Was 2020 a once-in-a-century scary election? Social media has her worried about 2024
It’s a new year and I’m praying I’ll survive it with my sanity intact. Never have I been so concerned about my mental health. This is because 2024 is a presidential election year and I know it’s going to be rough.
After the nightmare that was the aftermath of the 2020 election, I confidentially thought that I would never experience something so calamitous and disturbing again. I believed it was a once in a century or two occurrence. Umm, yeah. I think I might have been wrong.
Remember back in 2000 in the Bush/Gore presidential election, when we thought those hanging chads were life changing? Ah, the age of innocence. My current fear is that 2024 will be such a massive crap storm, it will make 2020 look like those hanging chads of yesteryear.
Four years ago I did a lot of due diligence to protect my sanity. I started by no longer interacting on my personal Facebook and Twitter pages. (I know it’s now called X, but when I said buh-bye, it was still Twitter.)
I realized I had to do this because discovering via social media that a significant number of people from your high school graduating class believe in outlandish conspiracy theories can change you. You go down a rabbit hole when trying to figure out what happened in these people’s lives that inspired them to proselytize absurdity with a wild abandon.
Worse is when my close childhood friend, a person I thought I knew well, made it inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. Yeah, my mind is still blown from that.
I’ve basically curated my remaining social media to be what I call “four o’clock in the morning friendly.” That means if I wake up and can’t go back to sleep, I can look at my phone and not get scared senseless about the future of humanity.
For example, I’ve cherry-picked my Instagram account to be full of home design, food, art, travel and fashion. It’s a very soothing place for me to rest my brain. That’s not to say I’m still not up on the news — I just don’t want to be up on it while I’m in bed.
Another thing I’ve done is become 100% OK with blocking people, including family, if reading their diatribes sounds like they’re casting a spell on my very soul. If you’re thinking that’s dramatic, let me just say if you attended one of my family reunions, you’d understand and probably be more than a little scared.
I’ve also had to retrain my brain in terms of how I use my phone. As a person who grew up with a phone in the kitchen attached to a wall with a 6-foot curly cord, learning to not answer my phone when it rings was hard. But now I never answer my phone unless I married you or birthed you. I’ve got my phone and text settings structured so if you’re not a person in my contacts you go into a file that might as well be labeled “never going to respond.”
One of the main reasons I had to do this was all the political robocalls, ads and text pleas for donations. I recently opened that “never going to respond” file and in one 24-hour period, I had 14 texts for political donations that all started with either a chatty opening sentence like a friend was reaching out to me or a desperate plea that “time was running out to make a difference.”
I have no doubt that time is running out for a lot of things but I’m hoping as we enter into 2024, our ability to process rational thoughts based on facts doesn’t become extinct.
Reach Sherry Kuehl at snarkyinthesuburbs@gmail.com, on Facebook at Snarky in the Suburbs, on X at @snarkynsuburbs on Instagram @snarky.in.the.suburbs, and snarkyinthesuburbs.com.