Any public figure will tell you, you shouldn’t read any of the criticisms or the bad press about you…and you definitely shouldn’t try to respond to all of them. It will cripple you. You’ll never get anything done. And it will only make things worse.
Every leader, every creative, every maker and builder and doer, only has a finite amount of energy. How will they spend it? Fighting battles with haters…or making good stuff?
Not every parent is a public figure, but each of us are constrained by the same amount of finite energy. And it could be argued that in a world of social media, we do have a presence on platforms with the potential to expose us to endless amounts of people who disagree or dislike us.
The question is: Are you going to get bogged down by this or ignore it? Because every pointless argument you get into, every comment you reply to, every hot take you feel inclined to rate is taking you from something else–namely, your children. It’s like that famous cartoon from xkcd, “Are you coming to bed?” a voice asks. “I can’t, this is important,” they reply, furiously typing on a computer. “Someone is wrong on the internet.”
Your kid wants to play, but apparently duty calls. You have to tell this total stranger why Tom Brady is overrated. You have to clap back to another MAGA kook. You have to see how many likes (or how few) your latest post did.
Meanwhile, you don’t see that your pocket is being picked–that you’ve been conned. The only beneficiary…it’s the platform and their advertisers! You can’t see that you, yourself, are stealing that time from your family–time you will never get back–in large part because they don’t want you to see and, if you’re being honest with yourself, you don’t want to see it either.
Why not? And for what? So you can shout into the void in peace. So you can piss into the digital wind. So you can feel great for a microsecond and then feel awful for the rest of the afternoon, or until you start the process all over again.
Remember: the cycle never stops. So you have to stop instead.
