Well written and fascinating as usual. As a late-comer to social media, I'm not your average user. As you may have noticed, I'm rarely brief in my posts and comments. Earlier this year, I posted something mocking those who think every hand gesture from a stage is a Nazi salute, by a picture from the news featuring David Hogg using such a gesture. Some left-leaning person picked it up to mock me, and it got a ton of comments. Some wanted to "correct" me because I failed to note that a raised arm to the side with a closed fist was TOTS different from a raised arm to the side with an open hand which is TOTS the same as a Nazi salute with a raised arm to the front. I found it amusing because the insults meant nothing to me. Eventually I wrote a post mocking those who mocked and insulted me, rather than engaging them in a comment war. Since I'm retired and well enough off, I don't feel threatened. But, of course, that makes me an anomaly.
Like you, I'm appalled at the deranged people who think they must dedicate their lives and commit felonies to support people they've never met and never will meet and whose suffering they know nothing about and might even be imagined. I worry about how the artificial online world is carrying over into people's real world lives. I suspect you're going to take that up more in a forthcoming essay in your suggested series. I suspect that the lack of an actual body with real feedback mechanisms, including pain, and a real inner drive will prevent the kind of artificial intelligence that people fear and warn us of.
The addictive dopamine hits that the algorithms reward are really nothing new, just intensified by the instantaneousness and ease of reply. "News" has always been designed to try to influence us by appealing to our primal instincts (greed, hunger, fear, fright, and lust) that bypass our rational thought processes. When confronted with real people, it's harder but certainly not impossible to imagine them as imminent threats that must be dealt with without thinking.
BTW, I also write notes, but rarely longer things, in only one case, but for me, my upper case letters are easier and more legible. My parents both had beautiful handwriting. Unfortunately my own is often unintelligible even to me.
The deliberate addiction aspect of social media is one of the most fascinating aspects of modern life. Do you know why, when you load Twitter, there's a *slight* delay before you see the number of notifications? Because of research into gambling addiction, which identified the precise delay point that causes the maximum dopamine and makes addiction the likeliest. That's why.
I also want to make two more comments that are beside the point. First, and most trivially, my only objection to same sex marriage is that it causes me grief in ontology creation, by making deductions about the term husband and wife ambiguous. Polygamy or polyamory is a whole different matter to me. Of course the whole multiple genders thing is even worse for ontology creation.
Also in re the Shiloh incident. I saw another one of those made for outrage videos yesterday. A motorcyclist was in the next lane to an SUV as they drove down a freeway. It wasn't totally clear in the video, but obvious to me, that the cyclist was flipping off the SUV driver. The SUV driver swerved and ran the cyclist off the road. Clearly, none of us online had any idea of what went on before, but my experience with obnoxious bikers may prejudice me some. Seems certainly to be a case for unnecessary use of force, but then my mind also went to, what if it's also a case of FAFO? I think the online answer to all such videos is, none of my business. The courts will have to sort that one out. When I was very young and insisted to my mother that we needed what I'd just seen on a TV commercial, my mother calmly explained to me that people lie on TV, that what I saw was advertising puffery. We need to learn to raise kids with that kind of social media awareness.
“Because of research into gambling addiction, which identified the precise delay point that causes the maximum dopamine and makes addiction the likeliest. That's why.”
You have just illustrated why people should avoid the Twitterverse at all costs 😲
Holly you always enrich my life with your incredible insight. I noticed something Josh posted the other day about not trusting people online because you don’t really know who they are or if they will turn on you. I felt a little sadness about that and I don’t even know him so there is that too. There is an opportunity to support each other as well and I think after reading this that I will try to be more intentional about that.
Like Frank, I am also a late-comer to social media (and then, only Substack). And that was a deliberate choice. I have never trusted Facebook or Twitter, or whatever else is out there. I suppose subconsciously for some of the same reasons you're writing your series.
