Est. Read Time: 5 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections + Housing.
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SHOWS:
Comedy Store Belly Room (LA). March 28th. more details soon!
Bergamot Comedy Festival (LA). April 1st-5th. more details soon!
Comedy Loft (DC). May 28th. featuring for the great Sam Salem. Sam is one of my famous friends, and he’s hopefully famous enough to sell out this 250-seat space but if not, maybe I can be that famous for him instead.
You live someplace you want me to perform?? Let me know, I’ll be there tomorrow, I never overpromise!
Sternal Journalists!
This week, I was with a decade-old friend at a bar and we were complaining about Instagram and I said, “I’ve actually muted everyone on Instagram, so it’s pretty boring.”
She replied with the same question everyone asks when I tell them this: “Even me?”
Even her. Even my sister. Even my partner. Even you.
This is not because I am sick and tired of everyone in my life and I don’t want to hear their shit anymore. Rather, this is because I am sick and tired of Instagram in my life and I don’t want to hear its shit anymore.
I have a somewhat unique relationship with Instagram, which is to say I am an “artist” trying to “make it,” and pretty much all conventional and unconventional wisdom says you must have some sort of online presence to “break through” the “noise” (quotes added to words I don’t believe in, but do supplicate myself to).
I am also highly addicted to it.
So even though it sucks my times and ruins my days, I do not feel that I can delete and divest entirely.
Therefore, I’m constantly looking for ways to improve my relationship without dooming my prospects, and it finally occurred to me: if I use the mute function, a function meant for people you want to unfollow but don’t want to offend, on everyone I know, then I’m not really muting anyone; I’m just muting Instagram. Before I get into how I muted everyone and what it does, a quick inconvenient truth I always think about:
My grandma was never on the ‘gram.
My grandma was one of the most foundational and important people in my life. I spent multiple days a week at her house growing up, she taught me to love to perform and to be there for friends and, in short, I had a blast any time I was around her.
But then because of that love to perform she instilled in me, I moved to Los Angeles 13 years (barf) ago. And I went away to college for four years before that. She passed away a few years ago, but when she was still around and I was thinking about the distance, I always felt weirdly sad that she wasn’t on social media.
Because I could talk to her on the phone (and I did), but the active, intentional, “make sure there’s enough time for a whole conversation” contact of the telephone made it so I never chatted with her enough. Meanwhile, I was staying in contact with friends from home, ostensibly as far away from me as she was, just by nature of the fact that we were all existing in the gooey net of Gchat, Snapchat, Instagram, and (at a time) Facebook.
And to be clear, some of these are very good friends that I’m glad I’ve stayed in touch with (or in some cases, reconnected with!)
But I could never shake the feeling (and still find it to be fairly true) that the medium is the message when it comes to adult friendships.
Put otherwise, if I had to list the 50 people I would prefer to be most in contact with in my free time and then the 50 people I am actually in contact with in my free time, I guarantee that any discrepancies would not be skewed towards people I’m physically in the closest proximity to, but rather the people whose IG stories I most often respond to and vice versa.
This is a boring way to live!
I don’t want to let the Instagram algorithm dictate who I talk to, but I very much do.
And that is why I finally decided to take the radical approach and just individually mute all 814 of the people I follow.
The Process
This was not easy. I looked to see if Instagram had a “select all” function to batch edit your preferences. It does not. They probably know how many people would opt to do this.
So basically I just started with whoever’s in my feed. It’s a little easier to mute off a story than off a post (it’s just a hold and then two selections for the story versus hitting the three dots and then going through a little string of selections for posts).
For the first couple days, I was spending a few minutes on muting whenever I opened Instagram. It was extremely tedious, but at some points fascinating. Instagram, after all, shows you the people it thinks you most want to see, so once you’ve muted the regulars, people come out of the woodwork (I forgot I met him! I didn’t know I was still following her! Dang, they had a baby!).
After a little while, though, you just want it to end. And for me, it took about a month (a MONTH!), which means I was manually muting about 27 people a day. This surely took hours off my life and now when I log on, I just see a bunch of greyed out stories at the top (legitimately less visually tantalizing than the full color versions) and then whatever the last thing I posted was. See below:
So basically, I see a bunch of boring, dull icons and then a picture that inevitably reminds me that most of what I do on Instagram is very stupid.
This is, in short, wonderful. It has turned Instagram into the publishing machine I feel I need access to without inundating me with addictive, but superficial pieces of information about my friends. But if I want to see what a friend’s been up to, or reach out to them? They’re one search bar away.
Rather than feeding me and definitely guiding who I spend time talking to, I have turned turned Instagram into an absolutely decimated, broken piece of social media which means I actually have a fighting chance to use it to connect with people.
Am I crazy? Does this make sense? Are you gonna join me in the all-mute lifestyle? Lemme know! But for now…
Recommendations!
Luna Luna. Art exhibit. In the 1980’s, artist André Heller enlisted the likes of Basquiat, Keith Haring, Dalí, and others to create a carnival in Germany. It ran for one summer and then all of the rides and pieces were literally lost in storage containers for over three decades. They were recently found and are currently on display in Los Angles, but I assume this will travel (hopefully, nothing will be lost this time). You can’t ride any rides, but it’s still cool.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Television Show. Finished it. Liked it a lot. Have thoughts. Willing to discuss.
Dust in a Baggie. Song. I listen to about fifteen minutes of a Theo Von podcast once a month and I’m glad I tuned in to this one and discovered thirty-one-year-old Billy Strings, who is apparently a well known Bluegrass talent, but I just discovered him and this is a hoot of a song.
The Dark Side of the Internet’s Obsession with Anxiety. Podcast Episode. Found this conversation about how our recent societal openness to mental health struggles has in some ways had a counterintuitive effect of actually worsening mental health struggles in some cases because of our clear focus on it. To be clear, the point is not that we should never have destigmatized mental illness, but rather that we might have to take a more nuanced approach.
That’s all for this week!
Wait, I also saw this today:
What a time to be alive! Make sure not to miss the arrow in the side mirror!
Hope you get through this week with the confidence of whoever was driving that Tesla!
Love,
Julian!
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos (Update: I have gained some paid subscribers since originally writing this bumper and I don’t think it’s had a meaningful impact on typos. Workin’ on it!)
instagram is a hellscape and it's trying to kill us all!!! delete it for a year and write the best standup special in the history of comedy!!!!!
i approve of muting and doing whatever you can to keep social media from consuming your time and creative energy!! the times in my life when i wouldn’t log in for weeks/months were the most productive times of my life! i’d recommend “digital minimalism” by cal newport if you haven’t read it - he writes about some interesting research findings regarding what the brain does when we are “bored.”