It has been some time since my last entry. To be completely blunt I think I’ve had a touch of depression which has completely zapped my motivation for many things including blog writing.
Over the past couple years there have been momentous changes, most of them negative. There is the political downward spiral lead by Trump and MAGA. The collapse of civility, the rise of “angertainment” and the polarization of the USA is lead by these Neanderthals. I remain in complete shock how their idiocy has been able to sway half of my countrymen.
There is the constant drumbeat of change and negative news in my industry for the past couple of years. This takes a toll.
For this post, I’m going to place the final blame on the internet. Social media is a poison. I heard a phrase last year that came from an old newspaperman who called it the “Daily Me.” Now it is post after post of people posting pictures of themselves. The algorithms of the big technology companies have been successful in hacking the minds of billions of people. These people now are addicted to the dopamine created whenever someone likes the picture they posted of themselves. Day after day another picture, looking for that subtle rush. The business world is not excluded thanks to LinkedIn. Post after post of a salesperson being “excited” yet again, from another business update. You would think these businesspeople would get tired of being in a constant state of “excitement.” I’d liken it to the village idiot running around raving about each modest improvement.
“I’m so very excited that Farmer Bob has harvested his crops!”
“I’m really excited to share that my neighbor has cut his lawn! Wow, it makes the neighborhood look so great!”
“We got some rain yesterday! We got rain every week but yesterday’s rain really made everything clean again! This is so very exciting!”
My social feed thus has become a daily drumbeat of people posting pictures of themselves and being “excited.” I feel like I’m in a movie where things continually get more absurd and the audience is wondering how long the protagonist can last until they go completely mad.
I will add one more and that is the fact that I’m now forty five. Time passes quickly and I can no longer consider myself “young.” I’m very glad to have grown up in the ’80s and ’90s which were much better times than what we are all experiencing now. But in a society where money, fame, sports are absolutely worshiped, one wonders if they have been successful enough.
All of these things have contributed to my feeling a bit down. My thoughts are rarely of the happy, uplifting sort and are mostly negative. Even if I wake up on a good note all it takes is one look at the news to see what atrocity, what idiocy spouted by MAGA has occurred recently. All of this takes a toll on a man and I feel as though I want to cut myself off from society completely and go become a hermit somewhere.
Well, I’m glad I could get this post down as the motivation to write something has completely dried up recently. Even if I feel as though I should write something the depressing feelings stop it before I can even open the browser.
Yesterday, I was able to shake it off a little bit and got a number of things done which helped improve my mood a little. These are small things like cleaning the fishtank, organizing my upstairs workspace where I’m now writing, reading a book.
I try to reason myself out of the funk but it is there like a dark cloud. It causes physical effects such as lethargy and the desire to sleep more. The only way out, I think, is to exercise, meditate, turn off the news and social media and distance myself from it all.
