I Have a Problem – I Both Hate and Love People and Communities

I have this problem. I've written before about how I eschew social media nowadays, etc, etc, etc... but bad habits are very hard to drop, especially when “being on the internet and talking to people” is the one thing I've consistently done for the last 32 years of my life. However, after two years off... whenever I try to go back to any sort of community, I literally get sick and stay sick for the remainder of the day. I hate it.

Where to start...

Okay, so I check the Etsy forums in the mornings because the news always sucks and my primary vocation is a tiny business I run on Etsy. I want to know what's happening in my business world. However, I know this is folly. The Etsy forums are a barely-moderated nightmare full of angry jackals looking to tear apart anyone who asks any sort of question. The names that pop up and do the tearing apart are always the same names, too... how do these people have the time?

I don't go in there expecting people to be nice to me or expecting to see nice and kind and flowery things, either. I go in there knowing what I'm going to see, prepared to be the Jackal Destroyer. For I am an angry jackal on the internet, too... I'm just angry at all those other jackals... the ones that make everything Not Very Fun AT ALL.

But being an angry jackal doesn't feel good. My body releases a shit-ton of whatever chemical comes about when you're preparing to fight. I can feel it flooding my system. Maybe it's adrenaline because after I come down, I feel shaky and kind of sick to my stomach and a little dizzy like I do after some near miss in my car or some similar adrenaline-spiking moment.

Except in those instances there's a spike and then it falls. When I'm arguing with jackals on the internet, it's a constant flow coursing through my body, and it just keeps making me feel sicker and sicker until I lose most of my day. I'd say this was a recent development, but I know it's not... it just wasn't until recently until I experienced life without that feeling.

It's gross, too, because I feel it a little right now, even though I know anyone reading this can't respond to it and make me feel like shit with their jackal-y answer. I gotta wonder... who else feels like this every day and doesn't even know it's interacting with the internet that's causing it? Doesn't know that they can get relief by stepping away?

I mean, relief from that, but not from the very human desire to want to reach out and be a part of a community of people who will support you and be kind to you, even when you're wrong. That's the kicker, right? It's easy to be kind to people when they're right. It's hard to be kind to them when they're wrong. Even harder to be gracious when you realize you were wrong.

Which is why I think so many people are so confidently wrong about things... and I'm not talking things that contain the nuance of opinion. I'm talking about things like verifiable, factually correct concrete parts of our world that can easily be looked up on the computer in everyone's pockets. They don't want to be wrong because they don't like how it feels.

This also explains a lot about why my mom never took accountability or apologized to me when she was wrong. She was always the type of person to make emotional decisions and then to never ever ever re-examine those decisions in less emotional contexts. I've found that's a common denominator among a lot of people raised in dysfunctional families of one form or another.

I'm pretty sure it's why soooooooo many people on the internet would rather just be angry wrong jackals and lash out at anything and everyone... and what I've discovered is that even being an angry RIGHT jackal doesn't actually do any good because just like my mom, all of these folks don't want to feel the discomfort of admitting they were wrong. There's no way to 'fix' these folks, no way to get them to see reason, no way to help them understand that what they're doing is just making the whole community worse and unusable.

The only winning move is not to play the game.

That sucks.

It sucks because there was a time, some 30 years ago, when the bright-eyed, idealistic, eternally hopeful young me looked at the possibilities of the future of the internet with glee and excitement. I was weird. I was different. I could find all my weird and different people online. This was great!

Capitalism destroys everything, though. It's made people believe they never have to experience discomfort, which has just led to everyone experiencing pain. Cool. Cool cool cool cool.

Don't believe me! Always fact-check everything you read on the internet through multiple sources. Here's a list to help.