It's all politics now
On this last day of February I've finally figured out it's time to totally break from just about everything on the Internet for the foreseeable future. It's all politics of one kind or another, even what is seemingly innocuous (example: when you're talking about why you're not going to pay for a certain security product because it's from a company in a certain country...that's politics folks). People are stuck in the news, so busy fighting for their own ideas online they've seemingly forgotten that real life is happening outside the news, offline.
I was recently reading an installment of Oliver Burkeman's "The Imperfectionist" newsletter (highly recommended) called "Reality is right here" where he talks about this situation:
I’ve been puzzling for a few years now over a shift I first noticed around 2016, when various acquaintances – and me too, in some ways – started doing what I called “living inside the news.” They seemed to view the world they accessed through news sites and social media as somehow more real than their immediate surroundings. The latter was a place they merely dropped into from time to time, before hurrying back to the main event.
It's become so much worse since then. I have to admit having to laugh when Burkeman said this:
It surely can’t be right, even if it were possible, to act as though the news didn’t exist. On the other hand, I think I may scream if I encounter one more newspaper column informing me that “now is not the time to turn away,” while offering no suggestions as to what that might entail besides working oneself into a frothing rage that somehow only ever ends up aiding one’s opponents. So what are you meant to do?
That is one of the things that has pushed me over the edge but not the newspaper columns where I've certainly seen that in opinion piece after opinion piece. Mastodon and Bluesky are full of this stuff. Civilization is about to collapse! Now is not the time to turn away!!!
Well, sorry I disagree. For me right now is most certainly the time to turn away. It's time to turn inward for a bit and get away from all of this. There are millions of others fighting the good fight and I'm going to leave it to them for the moment.
I'll leave the last word to Burkeman as food for thought:
Although don’t forget that one hour per week spent making the planet a better place, and the rest having fun, is preferable to eight hours per day spent angrily or anxiously thinking about how things ought to be different.