December is a mirror

Just make sure you tilt it right

These are the opening lines to one of the poems in my new collection.

I wrote it two years ago when all the end of year videos and round ups started to get posted on social media. Highlight reels, ambitions for the year ahead, lessons learned from adversity. As social media is again awash with a mix of genuinely inspiring stories and some sickening showing off¹ I feel myself being forced towards reflection before we have even reached betwixtmas.

Photo by Harald Arlander on Unsplash

Betwixtmas is indeed the pinnacle of reflection and social media is the most unreliable narrator of them all. I dedicate a whole chapter of my book to the confusing curse of the algorithm, in a section I call ‘Slave to the Algorithm’.

Just do my own showing off, this is the part of the book that got long listed by a publisher I really would have loved to have been published by.² But when it got rejected by the next place I sent to earlier this year, I decided to publish it myself before algorithms were out of fashion. AI / ChatGPT seem to be lurking more now, making the whole experience less and less human. I am always one step away from deleting all the apps. I did with Twitter in the summer. And although I do miss being able to find out about hyper local traffic incidents, I am pleased to report I manage just fine without that level of detail in my life. I hardly used social media for the first 4 decades of my life. Largely because it had not yet been invented. But my point stands.

Details.

Influencers sit next to inhumane

I also have a poem in my collection about how scrolling on social media sees you looking at influencers and inhumanity in split seconds of each other. The enormity of the gap between the human experience is never as obvious as at this time of the year.

This year there is also a new version of Do They Know It’s Christmas, a song that initially came out before I was even 10. Hearing it in 2024 is jarring. Despite the millions Bob Geldof is proud of raising, and conversations he is proud of getting people talking about, the world does not feel better. I have no doubt it would be worse without fundraising and conversations that push stories into the wider consciousness. But 40 years on Bono’s big line becomes more and more grating. As history does very little but repeat itself. Much like the re-release of the song. And now we get to watch it unfold, on demand, in a little screen we carry around everywhere.

Photo by William Hook on Unsplash

In 2005, pre social media, I left a work meeting, that I was personally finding very testing, to see footage of a bomb on a rolling news channel that was on as background in the reception of the office. From memory, putting TVs up in reception areas was relatively new, certainly where I worked. My sense of perspective was shaken in a profound way. I instantly felt utterly ashamed I was all annoyed at a meeting when something like was happening in the world. Now that kind of juxtaposition is happening on an almost daily basis. Throughout the day and it is astonishing how normal holding horror in our hands has become. The horror has always been there, of course, our proximity to it has changed. The volume of information and disinformation and the immediacy of both is almost too much to fully grasp. And I still get annoyed in meetings.³

Holding on to hope

Photo by Dan Stephens on Unsplash

The bit I do like is the hope. Hope at any time of the year is nice. Hope with tinsel and twinkling lights is better. And I guess is that why I still scroll. I want to see the progress we cling to whilst some progress is reversed and decimated. The good shining lights. Supporting. Cheerleading. I love that stuff.

Hope scrolling instead of doom scrolling. I keep going so I can see that good keeps going. People still make silly jokes. Sing. Dance. Try to bring joy to others. It doesn’t change the bad. Doesn’t even balance it out. No where near. But it helps. It is precious and worth savouring in amongst the scroll.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Thank you for reading this edition of Poems and That. A free irregular newsletter loosely connected to things I have learned through poetry. Paid subscribers receive a monthly newsletter called ‘Little Wonders’ at the end of each month and have full access to my archive.

Proving I Exist: A Poetry Collection is available on Amazon now, all royalties will be sent to Choose Love and Refuge.

1. No, I’m happy for you honestly. What do you mean my teeth look gritted?

2. I think it’s rude to submit and tell (if unsuccessful - otherwise I’d be banging on about on all the platforms available, including strangers at the tram stop.)

3. If I work with you, not your specific meetings, someone else’s ;-). And yeah, there is a poem about bad meetings in the book. I have a book and I will plug it.