Occasionally you encounter someone who is everything you hate, who is everything you don't want to be and worry you are, and is just so loathsome that you almost admire them. You'd stop hating exes long before you stop hating this person, and your every interaction with them seems designed by the other person to be fingernails on a chalkboard for you, no interaction with you goes by without them doing something to raise your pulse, no interaction with other people goes by without them doing something to raise your pulse, and every interaction becomes worse just by the thought that they might become part of it. The world is a worse place because they are there, there is not a thing they touch that they don't slime, and not a thing they do that does not seem designed to make themselves feel better at everyone else's expense.
And then you find out they're dead. And you don't celebrate, you just feel bad. And then you find out the circumstances in which they lived, and you feel even worse. You wish that there could have been some circumstances in which you could have seen the good in the person and they did not seem so gleefully filled with hatred. You can only imagine the life experiences which made them that way, and it fills you with a kind of horror. What terrible things about the world must they know to become the person they became?
And of course, you only know this person from the internet.
And then you take stock of yourself. You begin to wonder, did this person react to me the way they did because you are in fact closer to that way of being than you can possibly realize? And then you begin to question every interaction of your own; interactions in which your choices made perfect sense in the moment but when viewed with the distance of days, months, years, even hours, you wonder: am I that guy? And if I am that guy, what has made me that way? And even if certain things made me that way, what does that matter if I have contributed to making other people the same way; a state of being I do not wish on my worst enemy, even that guy who is now dead?
The internet attracts malcontents. There are two types of people who post on it regularly, the people who post the darkest parts of themselves - outrage, dehumanization, even antisocial behaviors... and then there is a second kind of exhibitionist who posts on it: the people in denial of their dark side, who simply want to convince others of their wonderfulness, and believe that perhaps in convincing others, they can convince themselves.
Either behavior only makes people feel worse, and makes people feel need to spew more rage and seek more approval. People gravitate to internet addictions because they have exhausted the possibilities of social interaction in their personal lives, and whatever affinity and togetherness they don't get from the people around them, they have to seek elsewhere.
The internet was created to bring the world together, and in a way it has, but everyone with whom we have not been brought closer together we feel farther away from than ever - and perhaps feel more rage toward people with whom we have animus than we ever did in the years before a troll could shitpost. And it's made all the worse by the fact that we don't actually know these people, because that means that our frustrations online may ultimately be emptied on our real life interactions.
There are so many miserable people out there, far more miserable than anyone reading or writing this post. Mentally ill people who can't leave their homes, physically ill people who can't leave their beds, and both for decades. But even for those who are not miserable in that particular way, what are we doing here? So many of us are on the internet because we find ourselves without enough purpose or meaning in real life, and here comes this place we didn't even know existed thirty years ago, a place to scrawl around all the various bits of wisdom and judgement we think we've accumulated, only to find that all too many others on the internet don't appreciate our wisdom or judgement any more than they appreciate us in the physical world.
It's probable that nobody has ever known why we were deposited on this planet. Every one of us has some responsibility for our misfortunes, but none of us asked to be in troubling situations, we all did the best we could with the hands we were dealt, many of us were dealt bad hands, and while we hope that future generations will be dealt better ones, we have no way of being certain they will.
But I do believe there is a way of learning from it. The pandemic has made the internet responsible for our lives to an extent it never could before, even in the heyday of Trump's government by tweet. The internet was practically the only way we all kept in touch, and whoever we were two years ago, we have all changed in the meantime more than at any point in the last 30 years, and that's even after the years of Trump, when the liberals among us have never experienced fear to such an extent, or 9/11, when the same happened to conservatives. The pandemic, whatever your opinion on it, was a universal experience shared by everyone in the world, and whatever your perception of it, it forced everyone on Earth to rethink their priorities.
For the first time in years, my social anxiety went waaay down. Hardly anybody would believe me if they found out I think myself an introvert, but it's true. Motormouthing was just the way a desperate kid with torrentially consequential learning disabilities found to cope with his many anxieties, which never went away, and resulted in him finding ways over the years to repay the bullying deposited upon him on many other people. It's not bragging to say that I've been very good at humiliating other people for decades, I have much experience in how to do it,... but the satisfaction in being the court jester who knows how to make a party of drunks laugh is extremely fleeting.
Some of us learn all too late that we have to be very selective in our interactions. Some of us learned to crave acceptance from people that we would never get when much of the real acceptance comes simply from doing the activities we love - be it sports, reading, music, hiking, whatever else. Being among people is a whirlwind, the potential for 'drama' and misunderstanding is astronomic, and inevitably none of us say what we mean or mean what we say. You often don't know which friendships will stay time's test until it's much too late, and all you have left of them is regretful memories.
'Things' are not forever, but 'peace' can be forever, and peace is as often as not procured through the inner life - whatever it is in the inner life that gives you satisfaction, be it music and books, or baseball and football.
One day, hopefully sooner rather than later, those of us who take to the internet will find the companionship we seek in real life, be it through love or friends, but in the meantime, activity is the key to getting us through the other side, where life is peaceful enough that others want to spend significant parts of it with us. A book is not a substitute for a friend, but it is a much better substitute than the internet. Books, music, sports, movies, walking and running, these are activities that, unless you do them competitively, can't judge you or tell you how inadequate you are. They're routine, they're regulation, they're prayer, they're a way to keep up the spirit and hold you together through the next anxiety fueled interaction.
As nice as it is to find out that there are other people who share our passions and broadcast our findings to them, nothing is a substitute for the thing in itself. The inner experience is the ultimate reward, and nobody, not even people who hate you, can take that away.
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