10 Reasons Why

20 Signs That You Might Be Spending Too Much Time on Social Media – Volume 1

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Note: This is the “Pinterest” version, but the shocking obsessions and degradations essentially apply to all platforms. More to follow.

1. You no longer remember the names of your children. Or if you even have any.

2. The last time you looked at the television, “Friends” was still in prime time.

3. You would rather be on Pinterest than pick up the dry-cleaning, let the dog out, get the clothes out of the dryer, show up at work, have sex, pay bills, or eat things containing chocolate. (That last one is a sure sign that the devil has spoken to you. When you ignore the luscious allure of the cocoa bean, you have fallen from grace.)

4. On Sunday mornings, you attack the paper boy at 5:45am so you can read the ad circulars first and get some pins up about new stuff before your friends do. He’s suing, but you don’t care. You’re on a mission and nobody has time for his petulant whining just because he might be bleeding a little bit.

5. You are very confused when you can’t find the “Pin It” button in those circulars, confounded as you move your mouse-finger over the photo of too-cute strappy sandals and no options pop up so you can share your discovery. No wonder nobody reads those old-school newspapers anymore. They need to come with their own wi-fi connection or just give up.

6. You have a low opinion of people with only one or two boards. You find this lazy and irresponsible, ignoring the fact that the dog still needs to go out and some idiot is on the front porch bellowing about foreclosure and repossession.

7. You discover that you have three boards of your own that you don’t remember creating, and you can’t tell by the titles what you meant to do with the boards. (Possible products of a drinking binge, improperly balanced medication, or just old age. Who knows.) But you like the stuff you pinned in them even if you don’t understand the grouping, so you shove said groupings down to the bottom of your board page and hope you have a revelation about their births before anyone asks why you have a board named “This Makes Me Shoot Ping-Pong Balls Out of My Woman Cannon!”

8. You realize that you have pinned the same exact quote on four different boards, with slight color variations being the only difference. (Oh, and one of them has a really sweet panda bear that caught your eye.) It takes a full week for you to decide which three of them to delete, because the pins are your children now and it’s hard to pick one as your favorite and let the other children have crappy, abandoned lives.

9. You get really angry with people who use their own captions with YOUR pins, because you worked super hard on that original, witty caption and all they came up with is “Bunnies are SO cute!”, and there’s not even a bunny in the pin. This is why nations go to war.

10. But when their new caption is actually funnier and better, you still get mad, because it feels like they are getting a little uppity and pointing out to the world that you have sucky writing skills. This is why wars last so long, because people can’t decide what really makes them happy.

11. You constantly refresh the screen just to see if your “Re-Pin” and “Like” stats go up. And you seek therapy if they don’t. (You: “Doctor, I just don’t understand why people don’t click on me!” Doctor: “You need to go back home and not come see me again until you have a real issue. That’ll be 175 bucks. Please pay at the front desk and then delete me out of your contact list.”

12. You purposely pin not-so-interesting things just to keep your name at the top of the feed, because if you roll too far down the feed people will forget that you exist, leading to misery and loneliness, at least in your own mind. In reality, nothing actually changes and you still have to pay property taxes.

13. There’s really no reason to have two Ryan Reynolds boards, one “with shirt” and one “without shirt”. (And those of you with stalker tendencies will have a third board: “Skanks that better keep their hands off my man because I’m just waiting for him to figure out that he needs me and we can get married and I won’t have to work and I can pin all day”.)

14. You delete older pins from back in the day when you clearly didn’t know what you were doing and you pinned stupid crap about nothing. This is the same thing as hiding your high-school yearbooks from your current lover. The past is the past, you have better outfits now.

15. You actually have a board named “I’ll Figure This One Out Later, Gotta Keep Moving”.

16. You keep wondering when the Pinterest People are going to start handing out awards for content and design. After all, you have amassed the largest collection of cats playing with empty boxes that the world has ever seen. That alone is worth a merit badge. And where are they going to hold the national Pinterest Convention? (“Pint-Con?”) We need to start pinning hotel options for that mess. These thoughts keep you awake at night and keep potential suitors from your door.

