✨ ana in space ✨

gotta be honest, being on social media has been so boring to me recently because it's like 2% posts about things i like and the rest is stuff i just don't care about. naturally decreasing the amt of time i'm on those places as a result is good, but also... leaves me with very little else to do except feel unrest and boredom. i'm trying to find other things to fill the hours but it just feels more empty than usual. it's not fun.

Summer sucks so fucking bad. Can it just be november already

i feel like there's something to be said about this sort of phenomenon on social media where we hear a certain story that's gone viral and within the same day, it's meme-ified to hell and back with little disregard for the gravity of the story...

granted, sometimes the people in question deserve a little ridicule, given that a lot of these stories end up being about privileged people who have never had to face consequences a day in their life, and they can take a little ribbing on social media and otherwise get to continue on with their lives. but i don't know. sometimes i'll laugh at a joke based on something in current events, but more often i just want to sit with the more righteous feeling something causes and think about it on a deeper level without having to reduce it to just jokes? and social media doesn't really allow for that. in fact it seems to often require the opposite, that you to engage with an event with as little insight as possible as long as you can make it funny for some likes.

in general, at least for me, it prompts in a really exhausting drain on my empathy.

it's going to sound wild but maybe not so much that the most recent occurrence of this was a media spectacle two weeks ago surrounding the whole like "govt provides proof of alien existence" thing. which, i will note, has already (blissfully) flashpanned its way out of the social milieu. you had one camp who are dead set on recirculating this as "irrefutable proof" that aliens exist, except it's nowhere near that-- it hasn't proven to be little more than the 900 other times someone has said "aliens are real, source: trust me bro," though the actual testimony in question wasn't even that egregious. then you had another camp who, assuming it was real, paraded their apathy about something that would fundamentally alter the course of human existence with complete and utter glibness. "who cares if we're not alone in the universe?? i got bills to pay!!"

those people were probably being facetious, but it doesn't really matter if any of these people were being facetious or not--that's my point. the facetiousness crowds out everything else. it rises to the top and drowns anyone from actually just sitting down with a topic and examining beyond face value. the only voice of taking it thoughtfully were people who had already bought into the conspiracy theory. and that is exactly the point in this timeline where i need everyone in the world to just shut the fuck up for a second.

after feeling like shit because i just hated everyone and their stupid fucking takes for a few days, of course i got over it. but it did make me realize that this kind of engagement in social media is exactly the line i draw in what i can and cannot consume thoughtfully or empathetically. it drains something in me that takes so long to build back. and i have got to find ways to leave it behind. i think we all do, but... good luck getting others to agree to that i guess

I love that the amount of destressing i get from a day off is wiped out within about 3 days