Hello Again

 

I decided to write something again. I've been busy since I last did so, and much life has been lived.

I had to get away from social media and the internet. When I met a lot of my friends online, the internet was still fairly new. The advertisers and powers that be hadn't really figured out how to use it against us yet. You could talk to people from all over the world and get to know them. You could find them human and relatable and come to the understanding that we're not all that different from one another. Most of the differences are culture-deep, and not insurmountable. It's how I ended up in the Netherlands via the most convoluted of routes. 

Now the internet is fully commercialized and weaponized against us. Instead of using it to foster communication and understanding, people use it to advertise a false image of themselves for internet points. It's being used to radicalize people and restart very old narratives and rewrite history. It's become ugly and full of propaganda and AI slop and influencer bullshit. I don't know where it will end, frankly, but it doesn't seem to be leading anywhere good. This is why I have to step away from it periodically, because I come to the internet for information and I get bullshit instead, and I know it's bullshit because I've seen it before in other forms.

The false image thing concerns me a great deal for its mental health implications. When you have to maintain a false image, it takes a lot of energy. Part of what takes this toll on energy is the dissonance between the authentic self and the false self that they're presenting to the world. Sooner or later something will have to give and they're going to get a breakdown. Sometimes I hope for it to happen so that these people have to take a good look at themselves and decide that the false image isn't worth it. It's better to be real and flawed and human than to spend all of your energy pretending to be perfect. It leads to people setting impossible expectations for themselves. The insecurities that it creates are used against us by advertisers to get us to buy their products. All of the beauty filters are making the place feel extremely "uncanny valley", and sometimes I wonder if any of them are real. I doubt it. I'm not even sure they have an identity or a personality outside of their internet life. 

I feel bad for anyone whose only window on the world is the internet, because that window looks out onto a landfill, and it is on fire. 

I realized at a certain point that I hadn't read a book in a couple of years. I used to devour books. I used to have my nose in a book at any moment when my attention wasn't being demanded elsewhere. On the bus? Read a book. Waiting room? Read a book, and on and on. My attention span had become so reduced that even when I tried to read, I would read the same paragraph over and over and not get anywhere. It turned out I needed glasses, because reading made my eyes tired. That was one thing, but once it was solved, it took some time to get back in the habit of giving reading my undivided attention. I remembered who I was. 

Then I started going outside just to walk around. I started talking to people and unlike their online counterparts, they weren't awful! It turns out that face to face interaction forces people to behave to an extent. Not all of them, because some of them have had their minds molded by the internet and the normalization of anonymous cruelty. Still, the majority of people in meatspace are nice people. Nicer than the ones online, in any case. It helped to cure a little of my misanthropy when I wasn't only seeing people in their online form. I got to know people. I made friends and created a support system. It was worth doing, because it more closely resembles having a life than being online all of the time does. 

I went to school and learned to garden. I learned to dance. I started collecting board games and learning how to play them. I bought a Yamaha keyboard....and let it sit there unused and unlearned. I need to do something to correct that oversight, but I'm finding out that I really do have better things to do with my time. Remembering who I was was not limited to rediscovering my love of reading. It also had to do with remembering how normal people filled their free time before the internet took over. There were plenty of people who filled it with drinking or watching tv mindlessly, but most people had a better idea then of how to amuse themselves without having it spoon fed to them. I missed that. I hope one day that it comes back in fashion again, but I worry that it will take another pandemic or a war with extended blackouts to make that happen. Naturally enough, I hope that doesn't happen. 

I'm just trying to make sense of the world like everybody else, but I'm coming to understand that the internet is not where I will find the answers. I have to go out and live life and figure it out for myself, the same as it ever was.