I’m teaching summer school in the dead of a desert summer. As in, if you linger outside at midday, you could die. Or at least fry your skin or eggs. There’s a thing about expat life, that if you aren’t on the first plane out, you feel like you’re being tested. Like someone a in post-apocalyptic show but there’s no Rick Grimes to keep you safe. Okay, so, we don’t have to deal with zombies. (Though the vacant looks you’ll get from students may be a sign of things to come). I curb the sense of being abandoned by enjoying the emptying roads, even as I minimize holiday photos taken in Asia.
Facebook, Stephe Marche, tells us, is amplifying our sense of loneliness. And this isn’t the first type of technology we have misused. First it was telephones: if you needed sugar, you wouldn’t have to knock on a series of doors anymore. Then it was cars: Cars took us away from dense urban areas into the suburbs with massive lawns and stretches of silence. We ushered in our descent into isolation as we made our lives easier.
Are humans smart enough to manage the technology we invent? When you read Marche’s trajectory of western development, you might think that we are our own worst enemy.
It doesn’t have to be this way though. Here are 5 ways to control the FOMO (fear of missing out).
1. When you’re with someone, be with them. The whole ‘love the one you’re with’ is good advice because everyone from Gretchen Rubin, happiness expert, to John Cacioppo, loneliness expert, says relationships are key to happiness. This is not the send-me-valentines kind of connection but those who listen to you, make eye contact while you’re telling a story, can come help jump a battery. Cultivate these and you won’t mind who is posting what.
2. Disconnect everyday. Yes, it’s great to go on that 10 day vacation to Greece and resist the urge to post selfies from the beach every second. But if you can do something other than scroll through status updates while in line at the bank, or idling at the red light, you’ll be happier.
3. Don’t believe everything you see. We have become experts at “self-curation” Marche warns. No one ever has a bad day on Facebook. This is why I celebrated my friend’s blog, the one that talks about how hard it is to struggle through cancer as a mother of three small children. If you really want to disrupt the picture perfect simulacra, post something that went wrong. A few days ago, I posted a coffee cup an office cleaner broke and the ensuing notes we exchanged.

4. Phone a friend. When was the last time you called someone to catch up instead of striking up a conversation via WhatsApp or text? Last Saturday I called a friend and she said “What’s up?”
Me: “Nothing, calling to say hi.”
A few seconds later, she asked me again, what was going on.
Me: “I was checking in.”
We stuttered through the rest of the conversation from lack of practice.
What are the other strategies you use to be a sensibly connected person in an over-networked world?

When I was in graduate school, a friend asked me to write for the University newspaper. Having finished my first short story class, I was excited at the possibility of regularly writing. The guy I was seeing at the time, a guy I thought was the one and only, a guy who faded into the background, cringed in disgust when I shared the news that I had been assigned my own column.

“I don’t want people to talk to me about what you write,” he said.

“I’ll do it anonymously,” I soothed.

The paper ran one piece by me under a pseudonym. I wrote about how female college students at the land grant institution in the South shouldn’t worry so much about getting married. Focus on what interest you, I urged. Turned out the editorial staff took themselves as seriously as the staff of the Wall Street Journal. No anonymity for their writers.

“What should I do?” I asked one of my girlfriends.”I want to do it but I made a promise I would quit if they wanted to use my name.”

“You shouldn’t write it,” she advised, deep in the throes of her own romance, one that turned into marriage.

The next week I pulled out. I explained to my contact I couldn’t publish under my name. So much for focusing on what interested me. I was on a long road of self denial, a road that took five of so years to spool me away from him and into the arms of writing.

Fast forward another ten years.

I write a blog post about an injustice in my midst. The situation affected my family but also the children of others. I kept the identities of the perpetrators hidden, though anyone familiar with the context of my ruminations could have sussed out the major players. The powers that be were preying on a group of non-Caucasian, non-native English speakers. As the writer of the bunch, I wanted to use my vantage for good. Or least to sound off. Let’s face it, I’m not Batman, at least not yet.

I shared a draft of the post with the one person who would be most likely to object.

Don’t post that read the unsurprising reply.

When I probed deeper, the warning was people will shun you for telling the truth. This was a more alarming reason than garden variety embarrassment. They took it one step further: people will shun those associated with you. Is that what you really want?

You’ve probably heard variations of this.

Don’t make waves.

No one likes a tattletale.

If you don’t have anything nice to say…

I didn’t post the blog entry.

I wrote this one instead. To ruminate on the irony that a banned writer can also self-censor. To remind myself that all writers have real bodies and relationships that inform our lofty ideals.

To remember that writing can inform, embarrass, endanger, or alert. We need writing or the silence would deafen us all.