Beyond the algorithmic manipulations, the largest problem I see is the de-humanization of social media. As you've pointed out, we only get one-dimensional views of real people, with real bodies and real lives with all kinds of joy and trauma.
Viewed from a distance, the idea of having "friends" without ever seeing or smelling or touching them is ridiculous on its face. Similar to enjoying nature by watching old Disney movies.
A good antidote is disconnecting from the screens and getting out into the sun, and the wind and watching the shapes of the moving clouds. At least for me, at least once a day.
Articles like this one remind me of just why I read your work, Holly. You touched on something I'm constantly reminded of -- this shit ain't real life. My experience is that if you can't see the person you're communicating with, you don't pick up the nuances needed to set the tone of the interaction. Words get misinterpreted. People misunderstand and take offense when none is intended. I've been more guilty than most, which is why I carefully choose with whom I engage.
I've had enough contentious interactions with people to last two lifetimes. Always, always, always, I end up feeling like crap and wish I'd kept my mouth shut (or fingers stilled). Unfortunately, God gave me a brain that remembers every harsh statement I've made to others, every slight, every sarcastic remark. Oftentimes it seems that I can't remember anything nice or polite that I've said, and it's depressing. Surely I'm not 100% asshole 100% of the time!
Or maybe I am.
I survive by keeping silent most of the time. Believe me, I could comment on every post. At 75, I've learned that I'm not gonna change the world. Not enough time left or energy available to do so, and who's to say I'd get it right!
Thanks for pouring your heart and soul into this Substack. We need more Hollies in this world.
It’s not real life, but it’s specifically designed to train our brains to react as if it’s more intense than real life. It’s sooooo dysfunctional. And here we are.
I suspect AI will render everything online as questionable, fake, fabricated, and annoying. My hope is that younger generations will rediscover the absolute creative joy of real, in-person interaction. Organically-sprouting conversations in real time, with wit and spontaneous laughter; friendships that grow out of shared real-world experiences and looking into each others’ eyes; personal growth and mutual understanding that result from interpersonal exchanges based on civility and kindness.
I’m 69, so I’ve had these kind of real-world friendships for decades. The online stuff is such a pale imitation that I have little interest in social media. There are a few priceless people on Substack for whom I’m willing to type out our ‘conversations’, but oh, how I wish I could spend time with them in a real-world setting.
Human beings should not lose this capacity. It’s the difference between black-and-white and color!
Right?!?!? When I got home from Josh’s the other night, I thought about this, and cried. I’d rather one glorious, wonderful six-hour stretch like that than years of six hours a day online. It’s so much better. Real, authentic, and so much less anxiety-producing. With body language, tone, energy, etc., real life is so much less anxiety producing than anything online.
I was JUST talking about this exact thing with friends last night. We couldn’t/didn’t, however, going to this depth of description and analysis of the issue (and just this one aspect of it). Your approach to pulling things apart and looking at them this way has, often, helped me get clarity on things that bother me and that I haven’t fully explored (even if I have already reacted; for example, the dynamics you describe, and my awareness of how they affect me and my perception of reality and other humans, got me to stop going on social media (although I guess now substack has become social media) several years ago). I so appreciate your writing.
Thank you for reading! And yes, Substack is social media. No caveats. I am trying to treat it the way Sundays were treated in an exercise/diet program called Body for Life that I did once — a cheat day. Sundays were designed for pigging out and being lazy, but you had to own it. You knew you that’s what you were doing. I’ve cut out Notes that were unrelated to my own posts for a few days now, which has been a positive change for me, but for the rest of it — yes, it is.
Never did MySpace, Facebook, Instagram Twitter, Blue Sky...because I know me. I don't reside in glass houses, can't handle it.
But I did open the door to YouTube, Substack and a few select podcasts. Enough to see the discord and extremism. Just enough to become dispirited over what looks like humanity circling the drain.
So I increasingly go analog, painting, walking outside, reading old literature, going to gatherings in person. Just to reaffirm that we're still all doing the best we can, even when we can't.
