Social exodus, nexting, phubbing, screen apnea and more 🗞️

September 8 2023

Sep 10, 2023

I googled ‘how to delete my Twitter account’ shortly before the blue bird turned into X. It was time. The future ‘everything app’ isn’t for me, but like many (perhaps you), I am watching the trainwreck. I admit that this recent spat was particularly entertaining.

Shortly after, I went back for more, this time typing: how to delete my Facebook account. Honestly, they don’t make it easy to quit these platforms. I’d left the big F dormant for the sake of old friendships. It was time, though. Delete, delete.

I couldn’t be off all platforms for long. I’m too curious. Yet I’m spending virtually no time on any of them. So do I feel satisfied with my smaller social media presence?

Well, I was annoyed to abandon my @annvi handle, but I felt smug, you know, and hey, I got a new one, I’m on Bluesky. I don’t get it yet. Give me a minute and I’ll report back. Or if you’re on it, can you look me up? I need help, please.

When I check my social media folder (my iPhone mirrors my neat desktop), it’s looking, well, sparse. Messaging apps don’t count as social, so I’m left with IG (Threads, which seems to be dying a slow death, is still not available in Europe) and Bluesky. I’m never on TikTok except that apparently I should be because now, like YouTube, TikTok is turning into a search engine.

I think that only a single one of my friends has no social media presence. But she does have a LinkedIn account. For she cares about being in contact with others in her business (she’s a journalist with a wide network, she may recognise herself in these lines - hey friend!).

Like her, the only network I engage with several times weekly, if not daily, is LinkedIn. When Bloomberg wrote that 'sorry, LinkedIn is cool now' I laughed. Is Bloomberg an arbiter of cool ? But then I paused. I think they may be right.

Meanwhile, I’m all in on Substack, and I’m not the only one. And I like Artifact but I’m not sure anyone else does. Join me?

Where are you spending your time online these days? Drop me a line and let me know.

This week’s digest compiles articles I’ve enjoyed over the last few weeks. I hope you’ll find them enlightening, entertaining, or both!

Thanks as always for reading me, I appreciate it.

Until next time, have a good one.

Much love,

LOOKING OUT

Quote

‘I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.’
Oscar Wilde

1. HYBRID WORK BLAMED FOR QUIET QUITTING

Remote workers’ connection to company mission and purpose is at a record low, according to a recent Gallup survey reported on by news site Axios. The survey investigates: does physical distance create psychological distance? Is that what’s behind all the quiet quitting?

I wonder: could it be that managers and executives have not been trained to communicate company mission and vision to remote workers because, like everyone else, they’ve just learned as they could, on the go?

Is it possible that these skills should be taught and cultivated and that companies haven’t invested in the training necessary to make that possible? I’ve managed teams and worked remotely for years, it takes effort and dedication to build remote workforce engagement.

Read more about it in this article, and drop me a line to share your thoughts.

2: WELCOME TO THE CLUB

The cool folks at Metalabel, who I regularly report on, have just announced their new release. Continuing their exploration of online/offline peer and community collaboration for greater impact, the Lonely Writers Club is ‘a space where interested people can transform their writing practices, collaborate with others, and create writing labels with people who share similar interests and visions.’

I think I need to join… Read more about it here.

I remember my early days in the press office at Christian Louboutin in London. Don’t go imagining something glamorous, it was a dingy, leaky basement in Knightsbridge.

Back then, the print press was flourishing, brand new titles were launching constantly. I remember attending the InStyle launch, Glamour, Grazia, the excitement behind Another Magazine, and later the Gentlewoman.

Digital has slowly killed the print business, which itself suffered from too much advertising-focused content, so there are fewer and fewer quality print titles around. BUT there are plenty of great writers and stylists making their mark outside of traditional publishing. As the New York Times reports, the new magazine is a newsletter. Read about it here.

(ps. My fave style newsletter is by far Leandra Medine’s Cereal Aisle)

4: WORDS OF THE DAY

The act of paying more attention to your device instead of your partner, colleague, or friends has a word. Phubbed. It’s good. It’s easier to tackle a problem when we have a word for it.

