Where do I go from here?
Cohost has fundamentally changed the way I use the Internet. I lived in the sea of Twitter-Tumblr, desperately checking my phone for likes and notes, tearing my life into pieces for fake Internet points. I was trapped in the dance of judging my entire self-worth on my metrics, constantly forced to form an opinion on all the worst things in the world.
Cohost brought me out of that. I saw a vision of a new Internet, one that cared less about metrics, and more about actual human connection. No need to be snappy, no need to care about likes, just... being human. It was like taking a breath of air after being underwater, lungs full to bursting.
(It was a similar feeling when, nearly exactly a year later, I started estrogen.)
So, now that it's going away... where do I go from here? Back to the cave, now that I've seen the sunlight? Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God, and tasted the eternal joys of heaven, am not tormented with ten thousand hells, in being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?
Now, that might be overstating my case a little. Cohost wasn't some utopia. It had its problems, (good lord, did it have its problems), and it was, ultimately, still just a website. But it played such an incredible role in my life in helping me get out of the Cave called Twitter.
And where else is there, on the Internet, that's doing what Cohost did? All the big social media sites are owned by tech conglomerates sucking as much lifeblood from their users as possible like an AI vampire. The Yesterweb is dead, too, because trying to manage a large community, any large community, is going to lead to burnout.
So, what? Do I just leave social media behind? Stick to chat servers (let's be honest, Discord servers, which is its own can of worms) and BBS boards and personal websites? The Fediverse sounds possible, but having every instance be managed by some petty baron lording over their own little fiefdom of Internet doesn't sound appealing to me either.
Honestly, I don't have an answer to where I go next. Maybe I should leave social media behind. Post my ideas to my own website. Start an RSS feed or something. But... I'll miss the friends I made here. Having my own website isn't social. There isn't connection there.
Fuck.
I was at Shoppers today, refilling my meds, when I noticed something, in the back-to-school section they dutifully put up for September. A little black notebook that declared itself a weekly/monthly planner. Only $10. I flipped through it, and saw twelve pages of an empty calendar, and fifty-two pages of an empty week. There was absolutely nothing special about it... except that it was real. I could feel it in my hands. I could take a pen or pencil and write in it.
At the end of Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, after Willy has spent the last two acts trying to convince himself and everyone around him that he's building... something, with his work at the sales agency, he's let go. All the intangible, social structures he's built around him evaporate, in the blink of an eye, and what does he do? He goes to the gardening store and buys seeds. He takes those seeds, and he plants them in his garden, because he can touch them. Feel them in his hands. They're something real.
When I was 23, I graduated from my local university with a computer science degree. I joined Cohost around the same time. In the over two years since then, I watched the tech industry catch fire with illusory hype cycle after illusory hype cycle, all for... for smoke and mirrors. Phantasmal riches, all built on... nothing. Some piece of data, somewhere in some datacenter. Now those phantasmal structures are evaporating as the bubble bursts, putting countless people out of work as they go.
I went to see a concert with a friend yesterday. We walked into an old theater, built in 1907 and still standing, every inch of the performance space a work of art, embellished with moulding and ornamentation. The concert was electric. It was incredible, to stand in a crowd, lost in a scene, just me and a friend and everyone else in the room, enraptured by the energy of the performers on-stage, live, flesh and blood.
Last week, I applied to my local trade college to learn how to weld, to go into the skilled trades, something I can do with my hands.
I bought the planner.