17. You consider gaining another follower to be far more important than Moses doing that boring Red Sea thing. Yes, he had followers as well, but that was way before social media and there wasn’t much to do for entertainment, so it was very easy for him to get the best traffic stats, especially since he could control water and GPS his way out of Egypt. It’s much more challenging these days to get indexed by Google.

18. You carefully review the boards of those people that have followed you, before daring to follow them. Can’t have no scrubs jacking up your feed with crap. You need the good stuff coming down the pipe that will shine a glowing light on you and your accomplishments, reflected glory that really doesn’t involve you. (In a certain political party, this is known as “how to run for President”.)

19. You lie to people about how much time you spend on Pinterest. “I was working on a spreadsheet on how to feed the homeless” is code for “I spent the entire weekend pinning 217 images of kumquats”.

20. You actually have a Pinterest tramp-stamp. And you’re not ashamed.

 

(Originally published in “The Sound and the Fury” on 01/27/12. Revised and updated with extra flair for this post. For the record, Ryan Reynolds still remains board-worthy, preferably sans shirt. And for the curious, the Philly Cream Cheese with Spanish olives and red bell pepper is extraordinary, should you have a hankering for those ingredients. Word.)

 

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53 replies »

  1. Dear Mr. Lageose,
    I am writing to you today in order to formally and unequivocally inform you that I very much enjoyed reading this post.
    It was extremely humorous, interspersed with flecks of with, realtability and charm.
    On another occasion in may have been moved to perhaps add something of my own here, with the purpose of creating more mirth and jest in the same vein as this fabulous post. However, I fear that this would cause confusion as I may not quite acquire the correct tone and possibly offend your delicate sensibilities.
    I shall therefore merely reiterate that this was, as the youth say, funny.

    Liked by 1 person

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  3. P.S it’s early and I am aware of the typos above but my toddler managed to somehow push send before I had finished. Which is funny and in no way meant to offend you.

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    • I did really enjoy Pinterest at one point, but that was back in the day when it was “invitation only”, where a team member had to send you an invite. I don’t mean that in a snooty way; it’s just that it was a much smaller crowd and it was a much more friendly, sharing environment with folks really trying to be creative…

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  5. Enter the Absinthe soaked friend in France. I actually don’t understand Pinterest. I have it. And I pin ideas for real decoration projects, real writing and real wardrobe and food cravings (huge board). But they are all private. I honestly don’t want to share. Is this wrong of me? Should I go and drown delicately in the delightful dolphin lined fountain that I can hear from my terrace. Should I consider myself ostracized and just go back to sipping coffee, snorting and bewildering the French? Should I beat myself sore with a stale baguette? I’m SUCH a failure 🙄

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  10. I have a dear neighbor who was disgusted with the bigger social media site, Book of Face (for the moment, I hear FB is losing it’s street cred ((internet superhighway is the ‘street’) with the young folks). She took up with Pinterest on the rebound and periodically asks me to view something on it…and is left frustrated, because, like some of the ladies above, I don’t ‘get’ Pinterest and I really don’t like using it. It’s not old fart user friendly…not easy to figure out and how the hell does one log off the freakin’ thing besides? It’s like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole without the good drugs to make things seem easier. I have one board (que horroreur!) with a few dusty old pictures of Toro (who died in 2015) and Huny doing cute dog things…but I’ll never be addicted to pinning stuff. I mean what is this anyway? High School? Wherein the ‘cool’ crowd got pinned… Sheesh.. and I admit to laughing hysterically at “woman cannon”. Oh dear Lord. I may never recover from that one….. BWAHAHHAHAHAH! (oh great. your post caused me to scare Huny. This is going to cost me .. )

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    • I did hesitate briefly with the “woman cannon” bit, but then I thought, meh, Embeecee will like it, so screw it. You have officially become one of the parameters I use for quality and creative control…. 😉

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  11. Pingback: Unseasonable – Reasons why the holidays SUCK | sparksfromacombustiblemind

