2341: Taking a Break from Social Media; Here’s Where to Find Me

I’ve reached this situation before, as longtime readers will doubtless remember, but I think I’ve lost patience with public social media (specifically Twitter and Facebook), and as such I think for the benefit of my mental health and overall enjoyment of life, I’m going to step away. I’ll talk more about the reasons in a moment for those of you who are interested, but before I do that I’d like to share the important stuff: how you can get in touch with me if you so desire.

Email: pjedavison at gmail dot com, or you can use the Contact page on this site, which comes through to the same address.

Google Chat: My only real form of private IM; same email address as above. I have a few other IM services but don’t use them much, so please don’t try and chat to me on Skype because I probably won’t know you’re trying to reach me!

Discord: You can drop in on my server at https://discord.gg/0PVr1hioSgchWQAs and/or add me as a friend under ID Amarysse#2465.

Pete’s Pile of Shame: I’m going to post some “live” thoughts and media relating to the games I’m playing over at this new site. Feel free to leave comments.

Note that I will be leaving my various Twitter accounts open, but not monitoring them. They will simply reshare my articles and posts from my sites. Likewise for Facebook. Please do not try to contact me using either Twitter or Facebook, because I won’t reply or even see your message!

If you want to play games with me, here are my various game IDs you might want:

PSN: Angry_Jedi
Xbox Live: sonicfunkstars
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/angryjedi
Battle.net: AngryJedi#2260
Final Fantasy XIV: Amarysse Jerhynsson, Ultros server (VinCo Free Company)

Okay. Onto the reasoning for me stepping away, if you care.

To put it bluntly, I’m tired of negativity, because that’s what social media seems to have become a magnet for. If people aren’t sharing the latest in Awful News from Around the World, they’re trying their damnedest to be contrary at every opportunity. No-one agrees with anything any more; everyone seems to perpetually feel the need to “correct” everyone else or have a differing viewpoint.

It’s the problem with everyone being able to express their opinions, in other words: everyone feels the need to have their own opinion, and heaven forbid it be the same as someone else’s. Arguments erupt over the most stupid things, and people snark about things that don’t matter with sufficient aggressiveness and determination to make considering talking about almost anything an unpleasant prospect. As someone who already feels a great amount of social anxiety during in-person interactions, to start feeling this way about online interactions, too — a manner of interacting which I had previously found much more comfortable and pleasant, but which I am starting to recoil away from — this is not the way I want to be feeling.

I’ll give you a simple example from today: earlier, I learned that Microsoft sells hilariously awful-looking soft porn movies on its marketplace — a storefront which is accessible on its Xbox One console — and yet we still can’t have Adults Only-rated games on consoles due to outdated concerns about Wal*Mart and Gamestop not stocking their shelves with anything controversial. I made a glib observation to this effect, and rather than a simple response of “Oh, interesting” or “huh, that is weird”, the first response I got felt the need to correct me on my use of the word “porn”. Apparently “topless” is not the same as “porn”.

This interaction in itself wasn’t anything unusual or particularly hurtful, but it was the proverbial straw that… you know. It exemplified everything that’s come to frustrate me about social media in the last few years; coupled with the fact that no-one ever seems to be happy about anything any more — between people whining about misogyny, sexism, racism, homophobia, censorship, Donald Trump, black people, white people, Asian people, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Germans, Belgians, gamers, games journalists, Anita Sarkeesian, feminists, men’s rights activists, Facebook, Twitter, Simon Cowell, Nigel Farage, gun enthusiasts, people who drink Mountain Dew, people who do fanart “wrong” and any number of other things, it’s no wonder I’m feeling particularly miserable and negative about life in general, really, is it?

So the most sensible thing to do from a mental health perspective when something starts making you miserable is to cut that thing out of your life altogether. Preferably cold turkey. But the thing that always makes me hesitate is the fact that amid all the negativity and bullshit, I have struck up some genuine friendships, and I’d hate to lose those. I’d hate to lose contact with people like Mike Cunningham from RPGamer; Steve Baltimore, Joe “Eritach” Sigadel and several others from Operation Rainfall; the glorious perverts of Anitwitter such as Vyers, Ashley, Luka, Firion, Bubbel, Xiaomu, Rin, Radkatsu, TheHatPerson and doubtless hundreds of others I’ve forgotten to mention. (If I didn’t call you out by name here, it’s to save time and space, not because I don’t want to stay in touch! Unless you’re a shithead. In which case I probably wasn’t following you anyway.)

As such, then, the details above are there in an attempt to stay in contact with people I want to stay in contact with, despite intending to leave what has previously been our primary means of communication behind. Please do feel free to use them and to say hi to me using any of the means listed; they’re there to be used, so don’t feel like you’re “intruding” in any way by sending me a friend request or a private message via some other non social media means.

In order to continue one thing I did enjoy about Twitter — posting “live” thoughts and reactions to games I’m playing — I’ve set up this site to continue doing so. It’ll probably be primarily PC games on there, as sharing console or handheld screenshots and other media is a bit more of a faff, but if you want to see what I’m up to and share your own thoughts on games I’m playing, feel free to drop by and leave a comment.

I’ll be leaving my various Twitter accounts and my Facebook page active in order to share things like these blog posts and my other content from around the Web, but I won’t be actively checking them, so please don’t use them to try and get in touch with me. No, really; I’ve turned off notifications on my phone and everything, so if you try and say something via one of those means, I won’t see it.

I’ll be continuing to post here each and every day, sporadically on my new site and (hopefully) weekly on MoeGamer. Those are the best ways of keeping up to date with what I’m doing and having a chat with me, so feel free to follow and comment on any of them.

Hopefully stepping away will allow me to regain a little perspective and a lot of wasted time on a daily basis. If nothing else, it’s probably healthy to get away from relentless negativity, particularly when I’m already depressed and anxious.

Thanks for reading if you came this far; hopefully I’ll hear from some of you elsewhere on the Internet sometime soon.