There is a tendency for me to not publish many of the photos I take. A high proportion of them end up in the bin, and many others just sit doing nothing in my Lightroom catalogue. I constantly compare the results of my photos to other people that I see online and the conclusion more often than not is that mine or boring and don’t offer anything. With my break away from seeing other peoples work I made the decision to show the boring photos I took the other day just because I can.
A short trip to Nottingham shopping and three images taken.
Comparison is the theft of all joy right.
Matt Birchler in his semi response to the latest Vergecast on Apple:
What this means in practice is that the thing all card issuers want is transaction counts and volumes to be as high as possible. You don’t do that by locking your card to your own wallet, you do it by making it an easy choice for consumers to pick you.
Of course, Matt is correct. If anyone knows about payment matters, it’s Matt. However, I think this is only part of the story. My Apple Wallet contains more than payment cards, and I foresee this becoming an issue when (rather than if) the EU forces Apple to open things up.
Currently, my Apple Wallet holds a variety of items that I can access with a tap: a few loyalty cards, my Arsenal Football tickets (they are by far the greatest team the world has ever seen), and also train tickets for my upcoming trip to London. There’s no hassle with different apps, printing things out, or searching through emails to find what I need; it’s all there, ready for me. This utility, I envision, will be decimated the moment everyone can produce a ‘wallet’ for my iPhone.
Suddenly, I’ll need an LNER wallet to access my train tickets, a separate app for all my loyalty cards, and my Arsenal tickets will return to the app from which they came. The simple reason is that everyone wants you in their app. As Matt pointed out in his post, their ‘wallet’ becomes a ‘halo’ product. Not one that directly generates income, although it could, but one that markets to you every time you open the app to retrieve your tickets or cards. We know this because you only have to look at Android as an example.
Every time I want to test a new Samsung phone, I endure the same frustrating experience. My bank, Barclays, doesn’t support Samsung Pay. They were one of the last to add Apple Pay, and for a long time didn’t support anything else. They tried instead to push their own payment app on Android users with a terrible experience. The great thing about Android is that I can download Google Pay and use that instead, but it doesn’t work as seamlessly as the default app. Samsung also works very hard not to tell me I can use another payment app, and as a result, most users go without.
This is because Samsung doesn’t want to inform users they can switch. They want to be able to sell you things in the wallet app: a new phone, perhaps a card that will work with Samsung Pay, or some accessories. By getting users into your app, you can generate revenue, and that’s important to all parties involved in the process. I think it’s true that most retailers won’t care, but many service providers will; they will want to cut out the 0.15% that Apple receives, and also sell you all their other wares while they’re at it.
I often catch myself in a relentless loop of introspection, pondering over the endless whys of my thoughts and actions. This internal dialogue leads me down a path where I’m labeled by some as overly anxious or neurotic, fixated on the trivial. Yet, there are those who share this penchant for self-questioning, albeit more quietly, to avoid seeming eccentric.
This habit of constant reflection, I’ve realised, is not just a quirk but a pathway to deeper self-understanding. It aligns with the Stoic philosophy I admire, particularly Socrates' idea that “An unexamined life is not worth living.” By scrutinising my motives and actions, I strive to ensure they are in harmony with my values and beliefs, not merely a passive existence.
However, life in 2024 complicates this introspection with its demand for an online presence. Without real-life friends and unable to disconnect from social media, I’m caught in a dual struggle. This digital entanglement, a reflection of my inability to sever ties with social media, remains a challenge despite numerous attempts to overcome it.
The advice I often encounter is to simply “not worry about it” yet this feels dismissive of the underlying issues. It overlooks the complexity of seeking understanding and personal growth in a world where online and offline lives are increasingly intertwined. This journey is about more than just worrying; it’s about navigating the nuances of solitude and connection in the digital age, striving for a life that truly reflects who I am.
It has been approximately three days since I began craving a step back from the web, choosing to remove Mastodon from my life to concentrate on being more present in the world and working more deeply than I have in a long time. I won’t go into the reasons, but it is safe to say the benefits are already starting to show themselves, as well as the downsides.
Curiously, this isn’t the first time I have experienced this strange phenomenon. Back in 2022, when I first deactivated Twitter and before I adopted Mastodon, I went through a stage of picking up my phone with nothing to do with it, only to place it back down again. I found myself opening new tabs and typing in social.lol before realising there was no need to go there anymore, so I clicked the x a few seconds later. For all the good effects that this has had on me—and they are great—I do feel as isolated as I did back then due to low levels of interaction.
There is no solution to these feelings because there is nothing to solve. There is nothing wrong with being bored, and if it motivates me to do something more constructive instead, then all the better. It just would be nice to be able to use social media without wasting loads of my time on it. An issue that is entirely mine; I can’t even blame the algorithm with Mastodon. I just have a personality that is attracted to that kind of stuff.
Om Malik, with a surprisingly popular, if reductive, take on social media:
If our parents were not around, we saw a lot of movies (on VCRs) or binged on television. When cable came around, it was all MTV all the time. Today, the same kids are on the ‘medium’ of their generation – the Internet and its many forms.
Combined with another post, Om gave a very measured and often cited summation of thoughts on the modern social web. Mainly predicting a coming demise in its appeal, and taking an approach that can only be summarised as “the kids are alright.” In fact, between these two articles, Om falls onto both sides of the social media argument that has recently raised its head again following Jonathan Haidt’s book.
It is worth noting that these posts are from 2023, and opinions could have changed in that time, but Matter surfaced this highlight today, and it seemed very appropriate. This could be my cognitive bias, or it could be the smartphone algorithm tailoring the content to keep me engaged - but, unlike social platforms, there’s no advantage for Matter to keep me engaged with their platform.
This is where the comparison of all the historical things that ‘educated’ kids in the past falls down. You cannot, in good faith, point to radio, television, MTV, films, or your old Super Nintendo as worthy comparisons to spending hours a day on modern social platforms. If you allow me to make a sweeping generalisation, I don’t expect anyone to look back on their childhood wasted on TikTok with the same fondness that many adults look back on their childhood follies now.
There were indeed countless hours wasted on activities in decades gone by, but not many of them (none?) were developed solely to keep you engaged with them to the detriment of the world around you. No doubt, some people wasted an unhealthy amount of time playing games or consuming other passive entertainment in their youth, but nothing compares to today’s epidemic.
There’s a tendency for some to write this off as the latest moral panic. Yet, the level of research that suggests strong links to mental health issues and social media, or the sheer amount of anecdotal evidence pointing to the same idea, is unparalleled. I could point to the research presented in Jordan’s book “The Anxious Generation,” but that has already been dismissed as cherry-picking by people looking to appraise the ideas presented. However, you simply have to make a cursory search for the science, and things become clear.
The lies presented by these platforms to connect people and make the world closer together, combined with the very real benefits of the web, seem to cloud people’s opinions. Yet, you can somewhat understand the pushback. We don’t like admitting that we have lost control and can be manipulated so easily, and it’s fairly easy to trot out users that advocate for the use of social media from their various positive experiences. It can be hard to accept that something that promised so much and ended up having a negative effect on the world has been allowed to happen. The people that built these things designed them from start to finish to disrupt and dominate our minds, and for some people, that is too much to take in.
Yet with all this said, there’s also a certain amount of responsibility we all must take. I am one for downgrading my phone or making myself go without things to curb my usage, but still firmly believe that is it our fault too. The algorithm doesn’t make you do anything you don’t want to, and it’s fairly easy to break free with a little will power.