Many years ago, I worked as a technical support agent at a SaaS firm. Onboarding was a brief, intense series of demonstrations, lectures, and exams covering concepts of accounting, real estate, and databases. After three weeks of hand-holding, we shadowed our senior colleagues and worked our way up to taking live calls.
It was stressful, but fun. A feeling of intellectual overwhelm was constant, and teammates often joked about “drinking from the firehose”, which is to say getting blasted in the face by the fire hydrant of knowledge and sputtering like a buffoon. As I recall, it took months for me to get on my feet, and even longer to feel like I could really help somebody. Getting there felt great.
This is similar to how I feel as a social media user in 2025. The flow of news and opinions is as forceful as it is endless, and the consensus seems to be that everything is bad. There’s plenty of evidence for that position. We’re witnessing the death gasp of democracy in real-time. The cadence is deliberate, too. If you present people with a torrent of anxiety and terror, the assumption seems to be, they’ll be too frazzled to resist.
I feel too frazzled to resist. Social media is great when you want cat pictures or news about discounted video games. Social media is awful when you can’t scroll at all without learning of some new way in which our civil liberties are under assault. The rising interest rates. Elon Musk’s ruthless siege against the federal government. How many reels of baby raccoons drown out all that noise? (And don’t get me wrong – I love baby raccoons.)
I don’t have answers right now. Intuitively, I think it helps to pay attention to what I’m consuming on the Internet. There’s no shortage of anxiety, fear, and terror on the Internet, and you don’t have to look hard to find it. So, where’s the midpoint? How can you stay connected without being consumed?