Taking it easy has been doing me some good, I think — I've still got a lot on at work, but not putting too much additional pressure on myself outside of work is providing me with the opportunity to reflect on a few things. Most notable among these is exactly what has been causing me to be feeling such a sense of "struggling" lately.
I think for the most part it is down to a deep-seated frustration with today's online culture. And part of this is almost certainly me getting old and shouting for people to get off my lawn — but another, probably more significant part is the fact that the world of "online", as vaguely defined as that was, is a field in which I once felt like I "belonged", but no longer feel that way at all.
Put it this way: a good… probably 15-20 years or so ago, I would have quite happily said that the way I carry myself online is actually a better indicator of who I "really" am than the shy, awkward individual I might appear to be in reality, particularly when first meeting people. The reason for this was that when interacting with people online, I had confidence and I didn't feel judgement. There was a sense of acceptance, particularly if you found the right communities to be part of — birds of a feather flock together and all that.
These days, though, with the way in which online communities have all ended up mostly forced to hang out in the same place — social media — I feel considerably more uncomfortable. I'd go so far as to say that I feel like I'm experiencing social anxiety online almost as much as I do in person these days, and that really sucks — because communicating with people online used to be my outlet that made me feel better about having difficulty in person.
Now, I know that online communities outside of social media haven't ceased to exist completely, but for a long time the kind of "specialised" experience that I particularly enjoyed hasn't been a thing. It started back when 1up.com decided to merge its various forums into "Games" and "Not Games", which caused the average quality of conversation to plummet considerably, and I feel like it's rare to find a community willing to actually fence areas off for different types of people these days.
The biggest gaming forums out there mostly follow the "Games" and "Not Games" model (with some making the eminently wise choice of ghettoising political discussions) — whereas what I'm looking for is the experience I used to have back on the 1up.com Radio forums, which were primarily home to discussions of the 1up.com podcasts, but which also played host to the most articulate and intelligent conversations on the site. This was the days well before memes (even before "image macros") and certainly well before the tedious "stock responses" that people come out with today. I miss it.
And before you suggest it, Discord isn't the answer for me, either. Discord servers cause me no end of anxiety — not just from the social angle, but from the autistic "I need to clean up all these notifications, but they never, ever end" angle also. Discord is built in such a way that someone like me feels like they need to read everything, even if that is not in any way practical or desirable to do, and that absolutely does not work for me.
The upshot of all this is that I don't really feel like I have a place that I "belong" online any more — from a social perspective, I mean. Rice Digital is absolutely my "home" now, and I love both writing there and working with our team of freelancers on what we put on the site. That's great… but it's just one part of the equation. I feel great having a platform where I can say pretty much what I want to say — but it's not the same as having a group of friends with whom I can discuss my passions.
I guess this feeling is being compounded somewhat by the fact that most of my "real-life" friends seem to have very little interest in actually being the slightest bit sociable with me, even when I prompt them with occasional messages about things I thought they might find interesting or amusing, or suggestions of games they might want to play — or, heaven forbid, an actual invitation to come and visit.
In other words, I was already feeling pretty lonely and isolated in my day-to-day life thanks to this situation, and becoming conscious of how alien the online world feels to me today is just making me feel worse. I actually had a full-on panic attack last night that I'm pretty sure was at least partly caused by these feelings, and I don't really know what to do about them any more.
It's true what they say, I guess: the more "connected" the world is, the more isolated some people end up feeling.
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