Read on Twitter
So bloody weird reading my timeline after getting used to not being on twitter most of the time. Makes me realise I'm actually coping OK with all the anxieties of the wider world - it's being on this website that makes me feel like I'm losing my fucking mind.
Like Halloween, I was just posting silly ghoastus stuff, but scrolling back after through everyone's lockdown 2 takes afterwards, I just couldn't square the sheer, extreme anguish of everything with the actual - admittedly shit - news that had happened.
This is nowhere near a "c'mon it's not that bad" take - anything is as bad as you feel it is. But I feel like Twitter is set up to have everyone gravitate constantly to extremes of misery, terror and confusion, even if they might otherwise be able to deal. It's brutal.
This place isn't the real world. I'm not quite sure _what_ it is, anymore. But whatever it is, it's not helping. I think the red flag for me was realising that looking at twitter from outside felt *exactly* like looking at booze abuse as someone who's lost interest in drinking.
Can't stress enough - I have no tweets or individuals in mind with all this. And nor am I trying to admonish anyone at all, individually or as a mass. I'm just properly sad at what everyone seems to be putting themselves through here, and I somehow found myself typing it.
Perhaps I'm just not wired right. Maybe constantly escalating the rhetoric about how hellish and joyless the world is really *is* good for people. But I suspect it's like the idea of drinking to "cope" with bad news: a solid reason to do something you felt compelled to do anyway.
I left facebook years ago, and Twitter is now my only presence on social media. It's been life-changing, really, and has brought me some wonderful times. But in the last few years, it has also done a lot of damage to my wellbeing, and I'm not sure how to regard it anymore.
I've been longing to share all of the quietly obsessive work I've been doing on my aquariums, and things like that, but in the end I never have the heart, as just being on the bloody app gives me a sense of rising unease that I never noticed when I was immersed in it.
And I am truly, non-rhetorically sorry if I seem judgemental, pious, or repetitive (as I know I've said this all before). I suppose... well, I'm _furious_ at this website (not its users!), for all the joy it's compelled me to hold beneath its surface and drown over the years.
And of course, take it all with a pinch of salt, as it's coming from a man whose social existence beyond his immediate family has constricted to a series of murmured, one-sided conversations with the inhabitants of two dozen small aquariums.
