any reason is not the reverse of why we do it in the first place. We can all protest our individuality all day long, but those who gather data on these things measure we move, or remove, slowly at first and then in volume and speed, like a school of fish with a few outliers who go your own way …
|