Respite, Repose, Reset

So, I unceremoniously left Facebook last week. I had become addicted to its most damaging aspects. I found myself incessantly checking it. Giving hours of my day to scrolling my Feed. It was the behaviour of an addict. My compositions, I discovered, were geared more and more towards trying, in some way, to sway people who I ultimately don't need in my life. Some are family members, and some are not. But, I have wasted far, far too much energy and too much time on caring what they think, or if I can or should try to influence them. The political climate of the last few years has exacerbated this, but I can't lay this exit all on that sorry state of affairs. I'm gonna own that I got addicted to tangles that weren't worth the portions of my soul that I am coming to realize that I gave to them.

Also, I find that I really, really despise what Facebook and Twitter are doing. We all have walked into a vicious social experiment that we didn't fully realize the implications of, back over a decade ago. It is not healthy to constantly converse with all the remote tangents of the history of your life. Some ghosts ought to remain ghosts. Some family only need be seen and nodded to at the annual reunion, if at all. And finally, having algorithms applied to one's self to help one more easily enter hate-filled echo chambers is an action of pure evil and self-eating abuse.

I don't know if this leave-taking will prove to be permanent, as I do a fair amount of work-related stuff there, and also have a couple of hobby sites there that I miss. There's a hiking page I like, and an old movies page, and an iceberg watching page. And, I enjoyed several years long Scrabble marathons with friends.... but there was also a fair amount of bile, and poison there, too. I injected a fair amount of it, myself. Sometimes I fancied myself in some grand ethical battle of epic proportions... and, I guess sometimes I was engaging in something like that... but, also, sometimes I was guilty of walking into the elevator and punching all the buttons to see what might light up.

Not healthy.

There's also quite a few folks there with whom I'd like to stay in touch, but I'm hoping that returning to this blog, which I haven't touched in over six years, will prove to be a more reciprocally sustaining and helpful outlet, and also will be a nice way to share stuff with friends. There's a few of you already here, and I really don't need "thousands of friends". Does anyone really actually have thousands of friends? I doubt that is actually possible. Maybe some of those folks on Facebook will join me. Who knows?

I have kept written journals for many years now, but I find that they ultimately serve a different function for me than online composition. As I read through them, I realize that they are really kind of a stream of consciousness mental spew.... there's no small amount of poison expelled in that writing, and ultimately, I'm going to burn them. They serve a purpose for me, but really, not for anyone else.

So, I'm gonna try this again. We'll see what happens. If you're out there, cool. I hope you enjoy this. That's what I wanna try to do, as well.