#oneaday Day 3: Talking is Exhausting

I’m sure discussing things with people online wasn’t always as exhausting as it feels these days.

I have some extremely fond memories of time spent on 1up.com’s forums and “club” pages talking about games with a varied crew of folk, all of whom had come together through our shared interest in the video game medium. We didn’t always agree on things, but that made for interesting discussions as we strove to understand one another’s viewpoints. There was no shaming, there was no telling each other we were wrong (apart from on one podcast, where a couple of participants got a little more heated than a reasonable person perhaps should over whether Fallout 3 was playable from the third-person camera) and there was just a nice atmosphere of mutual respect.

These days, it’s becoming more and more of an effort to open my virtual mouth online in places supposedly made for “discussion”, because to a disproportionately large number of people, “discuss” appears to mean “disagree vehemently and aggressively”. And it’s inevitably over something that simply doesn’t matter, but the nature of such exchanges make it easy for hot heads to prevail and things to get stupidly, absurdly aggressive over an absolute nothing of a subject. (No, I’m not citing specific examples, for reasons that I hope are already obvious.)

This is a disappointing development to me, because 20 years ago, I would have sat here and quite confidently said that on the Internet, I could be my “real” self much more than I could be in “the real world”. I actually do still feel that way to a certain extent — outlets such as this blog, MoeGamer and my YouTube channel allow me to express myself in the way I want to, rather than how I’m “supposed to” — but even in those places, there’s always the risk of some weirdo turning up and getting weirdly angry about something which absolutely does not matter.

Thing is, I sort of get it. I get why those people exist, because there are times when I’ll read something online and I’ll feel my own heckles rising (you feel it start around the balls) and contemplate posting some sort of snippy remark in response. Most of the time, I’ve conditioned myself to not do that. Occasionally one slips through, and I pretty much always regret it, because it inevitably leads to a disproportionately furious argument over something I actually don’t feel that strongly about, because the whole “sense of honour” thing kicks in and you want to save face, no matter the cost.

It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting when you get pulled into situations like this, and it’s exhausting making an effort to avoid situations like this, because it’s very easy to take things much too far and end up simply not wanting to talk to anyone. I have definitely reached that latter end of things, as there are times when I feel extremely lonely but unable to reach out to someone because I simply don’t have the mental fortitude to be able to fully process how today’s online interactions tend to work.

I think about this sort of thing quite a lot, and when I do, I always end up asking myself if it’s really worse than it used to be, or if my perspective has just changed. And honestly, I’m not completely sure of the answer to that. I suspect it’s a bit of both, because I know I have deliberately changed my online habits for the sake of a quiet life — but then I’ll look at something like this legendary thread from Usenet circa 1997 and see that people getting really very cross about things that don’t matter was still a thing back when I thought the Internet was much nicer.

I guess the difference is that there was a certain “barrier to entry” for the “tougher” parts of the Internet back then; I never went on Usenet, so I never saw any of that sort of thing. These days, that aggressive means of interacting with one another is just the norm; social media has become what Usenet was, only rather than being neatly segregated into interest groups, everyone has all been plunged into the same vat of boiling piss to fight it out among themselves and see who has the loudest voice. I’m aware that was an utterly tortuous metaphor but I don’t care. My blog, my rules.

The other difference, of course, is that today I am aware of my own mental health conditions, including depressive and anxious episodes that occur sporadically, along with my underlying condition of Asperger’s. Being aware of why I find certain things about socialising difficult is useful, but it can also make me feel more hesitant than I perhaps “should” be to engage with certain scenarios.

I don’t really have a conclusion for all this; I just felt like thinking “out loud”, as it were. And so there you have it. Now I’m off to go and eat chilli.

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