2541: Farewell

This is my last daily post on this blog, to coincide with the last hour of the last day of 2016. I’m not going to rule out posting on here again when I feel like it, but this is the last of my daily entries. I feel that the exercise has run its course, and I’m definitely satisfied with what I’ve accomplished over the last 2,541 days.

Why am I stopping now? Well, it’s part of a broader plan I outlined a few days ago. I want to unplug and get away from the constant noise of online culture in 2016. It stopped being fun a good while ago — roughly coinciding with the rise of the outrage brigade who love nothing more than using their social media clout to shame people for enjoying “problematic” material — but it’s also been becoming increasingly apparent that the reasons I’ve been keeping my social media accounts active for as long as I have simply don’t seem to be the reasons other people keep them active.

On previous occasions when I’ve considered deactivating my Facebook and Twitter accounts — Facebook in particular — the thing that has always stopped me is the thought that “oh, people won’t be able to get hold of me easily, since everyone uses Facebook nowadays rather than anything else.” But over time it’s become apparent that while everyone does indeed use Facebook, pretty much the last thing they use it for is keeping in touch with other people. Rather, the inherent encouragement of narcissism in modern social media encourages people to post everything about their lives — or rather, everything in a heavily edited, idealised version of their lives — in an attempt to make other people feel like they should be having more fun/sex/babies/delicious meals/strong opinions about Donald Trump. And while that occasionally leads to heated debates in comment sections, it very rarely seems to lead to good conversations.

Twitter comes at it from a different angle. I’ve heard Twitter described as being like going to a party where everyone is shouting things at the room in general hoping other people will come and join the conversation, and that’s a fairly apt description. The particular trouble with Twitter is that its original selling point — its 140-character limit, intended to encourage people to “microblog” rather than post walls of text — isn’t conducive to nuanced discussion and debate, which leads to particularly obnoxious behaviour when people of differing ideologies and/or opinions about which anime girl is hottest come into contact with one another.

In short, I’ve been finding social media to be more trouble than it’s worth, so I’m unplugging from the noise in the hope that those people who do value my friendship will make use of other, more private and personal means of contacting me rather than everything being aired in public. And this blog comes under that header, too.

This blog has been valuable “therapy” for me over the course of the last few years, which have been, to say the least, rather challenging and difficult for a variety of reasons. I’ve faced many obstacles — some of my own creation, some by other people being colossal jackasses and my not really having any power to do anything about that — and, while I wouldn’t say my life is where I want it to be in the slightest, I feel that I’ve grown stronger as a person as a result.

But I feel like I need to start a new chapter. Leave behind the past, and look forward to a hopefully brighter future. It’s not easy to shed emotional baggage — not to mention the physical baggage that mental stress can leave you with — but severing my ties with the past, be they social media accounts or indeed this blog, feels like the right thing to do right now.

I’m not disappearing entirely, mind you; as I mentioned in my previous post, I still intend to keep writing weekly on MoeGamer, which will become my main place to write about games I’ve found particularly interesting or exciting, so I encourage you to subscribe over there if you like what I’m doing. And for more general writing, I’m starting up a weekly TinyLetter — effectively a small-scale mailing list — for personal notes to those of you who have been kind enough to show me friendship and support over the last few years. If you’re interested, you can sign up for that here. (Those of you for whom I have email addresses already, I’ll be taking the liberty of signing you up automatically at some point on New Year’s Day; I hope you don’t mind, and if you do, please rest assured that if you decide you don’t want to receive my notes, you can unsubscribe easily.)

Aside from that, though, at this point in my life I feel like broader Internet culture just doesn’t hold the value it once did for me, so out the window the unnecessary crap goes for 2017. I’m not encouraging any of you to follow my lead and I’m certainly not casting any judgement on those of you who still find value in social media and Internet culture at large; I’m simply saying it’s not for me, and explaining where I’ll be going if you do want to find me.

If you’d like to stay in touch more privately, please either subscribe to my TinyLetter — which you can reply to just like a normal email — or drop me a message via my Get In Touch page with your email address and/or any other contact details you’d care to share.

For those who have supported this blog for any period of time — be you lurker or regular commenter — thank you, good night, and I wish you a happy, healthy and hearty New Year. Here’s to 2017 being a better year for everyone.