I was lost in the cesspit of social media. Then Jane Austen showed me the way out
Why spend every evening fighting trolls on X when you could be working your way through the greats of literature? No more online rage, recriminations, doom-scrolling …
For about as long as I’ve been aware of my own mortality, I’ve had a mental list of books I should get round to reading. You know the sort of thing: various Russians meditating on free will and religion, something by a Brontë sister, maybe Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire if I ever manage to retire. And yes, Austen, obviously Austen, a writer my mum constantly encouraged me to read when she was still chatting to me every week, and one I spent a shameful decade or so failing to get into after she died.
More recently, I’ve had the same struggles as everyone else with the cesspitisation of social media. On a long enough timeline, pretty much every platform goes the same way: a quick nudge of the sliders to encourage more engagement, a few bad actors doing a bit of bot-farming and the whole thing collapses in on itself. I’m not sure precisely how many hours I’ve spent carefully composing replies to obvious trolls or worrying about life because I’m being force-fed the worst people in the world’s opinions, but it’s definitely too many. Worse, nothing seemed to keep me completely away: I could set myself time limits, install blockers, delete my accounts, but somehow I would keep sneaking back, spending the last 20 minutes of every evening despairing about the state of the world.
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