PS: I can write with both hands. The non-dominant left hand just happens to write in a calligraphy style. I do uppercase and punctuation to honor my late mother, the proofreader. :)
If I ever have lottery-win levels of money, I’m building a compound and paying everyone who matters to me whatever it takes to move them there. Because something like the evening with Josh that I described in this essay? A thousand times more edifying than all my best internet experiences combined. Easily.
From the bits of yourself that you've shared here, it's clear that your life has been orders of magnitude harder than most. While you've had to struggle with the resultant challenges daily, you also have an amazing ability to see the big picture that most of us miss while obsessing over the minutiae. Your assessment of the pro-Palestine student protests makes a lot of sense. Like another brilliant woman, JK Rowling, you had to rely on welfare for subsistence at one point in your life. I'm very grateful that it was there for you, and allowed you to become who you are.
Brilliant. Your original essay was probably the best thing I've ever read on social media and psychology, and it's very cool to see your thinking expanding further.
I've been wondering similar things recently, too.
I've worked with a number of people who meet the clinical criteria for personality disorders (BPD mainly), albeit at a level where they are able to make good use of therapy. The first thing you learn (brutally, if you don't catch on quickly) in this kind of therapeutic work is that while you are building trust you must be a "person" in the room first. "Therapeutic neutrality", too much psychic distance, a face that appears blank, etc is absolutely intolerable. Something must be projected and interpreted. Usually that projected "something" will be that this person is bad and/or threatening, and the attack or withdrawal will come. The same thing happens in cPTSD, although it usually looks more terrified than terrifying. All this is to say that interacting online and the flattening and decontextualisation that happens seems to produce the same results, amplifying and normalising pathology.
I have to remind myself often when someone has a go at me online that they are probably somewhere else in time entirely, usually hearing something other than what I have said. Projection arguing with projection, and everyone's unconscious dancing on the keyboard.
Yeeeeees, this exactly. The number of people who emailed me after that essay on autism a week ago, to argue points I didn't make, is a good example of that. I truly have no idea what those people thought they read, but it wasn't what I wrote. In some cases, what they read was literally the exact opposite – the mathematical inverse – of what I wrote.
I can imagine. Which also gets me thinking about how everyone can also end up warping how they might normally converse online to adapt to the pathology even when they are aware of it.
It's funny you mention that post, I did something similar in my comment on that post (adding a disclaimer about my beliefs re the most likely origin of what I understand ASD to be, as opposed to conditions that might mimic the symptoms) and I went away feeling a bit yuck about that. Because I knew I wasn't responding to what you had *actually* written in that part of my reply, but I felt the need to do it to avoid the possibility of angry people trying to "educate" me in the comments (which is something I absolutely did not have the spoons to manage at that moment).
I wonder about the things people don't write about because they don't have capacity to stand up to the pathology their insights might draw no matter how many disclaimers they add.
Great article! You put into words how I feel about social media, how it ultimately strangles our souls and dissolves our ability to think. There is a devilish feedback loop where an algorithm stimulates a strong emotion to draw us in to be fed more content, stimulating more emotions and spiraling into an addiction. Even though I stay clear of most forms of social media, I've still been dragged into a quagmire of irrelevant information gathering on various platforms, hamstrung by my curiosity and a strange desire to learn more about the world so I can get angry about it. I can feel social media affecting how I think, with the information I consume massaging my brain into subconsciously accepting conclusions that I would purge from my mind during a detox. This manipulation that I feel happening yet am hard pressed to stop is infuriating, as its an erosion of my psyche.
I find that social media becomes less corrosive when it is used by fewer people at one time. A small population means that some echo of a real life community can form via repeated interactions. Meanwhile, any trolls or bots (LLM based or otherwise) are less likely to poison the well simply due to obscurity. Still, there are pitfalls.
