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firstbabylonian | 1 year ago

Does it not get exhausting to swim against the current all the time? Don't you ever wish you could let you go and let your inner little mind take control, if not just for a moment? What you describe as being genuine and authentic and open minded sounds like a cross you have decided you must bear. It's okay. You are not Jesus. You don't have to do this.

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logicprog|1 year ago

I just adjust the amount of time I spend online down in order to compensate for the added emotional strain, and also adjust what sorts of social media I interact with to ensure it is sustainable. I've also been slowly learning how to just disengage after a certain point: if a discussion really seems like it's going down the drain or not going to go anywhere useful then I'm learning to sort of just let someone else have the last word and move on, which has been good for my health. I don't want to engage with someone that isn't going to meet me on some fair level of discourse.

Because you are correct, making top level posts on a twitter-like social media constantly with this ethos was actually so emotionally exhausting for me it physically affected my health, but the solution to that is just to not do that anymore.

Also, I do this not because I've arbitrarily decided that I've got to bear this cross, as you say, but because it is my default mode of interaction, in fact the only one I know, and it's something I very much like about myself that I always interact in this manner, and I think trying to learn how to be less genuine and less invested and less open, even if just for my online interactions, would sincerely leak out into my character in general in a way I don't like. So I'm not really doing it out of a sense of duty, but essentially out of a sense of convenience, because I don't want to have to go through the effort of learning how to context switch between a mode of interaction for being online and a mode of interaction for being offline.

firstbabylonian|1 year ago

Thank you for this honest response, really. I wish you the best of luck out there.