a destructive habit i've been training myself to abandon is seeking anger with deliberation. in it's less harmful forms this looks like checking AITA all the time or looking for awful Instagram poetry to roll your eyes at. more insidious is seeing an expression of solidarity go viral on twitter and reflexively scoping the replies for naysayers. tossing aside the empowering essence of a message in favor of the hopelessness suggested by the existence of its opposition. for a lot of my life i would do this so reliably that seeing expressions of solidarity on social media would make me sick to my stomach in advance. i didn't even need to see the replies anymore. i merely needed to imagine them.
if i was on Team Suffering i would be giddy hearing that solidarity itself had been robbed of its power on social media. this habit is poisonous. it has to stop.
This kind of habit is so insidious. I used to catch myself seeing terrible takes from terrible people and then spending half an hour browsing their profiles just to confirm to myself that they were terrible and to justify my anger. The mental damage we reflexively inflict on ourselves is ridiculous.