The Internet

I’ve also got exceedingly frustrated at the Internet.   When I first jumped on the Internet back in 1995, it was a land of optimism and hope.  It was to bring everybody together.  It was going to solve the problems of the world.    The Internet from 1995 – 2006 was like a library, with endless resources to discover. Everything was at your finger tips.  You could meet anybody and do whatever you want.  The Internet now is like a cheap nightclub, lots of flash and over stimulation but no substance at all.   I think the Internet really started go downhill around 2007 when the commercial world really started dictating what the Internet was to be.  A giant fucking online shopping mall.  Plastered with ads and paywalls.  If it is free, you aren’t the customer, you are the product.  The Internet around this time became more and more accessible to the general populous.  With that, comes the idiots.  The Internet was suppose to give everybody a voice… but what if… not everybody is suppose to have a voice?  I find the problem with the Internet today is exactly that.  The media is driven by sensationalism,  so what is going to get more hits.  A boring factually based article, or one that is emotionally charged with angry tweets and radical views?  All the shit rises right to the top.  Wokeism and “equality” (which is really just discrimination against white people), invasion of privacy, mass surveillance.   That is all we see these days on the Internet.  Idiot after idiot speaking their idiotic views on things they have no business talking about outside of their own home.  If anything the Internet is the driving force for division amongst people.  It isn’t bringing people together.  It is driving them apart.  The woke are so deeply concerned with not offending anybody that governments are starting to make changes to what people can say or do.  It is a very slippery slope and unfortunately, we are going down it and there is nothing we can do to stop it.  Welcome to 1984.  The future looks very dark… a place where everybody will have to conform, if you don’t you are “cancelled”.  The thing is people don’t seem to realize that contrasting views and opinions are the things that make life interesting.  Not everybody things alike.. and that’s OKAY.

I think the problem is technology.  It is advancing so quickly and the human mind has been the same for close to 100 000 years.  Our minds aren’t meant to deal with the constant bombardment of information/views/opinions that the Internet brings.  There was a study that suggested that a human can have a max social circle of about 300 people.  After that we lose the ability to connect with those people.  We can’t relate.  They aren’t one of our own.  So people become increasingly cold, harsh towards those people.  Hence why people are so “angry” online and say things to others they wouldn’t in person.  They have no connection to that person but have the ability to say whatever they want.

I find myself withdrawing from the Internet these days.  I still love the technology, but humans have once again turned something with endless potential and promise into a steaming pile of shit.  I deactivated my Facebook account, I closed my Twitter account because I just couldn’t handle reading the nonsense anymore.  I found Facebook to be like watching a party from outside through a window.  Everybody inside is having a good time and you can see it all, but can’t participate.  I have also noticed that Facebook is the place where friendships go to die.  Instead of checking in with somebody in the traditional sense by inviting them out to catch up or giving them a phone call.  You can just check out their FB profile and bam… up to date.  Why even give somebody a call on their birthday anymore when you can just write “happy birthday” on their facebook wall, that is sufficient right?

So I thought long and hard about it and decided.  I’m going to walk away from Facebook and see if anybody notices I am gone.  Probably not.  Has anybody reached out?   Nope.  Have I reached out to some people, sure have.  I went out with a few people from high school a few weeks back and realized I had nothing to contribute to the conversation.  Not that I had nothing to talk about, it’s just the things I wanted to talk about weren’t really being talked about.  I tried a few occasions to change it up and the conversation just drifted back to their topics of gossip essentially.  One of those friends was talking about her relationship with another friend had gone south and they were no longer talking.  She talked about her and suspected that she may be going through a mid-life crisis of some sort.  They laughed about it, but it genuinely left me concerned so I figured I would reach out to her to see if things were truly okay.  So about a week later, I reached out to her to see if she would like to get together for a walk or meet up for tea or something.  She is somebody who I used to hang out with daily for a period of 4 years or so and we were good friends for about 10 years.  So it wasn’t like we were just acquaintances, at one time we knew each other the best anybody could know somebody.  However, we haven’t seen each other in about 10 years because life happened.  We had kids and well anybody who’s been there know how some friendships just fall by the wayside.   Her response to my invite was that she didn’t want to see me, that she was happy in her life.  I told her that I had heard some things about her, and I really just wanted to see how she was doing.  No response.  That really made me think about Facebook.  Why is she my friend on Facebook, if she won’t even see me in person, what kind of friend is that?  Exactly.  I soon after deactivated my Facebook account.   As I realized Facebook was just a friend graveyard.  A place to watch those friends from a distance but never be able to actually interact with them.  A place where I could remember the past… That seems counter productive IMO.

So here I am not a few weeks without any kind of social media.  I am alone.  I can go days without physically talking to anybody (typing online is not talking)  I’m not depressed.  I’m just lonely.