I’m listening to an episode of the Plain English podcast in which he interviews a child psychologist about the rising tide of teen and adolescent mental health problems.

They’ve started talking about the negative effects of social media on teen girls. To paraphrase their discussion on this point, social media is a perfectly designed tool for comparing yourself to others. Whatever it is you want to be or make or do, you can find someone on social media who has been it, made it, or done it better than you ever could. You will always find someone more successful, richer, more beautiful, more fit. Whatever your craft, social media will help you see how you could have done it better.

Luckily when I was a teenager, social media was just beginning to become a part of every day life, and it didn’t have the negative effect on my development then that it could have had. But this episode and this discussion still resonates with me right now as a 30-something year old man. I love writing code and building things. When I was a kid learning to code it was so easy to explore and create without an agenda. I never would have thought to compare what I made against the best the internet has to offer. Now when I get an idea in my head, I start by doing some “research”, find some similar project and then end up scrolling hackernews and looking at the incredible things others make, instead of making things myself.

As of right now, I am deciding to try to break out of this cycle. I will create software, food, art, whatever, and I will stop comparing my creations to those of others. I will bring my blog back online for the first time in years, and this will be the first new post. I will make things that are bad and unoriginal and broken and incomprehensible and I will put them online as a way to hold myself accountable.