Action Indicates Priority

I’m sending these out because I quit social media and I need attention. What I actually want is for you to reply and tell me you’re coming. I’ll drop one every night at midnight. You can register in the morning when you get up — something to read besides everything else.

Karma yoga is the yoga of action. I say it a lot — usually when I notice a gap between what someone says they want and what they’re actually doing about it. All talkie-talkie, no walkie-walkie.

Easy to spot in someone else. Quite another to see in yourself. That’s the whole puruṣa and prakṛti problem. But I digress.

I’ve been helping support my parents — a lot of Halls under one roof. I’ve been overstimulated (that’s an understatement), but I feel strong. There’s something familiar and good about having purpose, and I’m grateful for the chance to carry this kind of responsibility as a single gay man. My straight friends with kids know this weight. I’m glad to be learning it.

I need that compass for the work I do. A couple of times a week I teach breath and movement at a building that houses a few NGOs. I’m not the most compassionate Mysore teacher at that hour, but I care about you all more than I usually show. Getting to practice that care in a way that actually helps — that’s what this is for. It’s an honor to be on your team.

I’ve been struck lately by how few colleagues are actually doing what we’re doing. The people with the big platforms turned out to be all hat, no cattle when it came to their local communities — and that genuinely gutted me. I love being the neighborhood yoga teacher. After a few weeks of playing internet games, I started to worry there might not be a future for full-time yoga teachers who work this way.

In the words of Jocko: good. More yoga is good. Less yoga is also good. What’s not good is delusion and ignorance and suffering. And social media didn’t have to be this way — that’s what we made it into. Citizen journalism. A global village of blogs. We chose instead to do Addictive Slop via Capitalistic Enshittification.

And yet, I was using it. I told myself I could avoid the toxicity by monetizing it for work — professional distance. Then I caught myself actually believing other people’s curation, and I realized there was a game of manufactured deceit underway. That was enough.

I’m a little over two weeks off Social Media™. I’ve quit Google News too. No more algorithm brain rot. My hubris found me again — I’m not Śiva. I can’t swallow the venom and come out fine.

For me it’s going to be light redditing for very niche topics (I genuinely recommend e-ink devices), and my wide assortment of periodicals.

But I still desperately want to share. So here it is: the Shala Daily. Something here every day. Maybe you’ll read it instead of doom-scrolling. I made it for you.

I don’t want Bezos owning my ideas. I don’t want Zuckerberg locking me into the metaverse. I don’t want Musk neuro-linking me. They’ve all decided to take genuinely transformative technology and do this with it.

What a waste. But I’m going to share with people who chose to be here. And I’m not giving Substack a cut.

xoxo

MJH

P.S. If you want to think more about mission and how this sharing practice sits with your larger aims, you might like this on self-inquiry and vision.