Personally, I have a vivid memory of being phubbed. At work! Ugh. Some colleagues would not only pick up their phones and ignore the conversation happening at the meeting table, but they were mean-girl-style bitching about the people they didn’t like on the team.

Naively, I only picked up the phubbing bit - someone had to point out the bigger problem - which led me to ban phones from my team’s weekly meetings. Are you being phubbed? Or are you a major phubber? Psychology Today calls it ‘relationship mould.’ Read about it here.

In other news, I have a tendency to be a big nexter. I know, it’s a lot of new words today. Nexting stands for our difficulty in being in the moment because of our brain's natural tendency to focus on a yet-to-be-realised future. Like when you are chewing a piece of food and thinking about what you’ll have next? Does that resonate?

Mindfulness tools are a good antidote to that. Read about it here.

LOOKING IN

5: YOU WANT WHAT YOU WANT…

This New York Times guest essay argues that being a ‘good person’ is overrated and explores the joy in being bad and challenging the so-called “shame industrial complex” - when shame is both commodified and weaponised by a society that is increasingly estranged from real life. A very enjoyable read. To my point earlier this week in Looking Forward, I believe that desire is a compass.

6: SCREEN APNEA IS A THING

I was trapped in the dark. Blinds down, chained to my screen, finally dealing with a non-urgent pile of admin I’d left untouched since forever. I chose to get into it in the middle of a mother of a heatwave.

I worked intensely to get it over with. I even used all my best keyboard shortcuts, zipping through the files.

At one point, I noticed: oops. I forgot to breathe.

Have you ever done that?

When I was younger, I thought I was bad at breathing, assuming other people out there knew how to do better than survive on shallow sips of air.

Turns out, I’m not bad. We all are.

I’ve discovered a concept called ‘email or screen apnea’.

Sounds familiar?

As soon as I noticed I was experiencing ‘admin apnea’, I focused on my breath. Damn. Even editing this, I notice I’ve done it again! Breathe.

Thanks to my mindfulness and yoga practice, I know that when we observe the breath, it starts to change. It naturally becomes deeper. I used my skills, tried to relax and let go of the tension with each out breath. Unclench. What an experience.

Stress (including the pressure we put on ourselves) naturally triggers the body to respond to the threat it is experiencing. Admin isn’t technically life-threatening. And yet, staring at our screens triggers all sorts of stress responses.

Lengthening the breath tells our nervous system we are okay. I managed to remember to breathe for the following days. And I’m done! I did it all. But phew. It’s a daily battle. See, meditation can be the key to managing workplace stress. If we only remember to breathe.

Read about it here and discover more about email apnea from Linda Stone, who coined the term here.

I’ve got a new episode on Out of the Clouds, and how this interview came about has a bit of a story.

My guest, the changemaker Etienne Salborn, like me attended the TED conference in Vancouver earlier this year. I had the pleasure to meet Etienne over dinner one night — though, with me fighting tonsillitis and our positions at opposite ends of the table, we didn’t have much chance to speak! Luckily we kept in touch, and what a treat it was to be able to not only talk with, but interview him!

Now to introduce him properly: Etienne is the co-founder of SINA, (the Social Innovation Academy), a talent campus in Uganda. He serves as a lecturer for social entrepreneurship at the Management Center Innsbruck and the ESCP Business School, resource person for the Asian Productivity Organization, and facilitator for the ChangemakerXchange. His expertise and leadership have earned him recognition as an “AACSB Influential Leader 2021” and he was named an Innovation Ecosystem Builder Fellow by MIT D-lab in 2018.

The Berlin-born social entrepreneur has had quite the life journey since taking off for Uganda at age 18 for a volunteering community service (an option to eschew the German military service). In our conversation, he tells me about how he set up his first and then second non-profit organisations after he found his life’s mission: to support the empowerment of marginalised youth in rural Uganda.

We talk about the three pillars of the SINA program, how the community that lives and works together facilitates conflict and feedback within its flat structure, the concept of self-organised ‘freesponsibility’ and more in this unique interview.

Click here to listen. Enjoy!