About twice a year, a flock of cedar waxwings comes to the tall tree across the street from our house. One morning last week, we heard them before we saw them—singing their soft music. Some of them darted around while most of the flock sat in the high branches, whistling notes here and there.

My relationship to being online sucks. Like many of you, I’m blasted by alarming news every second I sit on Bluesky (a Twitter-like microblogging website) or Instagram or any social media. I’m also compelled to keep looking even as my teeth are set on edge; after each new degradation scrolls by; even as I’m diffused with a low, daze-inducing, inarticulate despair. I watch and feel helpless and yet driven to watch, as though my witnessing a thing can do something to change it. There’s a kernel in me that says something like “if you’re unaware of these maimed children, you’re shamefully ignoring them,” as though I must witness each ICE kidnapping, each brainless press conference, each blasé white supremacist tweet, each bloodied toddler in minute detail in order to… what, exactly? Help? Help who? Help how?

While gazing into the maw of my feeds, I’m unfocused and bewildered. In many ways, I am lost. The news is so crushing, the commentary—then the commentary on the commentary—so constant, it becomes really hard to locate in myself any feeling other than the jagged buzz of persistent anger. (Anger, of course, is fine to feel: I find it clarifying. Just not in the doses social media hits me with.)

It’s disorienting to spend so much time in the enormous pain of the people of the world whom I can do very, very little to actually help. Disorienting and dispiriting. But still I return to witness it all again the next hour.

The Tao often uses the image of a baby to talk about being “of the Tao” or “on the Way” as the book puts it. Babies are perfectly unaware of the world, are perfectly trusting of it. They lack what the Tao implies is the source of most adult pain: expectations. Babies are new to the world and so the world is new to babies. They don’t know enough to have opinions, they don’t know if something is “right” or “wrong” and are unworried—maybe even confused—about those judgments. They experience things and do not leap to explanations or conclusions about what they’re experiencing.

No baby in the world has a Hot Take.

Still I believe that there is, in many matters of governance or, more importantly, in how we treat each other, right and wrong. I think that we owe something to each other, and that we need both intelligence and wisdom beyond a baby’s to appreciate and materialize that.

And yet we can’t let our sometimes boorish conception of right and wrong get in the way of compassion.

And yet there are people in this world who loathe compassion itself, would force most of humanity to suffer, and those people must be held responsible for their deeds.

And yet to give no trust is to get no trust.

And yet.

And yet.

Let’s look at a poem. Chapter 71 of the Tao, called “The Sick Mind”:

To know without knowing it is best.
Not knowing without knowing it is sick.

To be sick of sickness
is the only cure.

The wise aren’t sick.
They’re sick of sickness,
so they’re well.

I’m a little sick of sickness.

I don’t need my priors confirmed every day on Bluesky. I don’t need my prejudices reinforced and honed to an edge that only ever seems to cut me. What I need is something social media promises but rarely delivers: human connection. What I need is friendship.

So I’ve decided to get off the microblogging apps. Not to retreat from discomfort or to revoke my empathy. No, never. But to preserve my own energy and to refocus my attention on doing something else. Rather than getting more and more and more evidence of what I already know—of what I know, at this point, without knowing it—I can instead listen for a moment to a waxwing. I can think about and then write—and then rewrite—a newsletter. I can plan for the weekend—food truck pizza, Costco, playground near the cemetery. I can feel better for a while.

I can’t say changing my relationship to social media is a good or bad thing. I may know fewer details about the world’s many problems and what needs fixing (but I know people need urgent help). I may be less burdened by the grasp of cruelty (but I know there’s no bottom to the pain we can cause each other).

To know enough’s enough is enough to know.

We’ll see how it goes.

Send me some stuff to read—I don’t have a thousand weirdos chittering in my feed anymore.

Read this

• Prison abolitionist and all-around helper Mariame Kaba on how taking a small, committed action has a way of expanding: The Magic of Showing Up

Some good news

• New Mexico becomes the first state to offer free universal childcare

• Flint, MI to all pregnant people: You get $1500 + $500/mo for the first year of your baby’s life

A song