I have no idea how I didn't get sucked into doomscroll culture.

Facebook was the center of my life back in college (2005-2009) and for a few years after graduating. What is now my diary started its life in Facebook Notes! I had Snapchat and Instagram accounts when those came out and used MySpace and even Friendster (a bit) prior.

All of those accounts have been deleted within the last three years. Aside from me arriving to closed businesses sometimes because they announced a change of hours on Instagram instead of Google Maps or (gasp!) a website, I miss nothing.

Maybe it was me trying to build a "things to do" service and seeing how locked down, not-open and not user friendly Facebook's Graph API was (in 2014).

Or maybe it's me having grown up a sort-of computer addict (on my computer all of the time when I wasn't in school) then, during college, seeing people get sucked all the way into World of Warcraft when that was new and connecting the dots.

What I do know is that these apps are extremely good --- casino-level good --- at sucking people into their portals and keeping them there.

Consequently, this has made going about my day in modern life difficult in some ways.

Playing music off of phones used to be verboten and socially enforced. These days, blasting 1, 2, 5, 10 second blips of nonsense every few seconds is "normal."

Walking around pretty much anywhere knowing that at any moment I can get hit by someone who overran the crosswalk so they could whip out their phone and scroll is a real possibility.

Driving around --- when I choose to do so --- is equally frustrating since people will tailgate me or cut me off so they can park 30 seconds faster and spend 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes FUCKING SCROLLING.

I keep my email inbox empty, thus turning it into a to-do list of sorts. But because most people have surrendered to their 90k unread email inboxes, doing things via email can be slow and frustrating.

Then there's the double standard of criticizing AI services while (sometimes within the same breath!) citing Google AI Answers as fact or spending hours and hours building whatever with Claude or Codex or whatever, whose web crawlers continue to descend on the web like ants onto a piece of bread and make everything I used to love using (Reddit, random blogs, this fucking site) increasingly inaccessible.