What a Hiatus From Social Media Can Do
by©️Leslye Joy Allen
I have taken brief three to four-day hiatuses from all forms of social and electronic media before and been rejuvenated and recalibrated. I still remember a psychiatrist who openly questioned whether 24 hour news or 24 hour headlines and blurbs online were healthy or whether they really got a message out. That was about 20 years ago.
I have watched stories that trend for days and even weeks. Anything repeated long and often enough can usually be memorized or even absorbed, but whether you understand it intricately or not remains to be seen. Whether you feel anything after a certain point also remains to be seen.
I need not be told that our current sitting president is a racist and a sexist and a sexual predator and a crazy man for the got-damned 10,000th time when slightly over half the population that voted in this country voted for him. He is an easy topic because he’s a shock show designed to distract. You may learn something new that just happened, but I never learn anything new about him. He was an abomination beneath being classified as human when I first learned anything about him back in 1989. He was then, and remains, like so many of the soulless, including those who never knew and still don’t know that they never had a soul.
When someone decided to try to be a copycat of my Substack account on Monday, September 14, 2026, several wonderful people on Substack jumped into gear to report the imposter; and soon the duplicate was gone. Yet, after taking some days away from all social media my brain processed the offense differently.
Some people hack, copy, falsify, pretend and troll much of the time for kicks; and to get jobs (hackers get hired); and to breach people’s bank accounts; and also because they have little else to do. They duplicate pages and names and images, but my gray matter—my brain belongs to me.
I spoke with an old boyfriend from high school a few days after the incident who said, “If I put on a blindfold and someone read me two paragraphs of yours, I would know it was you.” We laughed and reminisced about when we were both young and inquisitive and now we are much older and inquisitive. Aging is a blessing denied to many people. Good memories are also denied, as so many folks never have any because they never go offline long enough to make any.
When I hung up the phone it occurred to me that I never liked, loved or befriended any boy or man that didn’t have the soul of a poet whether he could write poetry or not. To be able to or just to want to be able to take a phrase that, on the surface, seems abstract and make it mean something else or several something else’s is a gift, a gift that requires that you not just look at the world and your circumstances, but that you have the capacity to see the beauty or joy or even the sadness or terror in those circumstances.
My quartet of college English professors: Dr. Waqas Ahmad Khwaja, Dr. Willie Tolliver, Dr. Christine Cozzens and Dr. Steven Guthrie taught me that a historian was a much better historian if that historian loved or could write poetry or fiction. The idiosyncrasies of being a human being are detailed, clothed and disrobed in haiku, sonnets, odes, elegies, cinquain, and free verse the way a couple whose marriage is over, but who cannot completely let go, so they create an ongoing argument, a conflict that lasts their lifetimes just so they can hold on to a piece of what can no longer be.
While away from the grind of scrolling on social media I finished reading three books and one stage play that was so good I couldn’t put it down. I peeked out my window long enough to watch my neighbors’ two small children giggling and playing with their two dogs in their front yard. A father and daughter passed by on their bicycles.
Then my fear completely disappeared because the job was done. I have written this before, but this oxymoron bears repeating: Anything intelligent cannot be artificial; and anything artificial cannot be intelligent. The underlying purpose of A. I. is confusion and fear, to convince citizens that machines and algorithms can wreak havoc in a split second. The constructors of A. I. are in testing mode—one week it may pose a threat to a forest, a water supply, a military base, a foreign enemy, or to a specific group of people.
Then after enough non-thinking humans are reasonably subdued to the whims of A.I., the plans to make it safer, less invasive will come along. Jobs will be offered where those who are employed can deliver well-crafted messages about how it is now under control with dozens of benefits to humans that no one realized in its infancy.
The only problem is that the ones who crafted A.I., who designed it, who will propagate it and implant its alleged benefits and its alleged problems in susceptible brains will not be creators who are able to write a poem or even murmur a few words and phrases that come from the heart or the gut. Emotions, perhaps even love itself, could be rendered suspect because love has never followed a formula.
If there are any deaths that could come from the whims and malfunctions of machines, the deaths on fields of battle or the obliteration of entire towns will come much, much later, if they come at all. The first deaths will be slow, caused by the absence of the souls of poets, those that can still find their way in the dark; those that know when to refrain from saying something; those that can say it another way to make people feel better without telling a lie instead; those that can remember childhood games and youthful romances and mischief well enough to care about the young ones who will outlive them, not just care about themselves or the here and now.
I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work and research with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp or PayPal; or become a paid subscriber to me on Substack to help me sustain my research and commentary.
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