Text is an inherently limited media since there are few options for communicating emotion. Word choice is the only acceptable way of doing so, though /s (sarcasm) and ALL CAPS are sometimes used to dubious effect. Hence, it is difficult to express emotion. Very positive and a wide variety of negative emotions can be easily expressed, but nuance? Much harder. I try to phrase things as well as I can, to ensure that my messages are understood with the intended tone and emotion. I usually succeed. But sometimes, I fuck up. Badly. And end up contributing to the flaming wreck that is the internet. Every one of these mistakes is a failure which contributes to the feedback loops which hook people onto the internet. Hence, I'll try to do better and make sure I don't make the same mistakes in the future.
Maybe there was a time in my life where I would’ve thought less of a person for not using capital letters in their writing. But now I am more likely to think it could be an outward indicator of an internal brokenness. Either way it will always be a severe irritation should I witness it. Not that the person exhibiting it would be diminished in my view. But I think it is likely due to the fact of my own brokenness, my need for walls. Walls to provide boundaries. Walls to make me feel safe. Walls that hem in my sanity lest it leak out.
I may have the subconscious realization that if such a person would defy such a commonly accepted social convention, what else are they capable of. Maybe I would have the subconscious thought that this is a dangerous person. But as you have probably recognized by now, this is more about me than others. It is about my own dysfunction.
This is both exactly what I needed to read and *exactly when* since I have had two instances in the last week where your clarity and grace are the only answer - one, about seeing a friend's politics and trying not to judge, the other, struggling with a friend who dismissed me rather than trying to understand what I was saying. I appreciate your words and wisdom, Holly, thank you.
Well written and fascinating as usual. As a late-comer to social media, I'm not your average user. As you may have noticed, I'm rarely brief in my posts and comments. Earlier this year, I posted something mocking those who think every hand gesture from a stage is a Nazi salute, by a picture from the news featuring David Hogg using such a gesture. Some left-leaning person picked it up to mock me, and it got a ton of comments. Some wanted to "correct" me because I failed to note that a raised arm to the side with a closed fist was TOTS different from a raised arm to the side with an open hand which is TOTS the same as a Nazi salute with a raised arm to the front. I found it amusing because the insults meant nothing to me. Eventually I wrote a post mocking those who mocked and insulted me, rather than engaging them in a comment war. Since I'm retired and well enough off, I don't feel threatened. But, of course, that makes me an anomaly.
Like you, I'm appalled at the deranged people who think they must dedicate their lives and commit felonies to support people they've never met and never will meet and whose suffering they know nothing about and might even be imagined. I worry about how the artificial online world is carrying over into people's real world lives. I suspect you're going to take that up more in a forthcoming essay in your suggested series. I suspect that the lack of an actual body with real feedback mechanisms, including pain, and a real inner drive will prevent the kind of artificial intelligence that people fear and warn us of.
The addictive dopamine hits that the algorithms reward are really nothing new, just intensified by the instantaneousness and ease of reply. "News" has always been designed to try to influence us by appealing to our primal instincts (greed, hunger, fear, fright, and lust) that bypass our rational thought processes. When confronted with real people, it's harder but certainly not impossible to imagine them as imminent threats that must be dealt with without thinking.
BTW, I also write notes, but rarely longer things, in only one case, but for me, my upper case letters are easier and more legible. My parents both had beautiful handwriting. Unfortunately my own is often unintelligible even to me.
Thank you -- interesting as always.
The deliberate addiction aspect of social media is one of the most fascinating aspects of modern life. Do you know why, when you load Twitter, there's a *slight* delay before you see the number of notifications? Because of research into gambling addiction, which identified the precise delay point that causes the maximum dopamine and makes addiction the likeliest. That's why.
Fascinating.
I also want to make two more comments that are beside the point. First, and most trivially, my only objection to same sex marriage is that it causes me grief in ontology creation, by making deductions about the term husband and wife ambiguous. Polygamy or polyamory is a whole different matter to me. Of course the whole multiple genders thing is even worse for ontology creation.
