To whoever needs to hear this, which at the very least of all means me: you will not find the answers to the political discourse that's been bothering you (or any "non-political" discourse, for that matter) at the end of a 4 hour social media doomscroll, you will find them in conversations and interactions you have with people in the Real, Offline World, and *very often* the answer will be "Wow it turns out that this thing that's been suffocating me and seemingly omnipresent in the corner of the internet I spend all my time in is Not a Real Issue in any meaningful sense of the word, I've just been chronically online, almost no one in real life actually thinks like this, and the people who do are just as chronically online and detached from the rest of the world as I've been". Most of the rest of the time, the answer will be some variant of "It's complicated" and/or "There might be an answer to this, but we wouldn't actually be accomplishing anything useful by finding it".
Emphasis on shared goals and actionable steps towards achieving them will always trump pursuits towards political correctness and lexical debates in their fruitfulness. Theoretical frameworks will never be sufficient to capture the messy, tangible world we live in, and you cannot capture the shape of someone's life through the words in their tumblr bio. Someone who feels the need to downplay your issues to elevate their own is, as a general rule of thumb, not someone who is going to show up for you when your house is the one on fire, and not generally worth keeping in your entourage (and yes, it would do you well to make a conscious effort to not be this person, either). Be wary of people who employ Othering and "us vs them" tactics in their politics, as well as black and white schools of thought beyond that, no matter how closely their beliefs, values, and experiences align with yours. A tar pit that agrees with you is not worth standing in.
Most people's actual opinions on things are far more nuanced and complicated that what they express online, be it directly through their own posts or indirectly through what they share. People who cannot develop complex opinions on complicated topics and extend genuine compassion when confronting other points of view are seldom worth worrying about. Most people will be more willing to hear you out in person, one-on-one, than online. It is okay to have complicated feelings about things, you do not need to collapse them into absolutes or "pick a side". No one will see the world exactly the same way as you do and you have to learn to be comfortable with that. The fundamental problem with binaries is not that we just haven't found the right one yet. The internet does not like or favor nuanced opinions or intellectual honesty.
Social media is only community in the way that a microwave meal is food. No demographic is a hivemind, and you can not determine what the "average" person thinks from a tumblr tag any more than a subreddit thread, which is to say you can't at all in a way that matters. I will keep saying this, you actually need to go out and talk to people. That thing that seems like the all encompassing topic on the internet right now is almost certainly not gonna matter to anyone on the internet in 10 years and will more likely than not be regarded as a stupid and counterproductive thing to have argued over in this first place. You will change your mind about countless things you feel strongly about now, and so will everyone around you.
Curating your online experience will never be a moral failing, and in practicing it consistently you will find that your perceptions of "what matters" and "what people think" are extensively informed by who is in your vicinity. The more you interact with people off of the internet, the better. The less time you spend on social media, the better (but especially if it is consistently making you unhappy). It is genuinely so vital that you hang out with your irl friends. Don't spend your life on your phone chasing a perfect soul that doesn't exist. The world is so much bigger than this.
You need to look at what you're spending these precious seconds of your life doing right now and ask yourself if it's worth it. Your joy matters. I mean that, Your Joy Matters.
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
dededos
2087
izzy806
yousharknotpass