  12. Thank you for the Philly recommend, I salivated a little upon viewing it and now won’t rest until I get some.
    The last few times I’ve been on Pinterest, there were so many “promoted” posts and ads, it turned me. I haven’t been back since.
    That being said, I remember well the thrill I got when one of my pins was taking off big time. It was from my “bathroom ideas” board (yeah, I wasn’t the most creative with my board names). Every day I was getting notifications of people repinning, it was great!
    Then I had an epiphany. They were liking my pin, not my bathroom. My bathroom wasn’t Pinterest worthy. Worse yet, I was spending so much time on Pinterest, I wasn’t doing any of the “ideas” I was pinning. So I took a break from Pinterest and we redid our bathroom to look like the pin. That was about three years ago and I still love it.
    What a difference a week away from social media makes! 😉

    Liked by 1 person

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    • I shared the excitement with the “pin taking off” angle, with some of my little ditties getting hundreds of nods and rep-pins. But that was back when the community was comparatively much smaller and folks had time to discover your pins. The excitement fizzled once millions had joined and it got to the point where your new post was completely gone out of the main feed within seconds. And apparently my bail-out happened before the promoted posts and ads, because I don’t even remember that.

      Now, back to the cream cheese. It really is delish, with a nice but not overwhelming Mediterranean/Middle-Eastern taste. I’ve been experimenting and my fave option right now is making a “modified muffaletta”, using the cream cheese instead of taking the time to make a fresh olive mix. Toast it a little bit and we have yummy! (Assuming you like muffalettas, that is…)

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  13. Well, i’m on pinterest, and i have quite a few boards, but thankfully, i’m nowhere near this degree of debached pinterestedness. Lol. No mailmen or paperboys have been injured in my pursuit of pins. And chocolate will ALWAYS come before pinterest, facebook, or any other such social network doings. Notice i didn’t mention the wordpress. 😉

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    • And that’s the proper way to go about it, with healthy moderation and chaste behavior. The issue comes when folks pin every single thing they run across on the internet. My sister used to be one of them, until we staged an intervention, with accusations and weeping and broken crockery. But she’s fine now… 😉

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      • So glad she’s fine. Sometimes i think i have a lot of boards, (and i do,) but i see some peoples’ Pinterestedness, and i think, holy crap! It is addictive though, so i can certainly understand it. I’m addictedto my smartphone itself. I check it, click it and scroll like a madwoman. It’s really a good thing i never started smoking…

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    • Thanks, Lynne! I must confess that I was a bit of a social media tramp at one point, but I have calmed down greatly over the years. And all these new social-media applications that have come out recently? I have no idea what those are for… 😉

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    • Seriously, where do these folks find the time? I do WordPress mainly, with a little bit of Twitter and Facebook here and there. Of course, as I’ve confessed in a few of the comments above, I used to be all over these platforms. I don’t know where I found the patience or the strength, but I clearly don’t have it now…

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  20. I was enjoying Pinterest for awhile, and have a bunch of boards with all kinds of things that I never looked at again. Then I read a horror story of someone being sued big time for pinning something without permission. I thought that’s what it was for, pinning stuff other people pinned. Anyway, I don’t go there anymore, and my boards just sit there. They get re-pinned all the time, though.

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    • I enjoyed it as well for about a year or so, so there’s plenty of my “old stuff” over there. But now it’s all dusty and neglected. And I do remember a big blow-up at one point about copyright issues, but nothing ever happened to me or my friends, so I don’t know how big of a deal that really was. All I know is that I still get emails that someone has re-pinned, but I rarely even check anymore to see which one it was…

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  21. Once again, please replace Ryan Reynolds with “The Rock” and we’re a go. Also, I am a little miffed you mentioned by board labeled “This Makes Me Shoot Ping-Pong Balls Out of My Woman Cannon!” I thought this board was secret and couldn’t be seen by other people.

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  22. I pinned, but then I consider I deleted all of them, and my chronicle (actually I’m not indisputable – may ingest to baulk that out) 🙂 It’s really a honorable affair i never started smoke…

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