Mint chocolate chip ice cream is, in my opinion, the best flavor of ice cream. Maybe that isn’t a popular opinion to hold, or to express. I know lots of people prefer rocky road, or chocolate, or vanilla. But it’s an opinion I hold, and you may, or may not, hold the same opinion. No big deal, right? If I like mint chocolate chip ice cream, I can eat it, and if you don’t, you don’t have to. It is easy to have an opinion, express an opinion, and respect one another’s opinions. That’s what an opinion is…

I found two easy ways to practice what I preach, to stop functioning from overwork to burnout like that crappy old guitar amp.

The real issue that confronts me when I consider the role of social media is the extent to which it may reproduce or facilitate “binary” thinking—“this” or “that”; us and them (my least favorite four-letter word is “they”). It’s hard to say something with nuance and qualification in a tweet. Memes, propaganda, and conspiracy theories do well in this sort of environment because they stimulate our brains in certain sorts of ways that cause instant, unreflective emotional reaction—it takes just a second to share or post something that viscerally stimulates but often hours to properly examine the claims being made. Those willing to engage in the work of carefully and skeptically examining claims, to be “informed and not just opinionated,” are perpetually disadvantaged in this kind of media environment; truth is the first and biggest casualty. That we talk admiringly now about “his truth” or “your truth” or “their truth” and telling, or seeking, “the truth” starts to sound quaint and old-fashioned reflects the kind of world that this media atmosphere has created.

I am wondering aloud whether the technological society we inhabit should be treated like Mithridates treated poison, or if we are just as doomed as the June bug. I could hardly argue that electric light is a bad thing; it’s made the night, and in many cases, the day, a far safer place, and as someone who reads a lot of books it’s hard to imagine my vision would be any good anymore if I read all those hours by candlelight. I feel for the June bug, and after learning more about them, made an effort to scoop them out of the pool, even if, to my chagrin, sometimes I’d find another, or even the same, June bug flailing helplessly in the water minutes later.

There is a reason I tell this story, besides getting something personal off my chest or challenging stereotypes. A lot of this comes down to time and how I used it. Since I quit social media back in November, followed more recently with deleting numerous games and apps from my smartphone, I have noticed many disturbing parallels to when I quit partying in terms of how my life has changed. I think about what my late academic advisor and friend Ben Agger wrote over a decade ago about how smartphones were changing the ways we interacted with each other, how we perceived time, and even our biological rhythms and cycles. He called it iTime, a blurring of boundaries between private and public, of work and leisure, of day and night. It has, consistent with his theories, unfolded as a constant battle for “eyeballs” or attention which has the effect of “dopamining” society, as philosopher Gerald Moore has recently discussed, in which the machinery of profit-making is turned ultimately on hijacking the reward-mechanisms of the human brain via increasingly sophisticated technological interventions (i.e. “screen culture”).

I do not believe. That is a complete sentence. I am not a nihilist. In fact, no one is a nihilist because nihilism doesn’t make sense—to attack, or defend, a viewpoint, you have to have standards of truth (what is), morality (what ought to be), or both—the very things nihilism is defined by rejecting. What I mean is that as soon as I discover a new idea inspires or fascinates me, I set to work trying to figure out how it might be incomplete or wrong.

I am going to start with an unfashionable idea: there is such a thing as truth, and over time, people who are willing to put in the time, effort, and hard work can get closer to it. I don’t care if anyone agrees with me, because if I am right, then the practical consequences of seeking truth (or not) will happen sooner or later regardless. I’m much more interested in why this idea has become unfashionable.