My desire to just leave behind anything even remotely related to social media is difficult to fulfill in the modern online age, unless I just outright hopped off the Internet entirely. Despite ditching Twitter, hardly ever using Facebook to begin with, and long since having dropped off of whatever else I’ve been on prior, there’s still elements around that I wish weren’t so obsessive to be there on any site. Apparently even Neocities, the current web host I’m using, bills itself as a “social network” but it feels like it’s more for marketing to appeal to those used to that. It’s really up to whoever’s on the sites to acknowledge its presence, through the following and comments and even likes being present. I generally choose to ignore that because I just want to have a site of my own to try to gather my thoughts before I go absolutely insane from talking to myself without putting it in text first. Yet I’m still interested in the wide variety of sites on the host, even with the increasingly questionable stuff that some sites have. That is just the Internet after all.
Despite generally using Twitch as a main source of video entertainment at this point, I really feel like I don’t get the chat room aspect now. Maybe I just see it as a bleedover from whatever social media the other people there are from. Maybe that’s just it, my tendency to be antisocial popping up again. I hardly find any desire to be popular, I don’t know how to best interject into conversations anyway, also some chat rooms are just so populated I don’t even bother going into those. But part of the whole experience is user interaction. If I ever decided to stream again, I would probably want to have chat open. On the other hand, I can’t just hand out bans if they talk about things I don’t want to talk about at that moment because that’s just overly controlling. Maybe if I were to be banned from every other chat room instead, but not to the point where it would be from me being a menace to the site, it’d be a blessing in disguise.
What I end up feeling is just not belonging. Perhaps it’s the isolation getting to me. Not being in the outside world much just makes it that more unknown, and I start getting convinced that someone out there is after me. Even despite making recent supply runs and people behaving well and minding their own business and not trying to stab me. With conventions, the way I was managing to break further out of an obsessive introversion, being outright banned until kingdom come I can only assume, I don’t see many opportunities for getting out there that aren’t just business. It’s not like I want to “cure” my introvert tendencies, I don’t think it’s healthily possible to radically change in-built personality traits in that way, but I want to be more open. I want to know what to say, but generally have no reason to say things anyway. It’s why I’m not some kind of webcam YouTuber wandering into abandoned places to mock corpses.
What the Internet to me was back in the days of middle school, where I was just old enough to not have to deal with making my parents fill out paperwork to go on sites because of some weirdly written law, was a place to play Flash games and then maybe go to a forum to talk about a video game. It wasn’t so much argumentative about who to pick for some office you don’t even know what it does, to put it lightly. I knew there were sites to not go to for grown-ups. I was generally well-behaved online, even though there was a possible stigma about playing games that could somehow break the computer, I tended to also avoid the ones that were just viruses. I never got into MMOs due to not having parents willing to pay for the monthly fees, but now it’s just me not willing to pay the monthly fees, as well as put in the hundreds of hours to reach some increasingly high level cap.
I think a lot of the habits have attached themselves to me today, where all I want to do online is watch video games and then write posts about playing the ones I actually play. There’s a select few times where I can have online chats, but I don’t really feel like I encounter many people who I could do that with, and that seems fine, as long as I’m just with good people. I just also have to be good people. If I’m just outright terrible and not thinking with my head on straight, that’s not very friendly. If I keep the feelings about everything in, that’s just casually suicidal, due to stress effects being physically harmful. Trying to keep things in a not-fast-paced manner, so I can actually figure out my feelings instead of just being reactionary as social media encourages, is how I should deal with things, and how I do, through this site thing.
I try to not let the complete collapse of society get to me, but seeing as it’s a major event at least on the planet scope, it’s hard to not think about. My worries are less about what I’ll do and more about what everyone else will do, for those way more unstable who plan to go murdering everyone in sight for no particular reason and so on. If somehow a social contract could exist without a society where people just generally don’t care about each other and let others do as they do unless they’re some immediate threat. I also don’t foresee the Internet existing without a society to structure it, or more the backing structure of it such as power and server maintenance.
I would be more concerned about the power, but there are things such as wood stoves to make it through winter at least. It may just feel a lot more boring once I go through all the books. My reasoning for solar would be less for saving money and even the “green” aspect, rather self-sustainability. It’s just pricey as all hell as essential stuff can be as well. Maybe something to look into once money stops existing or I somehow evolve into the upper class as the middle class goes extinct. If I get rich, I swear I won’t be some asshole about it, or you have full right to obliterate me with the other rich jerks. Other people can have my money if I have too much of it, as long as they’re not rich jerks either. But again, that’s if money still exists.