Defeatism, cynicism, doomerism, essentialism, materialism, anti-intellectualism, consumerism, and cruelty are everywhere on the Internet… and I’m just not into it anymore.
I used to buy into self-limiting beliefs because I thought they were answers from people with more life experience than me, but they just limited my thinking and led me astray. They were why I was insecure and unhappy. They were why I was doing nothing to make my life better.
Once I started to push back on all of the Internet’s supposed “wisdom,” I figured out that my fundamentally flawed beliefs were paralyzing me from actually doing anything with my life and being brave enough to take risks, especially socially. I’m noticeably happier, I’ve developed a positive life outlook, and I’m more comfortable in my own skin because I stopped getting my opinions from the Internet and started thinking for myself.
I recognized that others’ opinions don’t define reality. Opinions are the result of someone’s life experiences filtered through their brain. They may have some value, but they are often incredibly biased and should not be taken as gospel. If you take them all seriously, you will be riddled with insecurities in no time flat, subconsciously trying to appeal to people who you don’t even like and would never be friends with.
I honestly can’t say I know who social media is even for at this point. There is so much content promoting unhealthy ways of thinking just haphazardly strewn about everywhere. I don’t know how anyone can avoid it all. I don’t know if the benefits can outweigh the costs. Even the most harmless content is forgettable and eats up valuable time that could be used for something more meaningful.
Sometimes I think about how we never see any posts from the happiest people alive. They don’t need social media validation, their positivity wouldn’t generate clicks, and the negativity of social media platforms probably scared them off long ago. As a result of their absence, negativity and unhealthy thought patterns have proliferated unchallenged.
I feel like I don’t even belong on the Internet anymore. I can’t relate to all of the doomers and cynics. The constant firehose of simultaneous anxiety and apathy, the lack of introspection and empathy… what use do I really have for it all at the end of the day? It’s getting so old and stale. I feel like I can’t grow as a person anymore if I continue consuming Internet slop.
There are so many, much more constructive ways I could be spending my time. If I should be using the Internet for anything, it would be to aid me in doing that. For example, finding good books to read. I can’t wait until I finally overcome my behavioral inertia and move on with my life.
Where I live it’s the opposite, soon and gloom everywhere, and internet as a happier place then reality. I can’t even exist in real life without fear of being killed or locked up, I don’t have to worry about that online, if someone says something wrong I can just block them and for instance in Lemmy I block certain words so those posts never show up.
Two knobs, man, two knobs (George Carlin)
You find what you want to find on the internet. Sure there’s plenty of garbage. They’re all over the place outside touching grass too though. If everywhere you go on the internet you always see the same crap and have the same problems, the problem might be you and the kinds of places you like to frequent and the kinds of people you like to interact with.
There is nothing like interacting with real people to show you how unreal, unproductive, and honestly uninfluential the chronically online environment is. But when it’s your whole world, it feels like it is the whole world, and no one you’re interacting with has any proof to say otherwise. So then the most universally agreed upon things online seem like they must be true to all, until you talk to someone at a diner and realize no one gives a shit what these communities espouse online to other folks you never see or talk to outside.
There is nothing like interacting with real people to show you how unreal, unproductive, and honestly uninfluential the chronically online environment is.
This: the internet is fake bullshit from start to finish.
At this point, staying online feels a lot like making a choice to be miserable and have shitty mental health.
And yes, I’m aware the irony or whatever of someone posting that online, but my online footprint has gone from your usual corporate media shit down to… uh, Lemmy.
Which is not by any means perfect, but it’s a lot less fucking awful than what Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Reddit are trying very hard to do to you.
I feel like the internet was also a nicer place 20-30 years ago.
Now it feels like it brings out the worst in people.
I am hopeful that without the perverse incentives that corporate social media has, the fediverse can be a more positive place than legacy social media.
Personally I do find it less compulsive and more thoughtful but the doom and gloom is still pretty heavy.
I don’t feel like it’s better at all. Somehow it’s worse. Though my exposure to social media other than Reddit is very limited, I’ve left Facebook before it was too shitty and never had any other social media (well, I had Twitter but I used that like 2 times a year).
At that point, you’re just not fitting in with most humans anymore. Doesn’t really have anything to do with the internet.
I have had the same feelings as you. For me, the internet has now become more of a way for sharing my own answers with other people, rather than pure consumption. Just re-read what you wrote, imagining the opposite. Imagine if all content on the internet was filled by people like you. Someone who doesn’t fall into mental pitfalls. Who is happy. And so on. Wouldn’t that be an internet you’d again like to participate in?
I don’t post everywhere. I post where I think my truth is worthwhile for others to read. As I hope this truth right here is worthwhile to read for you.
