Life Interrupted

I don’t mean to trivialize the plight of soldiers with the real thing, but I believe that after many years of carrying a pager (and later a smart phone qua pager) I have developed something akin to PTSD. I seem to have an excessive fright/flight response to the phone ringing, to sudden loud noises, and, bizarrely, to sudden silences. I retired from medicine two years ago. I would have expected my quasi-PTSD to have diminished by now. Maybe it is a teensy bit better, but it’s not gone.

After I retired I latched onto social media, thinking it would help fill the void which I expected would inevitably appear when transitioning from the super-busy life of a private practice cardiologist to the laid-back life of a retiree. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ with a bit of Reddit, Tumblr, and Goodreads thrown into the mix. Of the bunch, I have stuck with Twitter most consistently. I like the fact that I can follow people without having to be “friends” with them, or them with me. I like its ephemeral nature. I can dip in and out of the twitter stream, ignoring it for long stretches without the kind of guilt that occurs when I ignore my friends’ posts on Facebook. And the requirement for terseness produces: terseness — something lacking from most social media. I think Twitter’s planned abandonment of the 140 character per tweet limit is a mistake. Like any other rigid art form, whether sonata-allegro form in music, or dactylic hexameter in poetry, the very rigidity of the format forces creativity. Or not. Four letter words, bigotry, hatred, and racism also seem to fit easily into the Twitter form factor.

But I digress.

Part and parcel with social media accounts came push notifications. Someone would post something on Facebook. My phone would beep. A notification would appear that someone had posted something on Facebook. The phone would beep again. There was now an email saying that someone had posted something on Facebook. Multiply this by half a dozen social media accounts and you get a phone that is beeping as much as my old beeper used to beep on a Monday night in July when the moon was full. It was kicking my PTSD back into high gear.

It seems that the notification settings for my social media apps were by default intended to insure that, no matter how un-earthshaking a post was, I would be notified come Hell or high water, by telegram if necessary if all else failed. It is a testament to how lazy I am that it actually took me about a year and a half to do something about this situation. Good grief, I was even getting notifications whenever I received an email. Actually, if I ever went a day without receiving an email, that would be something I’d want to be notified about.

So finally I turned off all the push notifications I could. Like unsubscribing from email mailing lists, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. The master notification switches are buried deeply in sub-sub-menus within the Settings of each app. But using my sophisticated computer know-how along with a lot of “how do I turn off notifications in such and such app?” Google searches, I was able to accomplish my goal.

The cyber-silence is deafening. And it’s a good kind of deafness.

I do feel some guilt when I occasionally look at Facebook and see all my friends’ posts that I have not “liked.” I hope they understand that on Facebook not “liking” a post is not the same as not liking a post. Sometimes it’s a bit awkward to tune into Twitter to find that you have been ignoring a direct message that someone sent you three days ago. But overall I find that I can focus better on tasks without the constant nattering interruptions from social media.

I still start muttering incoherent potassium replacement orders when the phone rings in the middle of the night, but it is getting better.