It's another phone call

Running a half marathon, living life for the 'gram and AI thoughts.

I don’t have the capacity or direction to write about one single topic today, so here’s a phone call issue. I call it a ‘phone call’ because it’s inspired by blindboyboatclub’s ‘phone call’ podcast episodes where he explores what’s on his mind without any clear initial structure— it’s like I rang you for a catch-up.

I’ll cover a few topics that have been floating around in my mind.

Edinburgh Half Marathon

Last weekend saw the hottest May weather on record, so it was ideal timing for me and Daire O S to take on the half marathon in Edinburgh. All things considered, I am pleased with how it went. I took two minutes off my personal best, but that wasn’t the real victory.

Last year, I wrote about how I went into the same race on less than three hours of sleep (plus recovering from sciatica and a cold).

The hardest race of my life

A lot of what I wrote still rings true now. Last year, I was burnt out, and I’m probably burnt out again now (I did just co-run a conference). I specifically focused on my fear of regressing and how I was terrified I was going back to a place where my anxiety would control my life.

Society wants us to believe that every struggle is something you can overcome. Like fixing a broken leg. But broken legs don’t ever really go back to exactly how they were before, do they? The bone might fuse back together, but there might always be a slight weakness in that area.

About ten years ago, my anxiety was so bad that if I had a panic attack somewhere, I would avoid going back there. This made my world very small, as places I once loved (and the modes of transport to get there) quickly became off-limits.

This is what happens when you let anxiety win.

So, crossing the finish line faster this year isn’t really what I’m celebrating… It’s the fact that I signed back up to return to a scenario where I’d felt such severe anxiety that all of my gut instincts were screaming at me to avoid forever.

Live like nobody’s watching

Recently, my phone has been showing me memories from the last few years, and what’s interesting to me is how often I am wearing the same outfit as today (or something I’ve worn recently). That’s a long-winded way of saying that I am wearing the same clothes as I wore one, two, three (or more) years ago.

So, why is social media obsessed with telling me that the trend cycle is always moving, and what I wore last year might not be in fashion anymore?

I watch a lot of fashion content on YouTube. Not necessary outfit videos, but fashion industry discourse and how that links to sustainability and shifts in our general culture. I recommend Katie Robinson (refashioned) if you are also interested in such things.

I started thinking about how social media has tricked us into thinking we’re constantly being perceived, and how we style our lives (outfits, holidays, meals, homes) for someone else’s algorithm.

You can now see this in the way people behave in the real world. Back in 2018, I spent a couple of months in Bali, and I was at a popular vegan cafe. I spotted a table of beautiful people all sitting together. Their food arrived, and suddenly they all started climbing on the chairs to take photos at the best angles. The number of dishes far outweighed the number of people. This was a photoshoot. Not a meal.

I looked up the cafe on Instagram later that day and spotted the influencers’ pages. They’d each posted several photos from their lunch, and it was made to look like a lovely catch-up with friends… and yet what I saw was a bunch of kids on their phones and not interacting beyond the lens.

Since then, this behaviour has expanded well beyond just influencers. Normal people are making choices about their lives based on what this will look like on Instagram.

But Instagram is not real life. All those moments spent curating your life simply to get a dopamine hit are slowly chipping away at your ability to just enjoy things in the real world.

And if we don’t have the real world. What do we really have left?

“If you don’t engage with AI now, you’ll get left behind.”

I’m seeing this rhetoric from brands all the time, and it’s pretty funny when you think about it. No great developments in human history have required as much persuasion as AI. It’s almost like we don’t really want it… We’re just being told we do.

If AI were really that good, then why is it being pushed so hard?

I’m not anti-AI. I did write about those crappy ChatGPT-generated action figures last year, and my disdain for this activity. But I also wrote about why fear around AI might be holding you back.

Since both of these pieces, Generative AI has become much more commonplace. I see AI-generated posters for local events every single day. I know people who use ChatGPT to write the simplest emails.

The reality is that many, many people are outsourcing their brains to Generative AI tools.

And sure, it saves time. You don’t need to write a full email or LinkedIn post, and you don’t need to log into Canva to make a poster. You don’t need to actually do anything; you just write a prompt and see what comes out.

It goes without saying that this takes away from the actual process of creating something. We’ve already seen brands rebel against this by sharing more behind-the-scenes content that shows their actual process. And, in many cases, this has become a more valuable commodity than the end results.

Also, those using Generative AI for content creation are completely missing the point.

The content they create is not for them.

It’s for the audience.

We’ve all been lured into thinking we are the main characters, forgetting that that LinkedIn post or newsletter or even novel (!) is meant to be consumed by someone else. And AI cannot create for someone else’s enjoyment because it’s essentially a pattern recognition tool, using tokens to place one word after another based on a complex algorithm. It’s not thinking. It’s not feeling. And it can’t make anyone else do that either.

I don’t know about you, but as soon as I see a post online and start to suspect it’s AI, I switch off. If someone can’t be bothered to put in the effort to actually write something, I won’t be putting in the effort to read it.

If you have any thoughts on anything I’ve written about today, please leave me a comment!

Here are some other great Substack pieces I’ve read this week if you’re looking for more long-form stuff.

• Ozempification of modern society has arrived - and it’s very very bad by Eve Simmons

• Maybe we need to stop idly letting everything go to hell... by Nicola Muthurangu-Hall

• Before this was AI, we called it something else by hel on earth

Episode 6 of Emotionally Invested Podcast is out now!

Nicola Muthurangu-Hall and I sat down to chat about age gap relationships in Hollywood. You can listen to it on Substack and Spotify:

Here are some things I enjoyed this week:

📚 Close To Home by Michael Magee - A story of a West Belfast lad who knocks another lad at a house party, and how he struggles to stay above water in a world that’s stacked against him.

📚 Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke - I was avoiding this one as I felt like it was being pushed so hard, it can’t possibly be that good. I gave it and, to be fair, it is a really great read. It’s all about a social media trad wife who finds herself back in time at a traditional pioneer homestead. A good one if you’re in a reading slump.

See you next week!

Ellen x

💌 About this email

I’m Ellen, and I write about mental health for the chronically online. I am a freelance copywriter, strategist and web designer, and I work from home at Content By The Sea. I have two rescue greyhounds, Potter and Harmony, and a human daughter.

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