Last week, I decided to read social media only once a day, so I wouldn’t have twenty strangers’ voices in my head while trying to create.

Yesterday, I went one step further. I installed the FB Purity browser extension, and set it to filter out all posts containing the words “Trump,” “Republican,” and “Democrat”.

Presto! The political vitriol that was dominating my news feed is almost entirely gone,and I can read about the cool stuff my friends are doing/seeing/writing again.

Do I feel bad about “sticking my head in the sand” about vitally important information? Don’t I feel the need to stay up on current events?

Nope. Here’s why.

First, the world contains an infinite number of horrible things. Child abuse, environmental destruction, animal cruelty, pharmaceutical greed, excruciating poverty, rape, drug addiction – any of those should provoke outrage in any decent person. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These are all terrible issues; they need to be addressed.

But not by me. Nor, for the most part, do I want to hear about them, unless one of my friends needs me to listen.

This is not because I don’t care. Quite the reverse. I don’t want to hear about them because I do care. I agree that these things are horrible. And hearing about them makes me angry.

Anger is a funny thing. It can be a powerful force for good, or it can be horrendously destructive. If anger prods you to action, you can change the world. But living in a state of continuous outrage – as Facebook encourages you to do – can quickly lead to feeling overwhelmed and helpless. And that can lead to hate.

I spent a lot of time in my twenties volunteering with organizations that worked with sexual abuse, rape, and domestic violence survivors. Every day, I would hear about a different horror. There was the woman whose fiancé had deliberately infected her with AIDS, then abandoned her. Another woman had been sexually abused and beaten by her entire family; when she went to a priest to ask for help, the priest molested her, too. The domestic violence survivor whose husband had battered her until her jaw collapsed and all her teeth fell out. The other survivor whose husband, a doctor, not only broke her bones, but wouldn’t let her use birth control because he enjoyed performing abortions on her.

The outrage I felt – every day – was so intense, so horrifying, that I had to find some way to come to terms with it. Because these atrocities were happening every single day, to thousands of innocent people, and I felt totally helpless in the face of all those stories. It’s one thing to know intellectually that terrible things happen; it’s another to look into the eyes of someone who has been beaten, abused, or raped, and hear her tell the story of her assault. It becomes personal, visceral.

I struggled hard with this. How do you hear this over and over without dying of outrage? How can you hear all these stories of cruelty, torture, and abuse without starting to hate?

Then one of my fellow volunteers told me the starfish story:

A man was walking along a beach, picking up starfish stranded by the tide and flinging them back into the ocean, one by one.

Another beachcomber walked by, and, seeing what the man was doing, said, “Why are you doing that? There are thousands of starfish washed up on this beach, and thousands more will wash up in the next tide! You’ll never make any difference!”

The man stopped and thought for a moment. Then he reached down, picked up another starfish, and threw it into the ocean.

“Made a difference to that one,” he said.

And that, to me, is the answer to outrage. Surviving outrage requires focusing not on the terrible things you can’t change, but on the positive steps you can take to improve the situation. I can’t stop all domestic violence, but I can tell the woman in front of me that she does not deserve abuse, and that her partner’s violence will almost certainly get worse. And I can connect her to resources. I can make a difference in her life.

But listening to all those horrifying stories without taking positive action doesn’t work. If you do that, you will drown in a sea of outrage. That doesn’t help you, and it doesn’t help the world. The only thing that helps the world is the positive actions you take.

That’s why I’m not interested in reading all the outrage on Facebook. It isn’t that I don’t care about these issues; it’s that I don’t have the time/energy/money to take positive action on them. My volunteer resources right now are entirely devoted to supporting the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. I’m the President of the Board there, which is a great privilege, but also a great responsibility. About half my time/attention is consistently focused on the Museum. So I’m maxed out. Any additional outrage won’t prompt me to positive action; it’s just going to make me feel angry, stressed, and helpless.

No, I don’t want to hear about the latest outrage. Not because I don’t care, but because I do care – but I’m not in a position to change things. The only thing that hearing about the latest outrage will do is make me angry, and further destroy my creative life.

So I’m opting out.

Outrage is great if it prods you to action. But choose your outrage wisely.

When I did my time log a few weeks ago, one of the first things I realized was that I was spending too much time on social media. The first day I logged, I spent nearly three hours on Facebook and Ravelry! So I immediately cut that back, deciding that I would spend less time on the sites, and stop writing long posts and comments there. The next few days I spent only 30-60 minutes on social media sites, mailing lists, etc.

