Alan Jacobs, in a post saying he's done with blogging quotes the following from Buzzfeed:

This is why algorithmic time is so disorienting and why it bends your mind. Everything good, bad, and complicated flows through our phones, and for those not living some hippie Walden trip, we operate inside a technological experience that moves forward and back, and pulls you with it. Using a phone is tied up with the relentless, perpendicular feeling of living through the Trump presidency: the algorithms that are never quite with you in the moment, the imperishable supply of new Instagram stories, the scrolling through what you said six hours ago, the four new texts, the absence of texts, that text from three days ago that has warmed up your entire life, the four versions of the same news alert. You can find yourself wondering why you’re seeing this now — or knowing too well why it is so. You can feel amazing and awful — exult in and be repelled by life — in the space of seconds. The thing you must say, the thing you’ve been waiting for — it’s always there, pulling you back under again and again and again. Who can remember anything anymore?

I'm sad that Jacobs is leaving blogging. His blog is weird and wonderful, frustrating and confusing, challenging in the best sense. I want good challenges to read, to overcome, and with which to be in conversation. (I've challenged myself to stop ending sentences with prepositions in order to understand why such a rule ever existed. I get it now and agree. Challenges are good.)

Much sadder is the Buzzfeed writer's abdication of her responsibility to choose a lifestyle. She labels anyone opposed to that lifestyle as "living some hippie Walden trip." She uses "you" to mean me and loses her argument because I'm not that "you" and ain't ever going to be.

Like Alan Jacobs, I disconnected from Twitter "and the thought of going back...prompts nightmares." I walked away from Facebook wishing I could have burned it down on my way out. These are my choices as to how to live.

The Buzzfeed writer isn't "using a phone," she is choosing to be used by a phone while complaining about it. Narcissus didn't complain while being turned to a flower. Her phone is a well engineered navel but she chooses to relentlessly, hopelessly, and pitifully gaze into it, as if doing otherwise would mark her as a freak.

I say, choose to be a freak.

Screw the mainstream, the social norm, the wisdom of the crowd. Keep a paper planner, play vinyl records, walk instead of driving, leave your phone home on purpose, ignore the news out of Washington, and so on. If the culture dishes out sewage, why choose to eat it?

Instead of that question, she asks, "Who can remember anything anymore?"

I can. I remember a girl smiling at me in fifth grade because I wrote it down in solitude thirty years later. I remembered a tiny shard of that memory and the rest came back over the course of an hour of writing. I freakishly reflected on life. This was twenty-one years ago, before I had a smartphone, back when that Buzzfeed paragraph would have seemed ridiculously dystopian, impossible to believe.

The life she describes is worse than ridiculous. It's insane. It sounds horrible to this Walden hippie, to this freak. I'd rather be either of those things than the "you" she thinks we all must inevitably be.

And damn it, Alan Jacobs. Keep writing your blog.