Welcome to The Back Porch, a new Sunday feature on An Americanist.
Most of the week I spend my time writing about politics, culture, and whatever fresh absurdity happens to be making headlines. On Sundays, I’d like to try something a little different.
The Back Porch is simply a place to pull up a chair, sip some coffee, and kick around a thought that’s been rattling around in my head.
No breaking news. No outrage cycle. Just a few observations about life, culture, and modern America.
One of the things I’ve noticed after spending way too much time on social media is that everybody seems to have a solution for everything.
No matter what the issue happens to be, there’s always somebody ready to explain how the schools should be run, how Congress should vote, how the economy should work, how parents should raise their children, and why complete strangers are doing life incorrectly. Sometimes I read through these conversations and wonder how a country blessed with this many experts manages to have any problems at all.
Maybe that’s unfair.
Lord knows I’ve got opinions too. I literally run a blog. If having opinions were an Olympic sport, most of us would qualify for the team.
Still, it’s something I’ve been thinking about lately.
The internet has given us front-row seats to everything. At any given moment, we can weigh in on a court case three states away, a war halfway around the world, a school board meeting we’ve never attended, and a controversy involving people we’ve never met. We have access to more information than any generation in history, which sounds like a good thing until you realize we’re also carrying around opinions about a thousand things we can’t actually do anything about.
Maybe that’s where some of the exhaustion comes from.
Every day brings a fresh list of problems to worry about. Some of them are important. Many of them deserve attention. But I can’t help wondering if social media has blurred the line between being informed and being involved.
I’ve caught myself doing it.
I’ll spend an hour reading articles, scrolling through reactions, and forming opinions about some national debate, then walk away with the vague feeling that I’ve accomplished something.
Except I haven’t.
I’ve just spent an hour reading articles, scrolling through reactions, and forming opinions.
That doesn’t mean discussion is worthless. Ideas matter. Public debate matters. Commentary matters. I wouldn’t spend my time writing if I didn’t believe that.
What I’m wondering is whether we’ve started confusing participation with progress.
Sometimes it feels as though we’re all standing around discussing how to fix the world while the things closest to us quietly wait their turn.
- The family member we should probably call.
- The neighbor we’ve been meaning to check on.
- The volunteer opportunity we keep saying we’ll get around to.
- The project we’ve been putting off.
The responsibility that’s been sitting there all week while we were busy solving problems on the internet.
I don’t think this is a social media problem as much as it’s a human nature problem. Big problems are interesting. They make us feel connected to something larger than ourselves. The small responsibilities of everyday life rarely provide that same rush.
- Nobody gets congratulated for handling the ordinary stuff.
- Nobody goes viral for keeping promises.
- Nobody builds a following by quietly being dependable.
Yet when I think about the people who’ve had the biggest impact on my life, that’s usually what they were doing. They showed up, they helped, and they listened. People kept their word and handled the things within their reach.
Maybe that’s the lesson hiding underneath all of this. The world will always provide an endless supply of problems to discuss. The challenge is remembering that our own responsibilities are still waiting for us when the discussion ends.
Including the garage.
Feature Image: AI-generated illustration.