Also in re the Shiloh incident. I saw another one of those made for outrage videos yesterday. A motorcyclist was in the next lane to an SUV as they drove down a freeway. It wasn't totally clear in the video, but obvious to me, that the cyclist was flipping off the SUV driver. The SUV driver swerved and ran the cyclist off the road. Clearly, none of us online had any idea of what went on before, but my experience with obnoxious bikers may prejudice me some. Seems certainly to be a case for unnecessary use of force, but then my mind also went to, what if it's also a case of FAFO? I think the online answer to all such videos is, none of my business. The courts will have to sort that one out. When I was very young and insisted to my mother that we needed what I'd just seen on a TV commercial, my mother calmly explained to me that people lie on TV, that what I saw was advertising puffery. We need to learn to raise kids with that kind of social media awareness.
“Because of research into gambling addiction, which identified the precise delay point that causes the maximum dopamine and makes addiction the likeliest. That's why.”
You have just illustrated why people should avoid the Twitterverse at all costs 😲
At least rational ones anyway.
Holly you always enrich my life with your incredible insight. I noticed something Josh posted the other day about not trusting people online because you don’t really know who they are or if they will turn on you. I felt a little sadness about that and I don’t even know him so there is that too. There is an opportunity to support each other as well and I think after reading this that I will try to be more intentional about that.
Like Frank, I am also a late-comer to social media (and then, only Substack). And that was a deliberate choice. I have never trusted Facebook or Twitter, or whatever else is out there. I suppose subconsciously for some of the same reasons you're writing your series.
Beyond the algorithmic manipulations, the largest problem I see is the de-humanization of social media. As you've pointed out, we only get one-dimensional views of real people, with real bodies and real lives with all kinds of joy and trauma.
Viewed from a distance, the idea of having "friends" without ever seeing or smelling or touching them is ridiculous on its face. Similar to enjoying nature by watching old Disney movies.
A good antidote is disconnecting from the screens and getting out into the sun, and the wind and watching the shapes of the moving clouds. At least for me, at least once a day.
Articles like this one remind me of just why I read your work, Holly. You touched on something I'm constantly reminded of -- this shit ain't real life. My experience is that if you can't see the person you're communicating with, you don't pick up the nuances needed to set the tone of the interaction. Words get misinterpreted. People misunderstand and take offense when none is intended. I've been more guilty than most, which is why I carefully choose with whom I engage.
I've had enough contentious interactions with people to last two lifetimes. Always, always, always, I end up feeling like crap and wish I'd kept my mouth shut (or fingers stilled). Unfortunately, God gave me a brain that remembers every harsh statement I've made to others, every slight, every sarcastic remark. Oftentimes it seems that I can't remember anything nice or polite that I've said, and it's depressing. Surely I'm not 100% asshole 100% of the time!
Or maybe I am.
I survive by keeping silent most of the time. Believe me, I could comment on every post. At 75, I've learned that I'm not gonna change the world. Not enough time left or energy available to do so, and who's to say I'd get it right!
Thanks for pouring your heart and soul into this Substack. We need more Hollies in this world.
It’s not real life, but it’s specifically designed to train our brains to react as if it’s more intense than real life. It’s sooooo dysfunctional. And here we are.
“It just means I still believe clarity is worth chasing — even from inside the mess.” Indeed.
If you do not know where you are, how can you possibly know where you are going?
I suspect AI will render everything online as questionable, fake, fabricated, and annoying. My hope is that younger generations will rediscover the absolute creative joy of real, in-person interaction. Organically-sprouting conversations in real time, with wit and spontaneous laughter; friendships that grow out of shared real-world experiences and looking into each others’ eyes; personal growth and mutual understanding that result from interpersonal exchanges based on civility and kindness.
I’m 69, so I’ve had these kind of real-world friendships for decades. The online stuff is such a pale imitation that I have little interest in social media. There are a few priceless people on Substack for whom I’m willing to type out our ‘conversations’, but oh, how I wish I could spend time with them in a real-world setting.
