IMO, Online Isn't Really A Social Life
Something I want to talk about when it comes to "having a social life" on the internet
This was posted on my SpaceHey account and decided to post this here as well.
People always telling each other that communicating online is an extension of one’s social life, or can be someone's entire social life. While I can understand how people think that, I fully disagree.
People can be anything online and anyone can present themselves as anything to cover up who and what they truly are. I can pretend to be Asian from the UK and no one would bat an eye. It’s completely normal, but it isn’t true for me. I’m not Asian or from the UK, but I can easily say this and everyone will believe it. I can easily lie and no one would question it, or end up looking like the jerk. This is when people know they can use this to their own advantage. Someone can pretend to be 19 years old, but actually be 40. People can pretend to be a girl, but is actually a dude. People can pretend to care about protecting children, but is actually a pedophile. The list goes on.
People can say anything just to fit in and don’t have to fully believe what they're actually saying online, like Twitter, where you have to have certain beliefs and opinions to even fit it. You can easily just say what others want you to say, and boom! You fit right in. Keep that up for the next several years until the next new set of beliefs that you have to pretend to believe in, while also pretending that the last things you said didn’t exist, or you can just delete them, because someone would take those and use them to cancel you.
This is why I don’t like the internet at this point. It’s mostly about pretending to be something/someone just to get some sort of attention, hiding skeletons in their closets, or trying to fit into a clique of people who are just awful anyway. It’s like school all over again. Immature slapfights about nothing because their feelings were hurt, or because they didn’t like a piece of fan art and how it’s drawn, people getting kicked out of fandoms because they don’t think the same as the others, and so on.
I personally stopped trying to involve myself in fandoms of anything because I know how it ends: someone(or more than one) starts hating on me because I don’t have the same opinion or they misunderstand what I said and it turns into a shitshow, leaving me no room to explain myself, or I just don’t fit in altogether and everyone just ignores my existence. Unless I act like a creepy obsessive freak over a fictional character, I’m just a boring person that should just get lost. At this point, I just post my original work and focus on things I really feel joy in.
I also see people pretend to love something when in reality, they actually hate it, and vice versa. People are weird...
Overall, people are fake, mean, creepy, and just immature. I don’t know how people can even make friends nowadays. You don't even know if you're friends with a murderer or not. I already have extremely trouble making friends as it is, and now I have all this crap as an obstacle...
Everything just seems surreal in the worst way possible. It feels like a nightmare...
Posted on 2022/03/12