Published via Ecency

I just deleted twitter from my phone. My reasons were different from most people.

While I don’t love Elon Musk, I don’t particularly hate him. I also haven’t completely given up completely on web2 out of principle because I know most of the world is still there and I’d like to engage with them. But the app was draining a whole lot more than it was providing.

I don’t like to get all emotional and accusatory about how these apps dominate our time or collect our information, thats all just kind of common sense for me and I would like to think practically in terms of how to achieve goals and how to enjoy life more rather than keep pointing out how much things suck.

I have been playing with twitter and youtube for a while now, throwing out lines and seeing what comes back. The goal has always been to be able to earn a living sharing my ideas which I feel are valuable and may be of help to others, and to make a few new friends to bring back to Hive or connect with in real life.

I was doing pretty well actually, getting engagement from around 20-40 people per tweet. I connected to a lot of language learners, which is good! But then Musk came and scared around half of them off, some just left around hype of Mastadon or Threads, some realized they didn’t need short form social media.

And so my 40 likes turned to 2 or 3, usually @kendewitt @nonsowrites @macchiata or @young-boss-karin. Since they are all at Hive and friends on discord and instagram, my time there now feels wasted.

I won’t delete my account and i’ll still share links to projects there but I don’t want to put any more of my energy into “growing my account” over there. It’s not time well spent any more because I already did it once and had to start over.

I realized that if I put any time into web2 it should be instagram because I know those people in real life. And more than that I should make a greater effort in my 3d life and in direct messages.

I feel like I’ve said all this before, and I probably have but it’s really hitting home right now and I am forced to question my place in the world a lot more this time.

Perhaps I was too optimistic about being able to live off my passions freely and too ambitious about reaching more people.

I feel there’s a bitter pill I need to swallow, that I may not be meant to do great things.

I always imagined myself playing a big part in the world, not massive, but enough where I would be recognized (and paid) and have an easier time spreading ideas among like minded people, building a few bridges along the way.

I suppose that will be me, but I feel thet I need to accept that this role can be thankless at times. That’s not to say that no one appreciates me, but with the way our attention is spread thin and the way so many people are struggling now, appreciation doesn’t easily translate into an income or a career.

It’s also easy to take for granted the way others appreciate you when you still feel powerless to influence the world.

That doesn’t mean I am giving up, but I want to double down on my individual relationships and I want to make sure I fully appreciate all the good people in my life, even if it feels like I should be focused more on my own financial stabiltiy and building my name up in order to achieve certain goals.

This feeling like I should spread myself out more and more started because I didn’t have people who understood me. Now I do, and I also feel less needy of people, but the desire to spread out is still strong because I want freedom and I feel more reach will make things easier giving more freedom.

But these past few days I am starting to feel that if I can’t make a difference and build bridges among the people I aready know, I don’t deserve to reach anyone else. I have 1000 friends on facebook for example, many of which I really like! if I can’t convince 50 of them that my work is valuable, then maybe it’s not valubale enough.

It will always be valuable to me and maybe to a small handful of people I am closely aligned with who needed it at that moment, but I feel I have been skipping a step by trying to utilize the internet to make everything easier.

Getting a ton of followers but not building upon the relationships I have already, the ones from my physical life feels….sad.

The reason I haven’t spent as much time on the people in my life already is because meeting new people is really exciting and I feel there are always people out there you can build understanding with. It also feels at times like I don’t have a sufficient amount of support to build anything tangible. I have great people around me but we are all wrapped up in very different things and many of my friends lack the resources to, for example, buy land or start a business, to become patrons of talented artists, or many lack the time to invest energy into a community a community.

I think deep down I want some more allies who check off all boxes, they have compatible dreams, resources to share, something they need help with that I could help them with, something they could help me with, deep understanding, good communication, fun, and willing to explore.

This is not realistic. Everyone has their own role to fill in the world and among their friends. I need to accept that some friends are never going to understand me well but that we can learn from each other, that some are reliable and others are fun and not everyone will be both.

I want to be happy with what I have and make the most of it. I feel like that has been the missing link my entire life. I feel appreciation for people naturaly, but I don’t take the time to really feel it, and perhaps I don’t show them as much as I think I do.

There are many old friends that I definelty haven’t made enough of an effort with. And some people I don’t remind enough.

I’m also a little scared because I associate with very very very different kinds of people and some of them seem to be at odds with one another. The old friends from my home town have been a bit judgemental about my “wild” lifestyle in general so I am scared to share my stories with them. The scientific minded do not always appreciate my spirituality and the spiritual do not always appreciate my sketpicism. The left hates the right and the right hates the left and I know and like people on both sides, radicals and moderates.

But I am in the job of building bridges so I have got to suck it up and deal with potential disappointment. There will surely be succeess too.

I’ve managed to gain a small but meaningful at Hive, and I know a ton of people in my physical life but I haven’t managed to connect these two. I made friends in China and Japan but I have not connected any of these friends with friends from my home town who I have amost completey lost touch with.

I am going to force myself to focus more on these people who have already made their debut in my life instead of seeking out more people.

It feels a little sad to say that because I am a hunter by nature, I seek out new things and always push myself to find new and better ideas and things that were missing from my community. But I don’t think I will lose the ability to hunt, I will just start hunting on the same ground long enough to build a presence there.

I’ve recently made new connections with English, Mandarin and Japanese speakers here who are connected to people outside of my immediate circle but loosely associated with it. If I can’t find support and collaboraters there and here at Hive, I don’t deserve to have my work reach new people or to have a bigger influence.

Up until now imagined myself at the center of my world with circles and tribes scattwred around me. It felt like my job to make relationships with all these groups and to connect them. But I found that my relationship with each group was not strong enough. Now I will visualize this a different way.

Now I will imagine myself surrounded by all people I know. Some are closer and some are more distant but it will be my job to draw them closer to me (not out of a desire for personal benefit, just out of a desire for a stronger and more diverse community). There are already a wide enough variety of people and a large enough number. Then around my circle, there is a circle of their friends and acquaintances around us. When they introduce me to new people those people will move into the “inner circle”.

This sounds like a self-centered view of the world but I don’t think thats a bad thing. We are the center of our experience and to see it any other way would be dishonest. Other people can have different versions of this image with themselves as the center and these different images can still be compatible.

This all sounds pretty mechanical here. I won’t be calculatinf any of this though. I just want to make clear what my mistakes have been and what I’ve learned from them so I can live better moving foreward.

If you want to chat or get to know me better, I am always available on discord. I will be making more of an effort too! I am aways in the Be Awesome/Cross culture/Untangled Knots community chat here
or you can find me on instagram (ipluseverythingand untangled_knots ).

You can find my other work here:

Novels/music/merch/social media/patreon:

https://linktr.ee/selfhelp4trolls

Untangled Knots podcast:
Japanese Upbringing Explained (interview my Japanese student)