Human beings should not lose this capacity. It’s the difference between black-and-white and color!
Right?!?!? When I got home from Josh’s the other night, I thought about this, and cried. I’d rather one glorious, wonderful six-hour stretch like that than years of six hours a day online. It’s so much better. Real, authentic, and so much less anxiety-producing. With body language, tone, energy, etc., real life is so much less anxiety producing than anything online.
I was JUST talking about this exact thing with friends last night. We couldn’t/didn’t, however, going to this depth of description and analysis of the issue (and just this one aspect of it). Your approach to pulling things apart and looking at them this way has, often, helped me get clarity on things that bother me and that I haven’t fully explored (even if I have already reacted; for example, the dynamics you describe, and my awareness of how they affect me and my perception of reality and other humans, got me to stop going on social media (although I guess now substack has become social media) several years ago). I so appreciate your writing.
Thank you for reading! And yes, Substack is social media. No caveats. I am trying to treat it the way Sundays were treated in an exercise/diet program called Body for Life that I did once — a cheat day. Sundays were designed for pigging out and being lazy, but you had to own it. You knew you that’s what you were doing. I’ve cut out Notes that were unrelated to my own posts for a few days now, which has been a positive change for me, but for the rest of it — yes, it is.
THANK YOU!
Never did MySpace, Facebook, Instagram Twitter, Blue Sky...because I know me. I don't reside in glass houses, can't handle it.
But I did open the door to YouTube, Substack and a few select podcasts. Enough to see the discord and extremism. Just enough to become dispirited over what looks like humanity circling the drain.
So I increasingly go analog, painting, walking outside, reading old literature, going to gatherings in person. Just to reaffirm that we're still all doing the best we can, even when we can't.
PS: I can write with both hands. The non-dominant left hand just happens to write in a calligraphy style. I do uppercase and punctuation to honor my late mother, the proofreader. :)
That’s very cool about being ambidextrous!
If I ever have lottery-win levels of money, I’m building a compound and paying everyone who matters to me whatever it takes to move them there. Because something like the evening with Josh that I described in this essay? A thousand times more edifying than all my best internet experiences combined. Easily.
There is something about this that really speaks to me, since I would do the exact same thing.
From the bits of yourself that you've shared here, it's clear that your life has been orders of magnitude harder than most. While you've had to struggle with the resultant challenges daily, you also have an amazing ability to see the big picture that most of us miss while obsessing over the minutiae. Your assessment of the pro-Palestine student protests makes a lot of sense. Like another brilliant woman, JK Rowling, you had to rely on welfare for subsistence at one point in your life. I'm very grateful that it was there for you, and allowed you to become who you are.
Brilliant. Your original essay was probably the best thing I've ever read on social media and psychology, and it's very cool to see your thinking expanding further.
I've been wondering similar things recently, too.
I've worked with a number of people who meet the clinical criteria for personality disorders (BPD mainly), albeit at a level where they are able to make good use of therapy. The first thing you learn (brutally, if you don't catch on quickly) in this kind of therapeutic work is that while you are building trust you must be a "person" in the room first. "Therapeutic neutrality", too much psychic distance, a face that appears blank, etc is absolutely intolerable. Something must be projected and interpreted. Usually that projected "something" will be that this person is bad and/or threatening, and the attack or withdrawal will come. The same thing happens in cPTSD, although it usually looks more terrified than terrifying. All this is to say that interacting online and the flattening and decontextualisation that happens seems to produce the same results, amplifying and normalising pathology.
I have to remind myself often when someone has a go at me online that they are probably somewhere else in time entirely, usually hearing something other than what I have said. Projection arguing with projection, and everyone's unconscious dancing on the keyboard.
Yeeeeees, this exactly. The number of people who emailed me after that essay on autism a week ago, to argue points I didn't make, is a good example of that. I truly have no idea what those people thought they read, but it wasn't what I wrote. In some cases, what they read was literally the exact opposite – the mathematical inverse – of what I wrote.
