Where else?

I’ve become a lonely nomad on the internet, and it’s an existence I loathe entirely.

It would be better if I just didn’t care about how I’m perceived, if I didn’t care about drawing someone’s ire, or saying something I then end up having to discuss with someone in-person.

Instead, I open up Twitter and start typing a tweet and then stall out because “is my tweet tacit approval of the perpetual bullshit happening on that hellsite at any given moment?” I look at Facebook, and then just get annoyed because most of the people I’m “friends” with in that place are so tuned out of anything I’d like to comment on, that it’s not even worth it. Mastodon is starting to sort of feel better, aside from the fact that I don’t follow enough people who engage with the site regularly for me to need to check it more than once a day. Plus, now a bunch of people I follow on Twitter are anxiously awaiting entry into Bluesky, which (I suppose once one has the ability to block bad actors) could be the Twitter killer so many are desperate for, so at some point I could add that app/site to the rotation of “places everyone I used to know might have gone.”

So, yeah, it would be better if I just didn’t care, except there are so many things to care about right now, it feels irresponsible to opt out of any of that stuff too.

And here I sit, occupying this middle ground of having so many thoughts about so many, sometimes terrible, sometimes boring, things, and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere for me to put them. But I have this blog, which is mine, and I think about that from time to time, and how I’m wasting money haphazardly updating it and then leaving it for months at a time. It’s a lot of pressure I keep putting on myself, when all I really want is somewhere to maybe complain about inane trivialities of life or my job and have someone say “yeah, I know what you mean, this one time…” and then somehow we have a conversation. Although, maybe I should be the one leaving the comments? Except that’s rarely something I have done willingly.

Of course, for all of those hum-drum everyday conversations, there’s also a ton of terrible shit going on, and it’s because of so much of that dark, terrible stuff, that I’m just as stymied when it comes to speaking my mind. I know just enough to be dangerous at this point, and it’s that level of knowledge that holds me back from even opening the door when it comes to talking about guns, trans rights, book banning, or abortion. Because heaven forbid I come across as uninformed or just so painfully naive!

I’d love to not care so much, to somehow make my peace with the ethical consumption I’m capable of managing, but I’m still wrestling with it. I spend a lot of time choosing my battles these days, and there are times when I get frustrated and annoyed because where I live, it’s easy to see how a dollar I spend locally might be used to hurt me or someone I love later. It feels like the social capital I used to spend (both on and offline) didn’t have as many obvious red flags, but these days… everything just feels dirty.