The High Cost of Living Your Life Online | WIRED

I've been a blogger for over 20 years, so my experience of being online goes back a long way. I can relate to having times where I feel a need to disconnect and make sure I ground myself. Having some part of our lives lived online does create new social and psychological dynamics that we are still trying to understand.

“It’s kind of an adapted hyper-vigilance. As soon as you send something out into the virtual world, you’re sort of sitting on pins and needles waiting for a response,” Lembke says. “That alone—that kind of expectancy—is a state of hyperarousal. How will people respond to this? When will they respond? What will they say?”

These feedback loops, that are part of the mechanism social media uses to create addiction, for sure create anxiety. Every time you see a "Like" button it is really a tool to drive machine learning adjustments and create feedback loops to drive more engagement. Personally I've worked hard to disconnect myself from these loops. This is part of the reason I don't track any clicks on the Weekly Thing. First, I don't want to invade your privacy. But I also don't want to "feel bad" because nobody clicked on something. That isn't why I do this, and I don't need or want that information.

I like to think about the idea of "write-only" mode for online activity. Many bloggers operate in "write-only" mode. It is hard in some sense because you intentionally deprive yourself of these feedback loops. But operating in "write-only" also has benefits. It is the opposite of lurking, or "read-only" mode.