Predictably, my productivity went up. But not by much. Which I found a bit puzzling: I had gotten 2.5 hours back per day – huge! – but I still wasn’t able to get much more done. Why?

XKCD, as usual, has the answer:

The problem with social media – and all social interaction, for that matter – is that the brain processes events by mulling them over throughout the day, thinking through alternative outcomes, what you could have done better, what you should do in the future, and so on. The stronger your feelings about the event, the more time the brain spends processing them. And humans are wired to care – a lot – about what other humans think. As a result, when you interact with another person, that interaction – and that person – stays in your head for minutes, hours, or days, depending on how upsetting the interaction was.

In-person interaction generally doesn’t produce strong emotional responses. That’s because people tend to be politer to someone who is standing in front of them, whose emotional distress is apt to be much more obvious (and may result in their punching you in the nose). A person standing in front of you also probably has friends within your social circle who may get pissed if you upset their friend too much. In other words, infuriating someone in the physical world has consequences, so people tend not to do it.

Online social media (not just Facebook, but other forums such as Ravelry, or mailing lists) doesn’t have that brake. It’s also a continuous conversation. At work, you might go hang out around the water cooler every couple hours on a coffee break. But you don’t go to the water cooler every fifteen minutes (unless you want to be fired, that is). With social media, it’s easy to flick over and check Facebook or your email every fifteen minutes. That doesn’t take more than a couple seconds…but it means that your brain is now processing all those social interactions, and all that new information, all day long. Continuously. And, because people are a lot less polite over the Internet, those social interactions are more likely to be offensive and/or provocative. So they linger longer, and are more disruptive.

So now you’re subconsciously carrying on a conversation with at least ten or twenty people in your head, the entire time you’re awake. And probably at least a few heated arguments. That produces a lot of mental clutter. It makes it hard to focus on other things.

If you’re cleaning the house, no big deal. You don’t need your entire brain for that. But creative work requires concentration and a clear head. Writing, in particular, requires internal silence, because you’re basically talking to an audience. You can’t do that if you have twenty people arguing in your head about something totally irrelevant. (Which is probably the big reason I haven’t been writing many blog posts for the last year!)

So I tried an experiment, and spent a few days reading social media only once a day. Wow! Suddenly I was doing a lot more creative work.

And then I went back to reading social media in snatches through the day. And my productivity tanked again. Surprise! I was right.

I don’t plan to abandon social media, for a variety of reasons. First, I have a professional interest in social media, particularly Facebook and Ravelry; it’s where I expect to “meet” most of my potential students. So I need a social media presence, like it or not.

But there’s more to it than that. Social media exists for a reason: it’s a great way to keep up to date on what your friends are doing, to interact with friends you don’t see every day, and find out about cool stuff from your friends. (I would never have heard about the Kubota exhibit, for example, if a friend in Canada hadn’t mentioned it on Facebook.) Plus, since I no longer have coworkers, it gives me a chance to socialize with interesting and/or like-minded people regularly, and I need some of that interaction. So turning off Facebook or Ravelry would be an overreaction (and stupid).

My compromise (at least for now) is to do social media, but only once a day – after the creative part of my day is over, and well before bedtime, so my brain has a few hours to process whatever comes up before bedtime. (And thus, doesn’t keep me up at night.)

In the same vein, I’ve also stopped fiddling with my phone at night. I used to play a relaxing game or two of Scrabble right before bed, just long enough to break off whatever stupid arguments were still bouncing around my head. That rapidly turned into an hour and a half of reading the New York Times, Facebook, Ravelry, and books about dye chemistry, tomato farming, etc. Which produced more mental clutter that kept me from getting to sleep, meaning I lost even more creative time the next morning.

This is not a rant about the evils of social media; social media provides a lot of great benefits, and I intend to keep using it. But I plan to use it more thoughtfully, so I can get the benefits without having other people’s chatter drowning out my own voice when I want to create.

Sherlock Holmes, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “A Study in Scarlet,” says

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order.

Holmes was talking about learning facts generally. As an eclectic collector of information, and someone who likes mixing unrelated media, I disagree with him there. But in the hours you spend on creative work, I think he’s totally right. Silencing the external chatter, and clearing your mind of everything but the mental tools that foster your creativity, will make you much more joyful and productive in your quest to create.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’ll keep you posted on the results.