#oneaday Day 1008: When it doesn't feel like your world any more

I've had a few days… possibly weeks, even months… where I've been feeling frustrated at all manner of things about the world in general. It's not one specific thing, it's just a general sense of annoyance at life in general in 2021. And I'm sure it's something that everyone goes through, particularly when they reach the point in life that I'm at — but I've just been feeling it in a particularly pronounced manner of late.

I'm frustrated with the way people communicate online. While once I remember online being a wonderful place where people really felt like they could be themselves and let their true personalities shine — even if they were shy and awkward in real life, like I am — these days it doesn't feel like that's the case any more. Everyone is "performing"; everyone is trying to make sure they say the right things, look the most beautiful, get the most viral posts. Very little feels like actual, honest, genuine conversation any more.

I saw someone — I can't find the original tweet, unfortunately — describe Twitter as a place where there are no real friendships, only combatants. I'm not sure I'd quite go that far — though I have seen plenty of situations where people who were supposedly friends with one another end up at each other's throats over the most stupid things. Hell, I've experienced it myself in more than one instance — quite recently even. I won't bother you with details, but needless to say I was extremely disappointed that someone I'd previously had a lot of respect for (supported on Patreon, even) had apparently drunk too deeply of minor social media victories and become an insufferable git in the process.

There's definitely endless attempts for one-upmanship going on. Everyone is streaming, so everyone has a schedule and no-one is actually watching one another. Everyone has a humorous take on the latest news, except it's actually the same joke several thousand other people have made in the last five minutes. Everyone has a library of predictable gifs and reaction images to post in lieu of actual conversation. Disagreements are marked by nothing more than the word "ratio" rather than actual discussion. And the worst thing is, the world seems to be latching on to its own increasing insufferability and catering directly to the most annoying elements of itself.

I read a post earlier about how Netflix makes its thumbnails, and the whole thing frustrated me. Not because it was a boring post — it was actually quite interesting — but because the whole algorithmic bullshit that is actually going on in pretty much everything you do online these days feels like it's insulting my intelligence. Except apparently it's not insulting anyone's intelligence, because supposedly people really do make a decision on whether or not to, say, watch a TV show or movie in the space of about 3.8 seconds or whatever it was — and thus a specific, tailor-made, robotically produced, algorithm-friendly thumbnail is needed. One that is colourful, one that has an individual person (preferably a villain) on it looking at the camera with a distinctive facial expression. Because that's what we're conditioned to respond to.

Like I say, I can't really pin down why all this stuff bothers me when it's just the reality of life in 2021. I guess the way I'd sum it up is by saying that it feels increasingly like we're living in a real-life cyberpunk dystopia despite the myriad warnings we've had against such things from fiction over the course of the last half-century or more… and when you can sort of see things for what they are, you can't help but wonder why more people can't… or won't.

I guess the thing to do is just grit your teeth and try to remove as many sources of frustration as possible. But it seems like every time you do that, something else becomes massively irritating or gets "redesigned" into something infinitely worse, too. Such is the endless cycle of things, I guess.

Anyway. I'm off to go and play Pretty Girls Mahjong Solitaire, eat a sandwich and cry myself to sleep or something. Hope you all have a pleasant weekend!