Kij Johnson

27 Nov 2025

Most of what I do here is write very short poems, but I am otherwise a writer of fantasy, SF, and experimental fiction, as well as roleplaying games. I also teach workshops on novel structure every summer and occasional other workshops.

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I live! Life in the physical world is cool: friends, art classes, embroidery projects. Here's a newsletter:

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5 Sept

Yes, yes it can.

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5 Sept

So, this is worth it for me. I’m still learning things about myself and how I interact with my world. I’m doing a bunch of new things because I have time--but also energy. So, on to the next month! My online goal for the next month is to get back to my newsletter and Patreon. And see friends. 10/

I said my social life has gotten a lot more interesting, and that’s true. There’s more f2f interaction than there used to be, but I also text and call more. And none of the things we share in any of these environments are things we’d share in social media, for a lot of reasons. 9/

I’m not talking about literature as an escape (which is a valid use), I’m talking about reading to fill the hours the internet used to fill. Preferable—for me—is to read when I want to read, not when I can’t think of anything else to do. I spend a lot of time doing things now. 8/

I’ve freed up a lot of time by not killing it with a stick via the internet. This led me to a weird discovery I’d never have made otherwise: that it’s just as possible to kill time by reading obsessively. In my case, it was 1930s crime novels--put one down and pick up the next. 7/

I do research, buy things, and check facts online. I play a couple of low-key casual games that only come out once a day. I use the internet more for Zoom, Whereby, and Discord calls and chats than anything else. 6/

I don't check art, photography, or poetry groups. I hate this part, but it’s the cost of not doing the rest of it. Sites are designed to lead me away from minimalist photography and haiku and toward whatever they want from me. I can’t have the one without the other, so I choose neither, sadly. 5/

I’m also not scrolling news or commentary. I get news through two sites with tight focus that distinguish between relevant and/or actionable news, and chatter I can’t do anything about except feel angry and depressed. I miss things in the vacuum, but otherwise I miss things in the howling gale. 4/

I miss happenings in friends’ lives. But I can’t be all the different places they call home--I'd miss something somewhere. The social media world is too fractured to reliably find everyone anywhere. In any case, lots of the real events are not being shared this way any more. 3/

I do miss people, but the algorithms weren’t showing me any actual people I know or even had friended--a year ago I spent an evening scorekeeping on FB, and found out that only 3% of what I was being shown was anything or anyone I’d friended—how did I think that was okay? 2/

Three-month checkin for my social-media-and-scrolling fast: At two months, I still scrolled automatically, but yesterday I went to FB for freecycle, and I didn’t look at anything, just found the page, posted the ad, and came back later to remove it, without interacting with any other posts. 1/

So lately, I started lifting weights, made some potential friends, read books, watched shows while working on crewel, talked to friends on the phone or zoom or in person, visited folks, worked hard in therapy. I didn't write much, and some medical things made me unproductive. On to the next month!

11. Yes, the internet really is broken and worse than it was. And it’s not going to be what it was, and it’s not going to get better because it used to be better. Improvement will not happen because we fall down online rabbit holes and howl at the moon. 7/

The ability to escape our lives is essential, especially these days—but when we wear the tread off our escape strategies from overuse, we’re left with depression, despair, and desperation. 6/

The physiologies of reading and online activity are similar: fixed focal length and limited eye movement, limited hand and arm movement, and everything else is usually inert. It’s worse if you read ebooks. This is also true of even the best movies and shows. 5/

9. One way I started filling free time was reading more books. Reading a book a day is better than spending the same time online, but only marginally so. You can end up with the same mental/emotional fatigue and data overload, though it’s at least unified. 4/

8. I don’t know what to do with the time & emotional energy freed by getting off SM and attendant activity—followup, fact-checking, clicking links, etc. 10-35 hours a week (depending on the week). This is a lot of time to fill, especially since our ability to take action has atrophied.

7. After two months, the addiction is still there. Returning to report, I accidentally went to my home page where posts go, instead of my profile. I started reading and scrolling before I knew I was doing it. It wasn’t even, I wonder how everyone is these days? It was an automatic response. 2/

The fact that I am five days late to follow up on life without social media here probably says whatever needs to be said. Everything I said a month ago is still true, but two months in, here what’s been added: 1/

6. My thinking slowed way down, in a good way. Because I wasn't always in an arousal state (not the sexy kind), the cogs in my brain started to dig in and turn larger things over. // I'm not done with this experiment. I will be back August 5. If you want me, write my email. It's findable. 5/

5. I didn't notice a change in my ability to get writing done, but then I also started working out at the gym, I was GoH at a conference in DC (MythMooth XIII), I wrote some RB stuff for Kobold, & I led my advanced workshop. Maybe that's the point, because I did all those things without effort. 4/

4. When I stepped away from the online community, I suddenly and almost instantly started to meet people who are becoming f2f friends. I still don't understand this, except insofar as spending more time out in the world face to face increases the odds of meeting someone you might like. 3/

3. When I stopped spending time on SM, I stopped doomscrolling the news. The slight possibility of a human contact was the sugar water that lured me: without that, the intermittent conditioning of 15% truths in a solution of bile and fear has been easier to ignore. 2/

A month ago, I took a one-month leave from SM, including BlueSky. I'm here to report. Things I found out: 1. I miss writing haiku and senryu for an audience. 2. I don't miss the primal-scream echo chamber SM deteriorates into. We have reasons to howl but screaming doesn't make me fight harder. 1/

5 June

Which is why I'm taking a break from all social media. I need to focus on some other things. I'll continue to write haiku, and I expect I'll go back to posting it when I return. Meanwhile, I have a website, Patreon, and a newsletter, with links in my info. I'll check in 5 July.