💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 307 captured on 2023-11-14 at 09:39:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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A little pondering after reading ~oracle and ~inquiry...
Musings on empathy, social constructs, the toxic bifurcation of conversation between groups, all poured into the brain funnel.
One does not have to be immersed in the continual shit-stirring of culture wars or even in the hyperventilating vortex of something said online taken in the worst possible way, in order to appreciate the culling of contacts to a select few.... but it sure helps. ~oracle wrote about a perceived lack of empathy (I'd call it emotional resilience), and I believe that sentiment is ahead of its time; empathy, at least online, has been reduced to either platitudes that are far too easy to type without any sincerity, or a walking-on-eggshells that one doesn't offend. ~inquiry has noted this difficulty as well, that having casual yet engaged conversation has become all the more difficult.
My solution has been to quit playing the game altogether, and I'm wondering if this resonates with anyone else here? I perhaps have taken my exit of this to extremes; my only social contacts of any significance or regularity can probably be counted on one hand (not including family, but that too is small in number), and my only current online social interaction is here at the Pub. I'm old enough (mid 50s and the lack of hair to prove it) to remember when chatting on CompuServe was a novelty and not at all how I connected with anyone that I knew in person, so perhaps this doesn't feel as radical to me as it would someone younger.
But it's not just a walking away from the monstrosity of social media; that movement has engaged young and old alike. Maybe it's the pandemic, maybe it's work-from-home (a luxury I am damned fortunate to have), but the need to be social, period, feels transformed. Most days I see exactly two people; my spouse and our dog, and I'm fine with that.
Tomorrow evening, I'm meeting up with two friends that I introduced to each other. One is a coworker who has become a true best friend over the past couple of years -he is the artist/poet version of me and I'm the scientist/engineer version of him- and the other is someone I have known for over a decade and have spent several years with in a local Zen meditation group. We'll discuss whatever we've been reading lately and What Is Wrong With The World and why We Have The Answers, which will all of course just be our own perspectives and conceits. But I'll also be mixing vodka martinis and we'll be listening to Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington (if I have my way).
That may sound like a total shite boring-as-fuck evening to you, and that's absolutely ok. The point is, that kind of evening, once every 2 or 3 months with a couple of the very few people I care to see, that's the entirety of my social life. The casual encounters, the small talk, the interaction with people you knew but didn't really know, that's gone. It all moved online. And I quit online in the middle of a pandemic when it was the only place to go. During a period of forced isolation for many of us, I embraced it and isolated myself even further. I like to think that I just used the situation to provide clarity to choices about my time. Am I alone in this? Or given our social nature as humans, am I merely banging on the walls of my psychological health?
Solitude is precious and you must seek it at least occasionally or you will mentally break. My wife and I often sit by the fireplace and read or listen to music and that is some of my most joyful times. Don't worry about what society thinks is normal for your social life.
Well, lots of the Internet just now is very broken with regards to incentives and attentions and etc. etc. etc. Engaging with stuff like the Midnight or other things on Gemini is a nice little corner of the world.
I don't know. I really miss small talk and casual conversations and office gossip, personally. They say that weak ties are an important predictor of wellbeing, not just the intimate friendships one cultivates carefully -- and that seems right to me. I don't know if it's good that it's *possible* for us to be so cut off from the world. But that's at the macro level; one's individual choices are a different question.
I lean firmly quit end of the online spectrum. Can't remember exactly when, but I dumped Facebook and Twitter at least half a decade ago. For me, it was mostly due to noticing neither platform attracted people capable of long(er) form. Such platforms seemed in the vein of how Windows became the darling of those seemingly incapable of ever developing genuine computer competence - descendants of sorts of the clueless :-) Eternal September horde, if you will....
Fun to see the word 'Compuserve' again. I never got with that, but did enjoy similar "onvirons" from good 'ole General Electric called "GEnie".
Your "tomorrow evening" description has it sounding glorious!
<mental note to acquire a "handle" - i.e. a 1.75L bottle - of Ketel One>
You are not alone in this at all :-). I think this rollercoaster of social media discourse is simply the outcome of targeting engagement as a metric of success. You're not gonna get much engagement by encouraging reflection and dialog, which will quickly sink your stuff at the bottom of everyone's timelines and poof! goes the traffic.