Dreamer's World April 3 2016 - The Downside to Social Media

I love to write. I love to communicate with other people, and the Internet is a wonderful tool for doing so. It does have it's drawbacks however and today I have reached the boiling point with some of those drawbacks.

My Twitter feed is polluted with nothing but garbage, I suspect it is one of the campaigns by groups of people to blast everyone else out of their on-line existence via concentrated tweets. Regardless, I am done with Twitter for the time being, if not for good. The purge is underway today, but then I realized the utter futility of my action. Why am I letting this shit get to me? It makes no difference at all what people say or do on Twitter or any other site. It is my response that generates my feelings, and that I can control.

I am done with Twitter for a while. When I venture back, I will not take the time to tolerate or respond to any bullshit, I will just start a slow process of unfollowing and blocking the users who waste my time. This might well lead to my leaving Twitter altogether, but I can accept that. The key is to not just respond immediately because that plays right into the hands of those who provoke for no reason but to get a reaction in the first place.

Just when I was finishing with that rant, the same thing happened, or rather something that just hit me the wrong way at the wrong time, on Face Book. An old Navy buddy, well more acquaintance since it has been years since we last spoke, put out the brazen announcement that anyone who did not cut-and-paste a statement proving that they were actually following his time-line onto their own time-line would therefore be considered no longer a friend to follow. Once again, I saw red but was much quicker to calm down this time. If he has to plead for people to follow him by displaying that type of subservience, then it certainly isn't worth my time to be bothered with him.

The key to all of this is Life goes on. We have a huge degree of influence over our own reality if we choose to exercise it. People from an on-line world mean nothing. Friends who have morphed into nothing more than on-line presences are exactly the same. I took a long time to realize that people genuinely act the way they want to, it takes effort to maintain a friendship or an acquaintanceship. It is hard work and I simply don't have the time or the inclination to allow those people to dictate my life.

Life is always better with friends, but life is better without fakes and posers pretending to be friends than it is to pretend that these people actually care.