What I’m saying is, maybe it’s not time to ditch the internet, maybe it’s just time to use it differently.
Also, even though the internet is filled with a lot of shit, through a rationality filter you can still get good tidbits out of it. Just gotta take the good and leave the bad.
… maybe it’s not time to ditch the internet, maybe it’s just time to use it differently.
👆
That’s a good point; there are people who think like this everywhere, not just on the Internet.
I believe that the main difference for me is the speed and volume of negative sentiments. Maybe in real life, you’ll have one or two people in the general vicinity expressing worry for the future, and many who won’t say anything. But on the Internet, it’s an endless scroll of hundreds of people saying “We are doomed” in different ways. As others have pointed out, there are additional statistical effects that also make negativity more prominent on top of that.
But ultimately, even if you quit the Internet, the rationality filter you mentioned is necessary for real life, too. If your positive mindset can be ruined by talking to a single negative person, you aren’t going to be positive for very long. I try to understand where other people’s opinions come from rather than accept them at face value. Once I recognized that I had control over how others’ words affected me and could interpret them in my own way, I become much more emotionally stable.
That filter doesn’t make you invincible, but I think it’s much more resilient against a slower pace of negativity rather than the constant deluge on many social media spaces. A slow pace of interaction gives you more time to reflect and ponder the meaning of negative statements, whereas a fast one often precludes such introspection.
I also like your point about engaging with the Internet thoughtfully. There are some who still use it to spread positivity, even if they aren’t immediately visible. Someone sent me an unexpectedly sweet and heartfelt compliment yesterday, and that really touched my heart. One of the best things about the rationality filter is that it diminishes my sensitivity to criticism while maintaining my high sensitivity to kindness. That diminished sensitivity to criticism makes me less afraid to put myself out there, while the high sensitivity to kindness makes even the smallest positive interactions feel wonderful.
I’ve been feeling the same way a lot recently. The only social media I have left is snapchat, and that’s purely because I have a 1000+ day streak with a friend that I feel obligated to maintain. Every now and then I’ll wind up on whatever they call their doomscrolling video platform and it feels like fifteen minutes of my life just vanishes into thin air. And whenever I close it, I’m vaguely pissed off and my eyes hurt, but the slight boredom that incentivized me to go there in the first place is still hanging around, so I just feel restless and dissatisfied. It’s frankly exhausting. I’m in the “this sucks and I don’t want to do this anymore but I’m going to do it anyway and be mad about it” phase of my internet addiction and just haven’t quite found the right combination of other habits to prevent me from wandering into those corners of the internet when I don’t have anything to do for more than two minutes.
Things that often come to mind when I see that doom and gloom mob behaviour are;
“We all float down here.”
&
“Misery loves company.”That’s not to say that things aren’t royally fucked, but sometimes people find masochistic pleasure in focusing on everything negative and comfort in the fact that they aren’t alone in thinking that way.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Saving this post for future reference.
Internet commentary is like the readers column in newspapers. It’s only written by people who feel so strongly about something that they have a need to share or even bother writing it. Angry or frustrated people post more often online than people who are happy or at least content with life. The internet will never be a representation of real life. It’ll always be more negative, because negativity fuels the need for a person to express themselves more than positivity. Anger is something you’ll want out, while a blissful experience is something you’ll want to keep without sharing it with the world.
When reading online stuff, it’s necessary to consider this and realize that the content is filtered towards negativity before it is even created. The internet is not real life. It’s mostly only the moaning and shouting of real life.
I honestly can’t say I know who social media is even for at this point. There is so much content promoting unhealthy ways of thinking just haphazardly strewn about everywhere. I don’t know how anyone can avoid it all. I don’t know if the benefits can outweigh the costs. Even the most harmless content is forgettable and eats up valuable time that could be used for something more meaningful.
Sometimes I think about how we never see any posts from the happiest people alive. They don’t need social media validation, their positivity wouldn’t generate clicks, and the negativity of social media platforms probably scared them off long ago. As a result of their absence, negativity and unhealthy thought patterns have proliferated unchallenged.
I think you’ve found the larger part of the Internet you don’t relate to anymore with this. Not necessarily the Internet as a whole, but the subset of social media, and the subset within that of the many expressing how bummed they are with things (to put it lightly).
When you shift or fine-tune your focus to use the Internet as it was originally built for (sharing info, collaborative research/creative work), you’ll find it more useful and maybe more pleasant. This is more or less what I’ve tried to do more and more after fumbling about with social media stuff for awhile and experiencing my own growing disinterest in the bummer parts of it.
Speaking of books btw, if you’re into public domain work and ebooks, give Standard Ebooks a look! Similar to Project Gutenberg (also great) with more attention to nicer formatting.