Social media is a pathology machine.
I can imagine. Which also gets me thinking about how everyone can also end up warping how they might normally converse online to adapt to the pathology even when they are aware of it.
It's funny you mention that post, I did something similar in my comment on that post (adding a disclaimer about my beliefs re the most likely origin of what I understand ASD to be, as opposed to conditions that might mimic the symptoms) and I went away feeling a bit yuck about that. Because I knew I wasn't responding to what you had *actually* written in that part of my reply, but I felt the need to do it to avoid the possibility of angry people trying to "educate" me in the comments (which is something I absolutely did not have the spoons to manage at that moment).
I wonder about the things people don't write about because they don't have capacity to stand up to the pathology their insights might draw no matter how many disclaimers they add.
Amazing article as usual, and even though I may not agree with everything you write, I am most certainly willing to give you the mercy of nuance.😇
Also keep in mind that if you do ever get that ultimate bunker, you'll have to stock it with plenty of stuff for Josh's cats as well!
Great article! You put into words how I feel about social media, how it ultimately strangles our souls and dissolves our ability to think. There is a devilish feedback loop where an algorithm stimulates a strong emotion to draw us in to be fed more content, stimulating more emotions and spiraling into an addiction. Even though I stay clear of most forms of social media, I've still been dragged into a quagmire of irrelevant information gathering on various platforms, hamstrung by my curiosity and a strange desire to learn more about the world so I can get angry about it. I can feel social media affecting how I think, with the information I consume massaging my brain into subconsciously accepting conclusions that I would purge from my mind during a detox. This manipulation that I feel happening yet am hard pressed to stop is infuriating, as its an erosion of my psyche.
I find that social media becomes less corrosive when it is used by fewer people at one time. A small population means that some echo of a real life community can form via repeated interactions. Meanwhile, any trolls or bots (LLM based or otherwise) are less likely to poison the well simply due to obscurity. Still, there are pitfalls.
Text is an inherently limited media since there are few options for communicating emotion. Word choice is the only acceptable way of doing so, though /s (sarcasm) and ALL CAPS are sometimes used to dubious effect. Hence, it is difficult to express emotion. Very positive and a wide variety of negative emotions can be easily expressed, but nuance? Much harder. I try to phrase things as well as I can, to ensure that my messages are understood with the intended tone and emotion. I usually succeed. But sometimes, I fuck up. Badly. And end up contributing to the flaming wreck that is the internet. Every one of these mistakes is a failure which contributes to the feedback loops which hook people onto the internet. Hence, I'll try to do better and make sure I don't make the same mistakes in the future.
Maybe there was a time in my life where I would’ve thought less of a person for not using capital letters in their writing. But now I am more likely to think it could be an outward indicator of an internal brokenness. Either way it will always be a severe irritation should I witness it. Not that the person exhibiting it would be diminished in my view. But I think it is likely due to the fact of my own brokenness, my need for walls. Walls to provide boundaries. Walls to make me feel safe. Walls that hem in my sanity lest it leak out.
I may have the subconscious realization that if such a person would defy such a commonly accepted social convention, what else are they capable of. Maybe I would have the subconscious thought that this is a dangerous person. But as you have probably recognized by now, this is more about me than others. It is about my own dysfunction.
I feel sorry for you that something so absurdly minor and having nothing to do with you can affect you so terribly. It sounds like pure misery.
I really do appreciate your sympathy. That is only the tip of the iceberg. Most people seem to see my dysfunction as an irritation at best.
Beautifully written with heart and sparkling clarity, the rare kind of writing that stays with me for a long time.
Very kind; thank you!☺️
This is both exactly what I needed to read and *exactly when* since I have had two instances in the last week where your clarity and grace are the only answer - one, about seeing a friend's politics and trying not to judge, the other, struggling with a friend who dismissed me rather than trying to understand what I was saying. I appreciate your words and wisdom, Holly, thank you.