Just Turn It Off

Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash

Those of my vintage will remember Mikey from the Life cereal advertisement.

In the ad, Mikey’s two older brothers are looking at a new cereal that is “supposed to be good for you” and neither wants to try it. They brainstorm and decide to give it to Mikey to try since “he hates everything.”

Mikey likes it and you can guess the rest.

Ought to be true but unverified fact: the child actors playing Mikey’s brothers in the commercial were his actual brothers.

The ad played endlessly and in our sad little Boomer 1970s lives we had no Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or other tweetable ways to make our existence meaningful so we had to create our own rumors and conspiracy theories just as the good Lord intended, i.e., on the playground.

I think there was a rumor that the actor who played Mikey was killed in Vietnam. No doubt by his own troops for his failure to share his breakfast cereal.

But the one that really stuck was that Mikey died by eating Pop Rocks together with Coca Cola, combining our deep concern for Mikey with the latest taste sensation.

Clearly, anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of candy, sugar and fizzy soda would intuitively know that such a combination could be deadly.

For any readers who are not yet on Medicare, Pop Rocks was a substance that defied the laws of nature and blasted into the 1970’s like the Bee Gees.

Invented accidently by a chemist named William A. Mitchell while trying to make a powder-based soda, Pop Rocks was distributed by General Foods and combined carbon dioxide, sugar, lactose and corn syrup in a manner which bubbled in your mouth to create an “atomic candy.”

Hey, we had no internet! Just I Love Lucy reruns on daytime television! You would turn to disgusting candy too!

Conspiracies and mysteries are all part of human nature and once the rumor got started it spread over every middle school blacktop and sandlot in America.

I doubt if any adult who did not work for General Foods even knew anything about Mikey or Pop Rocks, although General Foods felt the need to start a whole advertising campaign defending the candy’s safety.

Still, we all knew the sad truth.

Our first life lesson. The world could be a dangerous place and even Mikey could not survive all that carbonation.

Don’t worry. The actor who played Mikey, John Gilchrist, actually did not die from eating Pop Rocks and Coca Cola.

Eating Pop Tarts killed him.

Honestly, I miss the before times when a playground rumor could start organically and slowly grab the attention of the nation’s middle schoolers, but I am not a complete Luddite and recognize that there is good and bad with today’s technology, even social media.

But while social media provides the possibility of connection, the way it manipulates us and the wedges it drives between us no longer seem worth the price.

Algorithms and artificial intelligence only add to the toxic mix, although even AI may soon be out of date since Microsoft claims that it has created a new “state of matter” that will allow for quantum computing and even greater technological power.

No, of course I do not know what that even means.

We all know that there are only a few primary states of matter: solid, liquid, gas and Nutella.

But I do know that today the Mikey Pop Rocks rumor would result in General Foods being under investigation, lawsuits flying left and right, Pop Rocks being vilified and banned from Instagram because of corporate malfeasance, while the campaign against Pop Rocks would be kicked off X for promoting a woke agenda.

And then, three weeks later we would have forgotten all about it and be on to the next thing.

The New York Times had a recent article about the overwhelming stress felt by Generation Z to consume more and keep up with the latest fashion trends as “coastal grandmothers (and eclectic grandpas), ballet dancers, indie sleazers and coquettes,” describing social media as “standing in front of a fire hose of fashion and internet fads and cranking open the nozzle, full blast.”

I do not know what that means either, but ease up Gen-Z’s, I am the only coastal grandparent here.

Social media is also filled with all kinds of political (or politically adjacent) vitriol.

Each half of the country thinks the other half is ignorant and dangerous and both may be correct.

The consumption play here is to keep our eyeballs endlessly scrolling.

Based on “Careless People,” the recently released memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Meta executive, it does not sound like the “status-hungry and self-absorbed” leaders of Meta (and presumably other social media companies) care too much about the damage that they cause.

Ms. Wynn-Williams says that “The more power they grasp, the less responsible they become.”

Not terribly surprising and keeping all those dollars flowing explains why the country’s tech leaders all lined up at this year’s inauguration.

There have been numerous books written recently about the “attention crisis.”

I would tell you about it but was not paying attention.

But my best guess is that these books chide social media and other distractions for having diluted our ability to focus.

In a 2014 University of Virginia study, participants were asked to spend up to 15 minutes alone without cell phones, laptops, or books.

No, anything but that!

Some were even given the chance to experience a mild electric shock to help pass the quiet time.

Astoundingly, 67 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women chose the unpleasant shock over no activity at all and being left alone with their own thoughts.

I cannot confirm or deny whether both 93 percent of the men and 93 percent of the women preferred an electric shock to reading this newsletter.

Social media provides us with meaningless distraction fueled by algorithms that suck us into “a chaotic loop of stimulation.”

So, why not turn it off?

We can complain about the tech billionaires all we want but remember that they and their dollars would be lost without one (really two) things.

Our eyeballs.

I am not on any social media and even gave up LinkedIn after I retired.

Okay, it is true that I could not figure out how to brush my teeth without first watching a YouTube video, but why not go to YouTube only when it is needed rather than being caught in a scrolling doom loop?

Just turn it off.

They are our eyeballs and we own them.

Kind of simple. Saves money. Reduces stress. And gives back all of that time.

Enough time to start an organic rumor about the actor who played Mikey.

I thought I heard that he now works for D.O.G.E.