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Close the tab and move on
Jan. 15th, 2023 12:13 amSince the Musk takeover of twitter, I haven't totally stopped going on the app to mindlessly scroll and rt art I happen to see. I specifically check on a couple of friends whose well-being seems to be frequently chronicled there, like it's my job to keep up with it somehow even though I don't think they feel the same obligation to seek out whatever socmed I'm using at the moment. However, twitter just... stopped working on Firefox one day, and I hadn't been making many original posts there for a while anyway.
And because I don't have a place that I can just casually drop a one line comment about something, forget about it, and half-hope for notifications to return and gratify my need for attention, I have just been staying quiet a lot more lately.
Outside my day job, the internet is the only place I really say anything ever. And yet, more and more, I'm just not saying anything.
A lot of my long-term, if long-distance friends have been this way online for the whole time or for a long time. For me, it's something of an adjustment. In the age of algorithmic feeds, I was very aware of this reality but still fell prey to it. I started using twitter in 2016, and at the time my set of mutuals were people I actually talked to and the feed didn't go out of its way to make people who aren't serving the content creation machine adequately or interacting often enough just disappear.
tumblr was never a good place to find new people either unless you had an interest-working-backward approach, which is also what I tend to do here.
Anyway, I guess I had reached a point quite some time ago where I no longer expected people to click the "like" button for "I'll answer one of these questions for every like I get!" Like, who cares about my answers enough to get me to the full number? No one. And why should I care? Either share the information or don't.
And knowing that no one was listening made me no longer want to answer them.
My job is the only time I really talk to anyone in a way that isn't a transaction about food.
I am really tired of being alone, really. But not keeping up the pretense that I have an audience to entertain is maybe something of a bittersweet relief. At least if I get interaction here, I know it was driven by some human decision and not pure happenstance.
And because I don't have a place that I can just casually drop a one line comment about something, forget about it, and half-hope for notifications to return and gratify my need for attention, I have just been staying quiet a lot more lately.
Outside my day job, the internet is the only place I really say anything ever. And yet, more and more, I'm just not saying anything.
A lot of my long-term, if long-distance friends have been this way online for the whole time or for a long time. For me, it's something of an adjustment. In the age of algorithmic feeds, I was very aware of this reality but still fell prey to it. I started using twitter in 2016, and at the time my set of mutuals were people I actually talked to and the feed didn't go out of its way to make people who aren't serving the content creation machine adequately or interacting often enough just disappear.
tumblr was never a good place to find new people either unless you had an interest-working-backward approach, which is also what I tend to do here.
Anyway, I guess I had reached a point quite some time ago where I no longer expected people to click the "like" button for "I'll answer one of these questions for every like I get!" Like, who cares about my answers enough to get me to the full number? No one. And why should I care? Either share the information or don't.
And knowing that no one was listening made me no longer want to answer them.
My job is the only time I really talk to anyone in a way that isn't a transaction about food.
I am really tired of being alone, really. But not keeping up the pretense that I have an audience to entertain is maybe something of a bittersweet relief. At least if I get interaction here, I know it was driven by some human decision and not pure happenstance.
