With my new book coming out in May, I need to engage in social media more than I have up to this point. I know about marketing. I need to market the book to the best of my abilities. I have a publisher who has offered extensive and useful guidelines and assistance to show me how to use social effectively.

And yet I balked.

The balking is complex. I would like to say that it is solely a result of my moral compunction about acting on platforms that further enrich and empower amoral oligarchs. That is certainly a part of it, the convenient high horse excuse.

But I also know myself. I get sucked into the appreciation from the ether, eagerly monitoring the harvest of symbols of approval, the hearts, thumbs ups, reposts and other accoutrements of affirmation.

I’m a recovering alcoholic. I understand the appeal of the dictum “If a little is good, more is better.” The old muscle memory of the relief of getting annihilated by a sensation to the exclusion of all worry and trouble lingers still, and plenty of activities get me checked out besides alcohol or drugs.

I don’t spend time in bars unless I have a very good reason. Other venues also have emotional yellow caution tape around them. I need to be clear about why I am going in, know what I have to do there, and then get the hell out.

Since I worked in advertising for so long, I have always been an early adopter of social media and its precursors. I was active on message boards in the early 90s before social media existed, reading the extensive and lively posts by this guy named Mark Cuban who was doing some cool tech stuff in Texas.

Because of this, I’ve had many opportunities to watch my attention shift away from the good - engaging with various viewpoints, joining conversations, posting things I like, using words in this specific way – into another arena, the yellow caution tape area. Posting and then obsessively checking engagement. Wanting to respond to trolls or outrage bait, fuming in judgement, wanting to opine on issues I know little about. The digital peer pressure, the yearning to be one of the cool kids in any social playground is hard wired into me.

I understand that most of you can go into a bar, enjoy a cocktail and not end up puking in the parking lot or blacking out. But plenty of people who are not alcoholics keep an eye on their alcohol consumption, checking in with a Dry January, or staying accountable with a friend when their nightly glass of wine turns into half a bottle. They have an ethic of consumption around alcohol or drugs, just as many people have an ethic of consumption about what they eat or buy or how much debt they carry or how often they fly for pleasure in planes that contribute to global warming.

For those of you who might be interested in considering an ethic of consumption around social media here’s what I did to get to my rules of engagement. Yours will, of course, be different.

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