tangentspace replied to your post: I keep saying I need to spend less tim…

i think i can relate to this, except i do not tend to think of tumblr as very homogeneous

I don’t think tumblr as a group of people is really very homogeneous, but I guess the reason I think of it as (somewhat) homogeneous is that it’s almost impossible to use tumblr and not regularly encounter posts that have 10,000+ or 100,000+ notes.  And often those posts are kind of homogeneous – there is a distinct voice, or set of voices, in which they are written, and certain ways of presenting opinion and emotion and the like that tend to show up in those popular posts.

(And just as there are “popular posts” there are also “popular posters” – not necessarily the people making those 100,000+ posts, but people whose posts frequently get hundreds or thousands of notes and whose names I recognize even though I’ve never followed them or wanted to)

So when I talk about “tumblr culture” I’m not really talking about the behavior of anyone I follow, except insofar as they do reblog these posts – but then, the posts do often have good qualities, which is how they get so popular.  (Or sometimes they have no good qualities but people reblog them to argue with them.)  I don’t follow people I don’t like, but even if you only follow people you like, existing on tumblr means coming into contact with “the kind of material that gets big on tumblr” and that stuff has some definite … regularities, I guess.

I keep saying I need to spend less time on the internet, or at least on tumblr, or at least reconfigure tumblr somehow so it makes me feel bad less often.  I never end up doing it, though.  I should work on that.

Internet culture and “tumblr culture” in particular are just not a very good match for my issues, I think.  I worry about the possible consequences of actions and often end up talking myself into inaction because of unrealistic worries.  One of the most basic genres of online content is “look at this person who did an incorrect thing (let’s laugh at them / be angry at them / etc.)”  Of course this only reinforces my tendency towards inaction – if I ever do anything I’m risking being one of those people.  (You almost never see people shamed for inappropriate inaction or silence.)

And tumblr valorizes anger and has pretty specific (often implicit) standards for how to “properly” express things like emotions.  I worry a lot about how if I try to express my emotions I won’t do it in the “right” way and people will find it offputting, incomprehensible, etc.  In particular I really clearly do not feel like I have the right to express anger (some recent experiences have made this obvious to me).  So the valorizing of anger on tumblr really messes with my mind because it feels like “everyone else should do this thing, but you shouldn’t do it (because you are different, not human, a robot, etc.)”

And tumblr views people as suspect if they seem too calm or like they’re trying to be too “objective.”  But I find these people comforting because at least I can explain myself to them, at least they’ll try to understand me for the sake of objectivity even if I don’t know how to package my emotions in the culturally “correct” way.  In that online argument a week ago someone said “my only allegiance is to the truth” and the person he was arguing with relentlessly mocked him for it (and for being “too literal,” etc.) and even started using “my only allegiance is to the truth” as a sarcastic tumblr tag.  Because, I dunno, “the truth” is always-already political blah blah blah yes I went to college too.  But to be honest, statements like “my only allegiance is to the truth” make me feel comfortable with people because it means they’ll try to understand me for the sake of the truth even if they find me offputting or strange, even if I “scan wrong.”

Basically the internet feels like it is full of people telling me I should be even more irrationally worried than I am, and also that the kinds of people who make me feel comfortable are suspect and probably evil.  This is not good.  I need a new hobby (that I can actually stick to).

Therapist tried to convince me to go the journal club but I was feeling too bad after our meeting to want to do it, so I came home.  I think it was the right decision.

Also, thanks to everyone who responded to my post earlier this morning saying they had the same issue – it makes me feel a lot better about it.

Clearly I am functional enough today to see my therapist, provided I can get myself into the shower and out of the house on time.  (Seeing my therapist is kind of a special case among responsibilities, in that it may be more useful if I am less functional.)

Maybe I should skip my other “responsibility” today.  It’s an informal journal club.  This week the leader forgot to send out the papers we will be discussing until 11 AM today, the day of the meeting.  I can’t imagine the discussion will be very good, I surely won’t be able to read and comprehend the papers in time, but I will still feel bad about myself the whole time for sitting there and not being able to say brilliant things about them.  Since the club is informal, I am not sure if there is any expectation, even an informal one, that I come; it’s supposed to be something I’m doing for my own benefit.  But who knows.  Grad school is confusing.

I have this problem where it frustrates me when other people are clearly smarter or more capable than me, not because I’m especially competitive or anything, but because I assume that I’m clearly “below normal” at all of the “normal human” stuff and need to have hypertrophied “special abilities” to compensate.

Like why can’t I just be satisfied with being pretty good at some stuff and not the best in the world, which I clearly am not?  Normal people are satisfied with not being the best in the world.  The answer is: “because I feel like I am very bad at being a normal person and need to feel I have vast, world-class ‘redeeming qualities’ to make my existence worthwhile.  An absent-minded professor has a place in the world, but what about a person whose mind is just absent?”

This is probably not an accurate feeling but it won’t go away.

According to Goodreads stats, I’ve read a lot fewer books, and a lot fewer pages, in 2014 than in either 2013 or 2012.  (I mean, the year isn’t over, but I’m really clearly not keeping pace)

The biodeterminist side I inherited from my dietary supplement-obsessed father wants to think this is somehow related to Lexapro, but really I suspect it’s just because there’s more going on in my life and I have less use for books as a novelty source when there’s nothing else going on.  Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Not sure my mood is good enough to work today, so as usual in such cases the goal becomes “get off the internet and read a book, because you can, and book will probably make mood better while internet will probably make it worse”

The internet is depressing today.  Should stay off and read a book when I’m not working

I got 2 hrs of sleep last night and am about to fall asleep but there’s something I want to say about this tumblr, I guess because I don’t want to mislead people when I write soapbox posts like I did last night.

This is, and always has been, completely a personal blog.  Usually if I write anything more than a few sentences, I’m writing it because it’s been going through my mind and it feels good to have it somewhere out there in the world.  This is also why a lot of my posts are pretty long – if I post about something it’s usually been churning around in my mind for a while, much of it already formed into words.

I’ve been doing this for a long time – I did it for years on LJ before I got a tumblr.  It’s a pleasant thing to do and it improves my life.  I’d probably be doing it in a private journal if I hadn’t started out doing it on blogging services and gotten used to that, but I’m glad I ended up doing it this way because it also lets me meet people.

But I feel like I need to put something like one of those “this does not constitute legal advice” disclaimers on my whole blog – except it’s “this does not constitute anything but the personal noodling of one random dude who claims no particular expertise or distinction.”

This blog will not Educate You, unless I just so happen to feel like talking about something I actually know stuff about.  I don’t strive to focus on the most important issues, or only say things that pass some standard of quality I have for my blog, or anything like that.  Sometimes I may be completely full of shit and I may still talk about the thing just because it’s on my mind.  

I guess I’m only posting about this explicitly because I feel like it may not be as clear as it could be.  I can seem detached and academic at times, but even then I’m always choosing my topics for personal reasons, not because I think of myself as some sort of great analyst of anything.  The recurring topics on this blog are recurring because I’m fascinated with them and they come to my mind a lot, not because I necessarily think they’re particularly important or that I have anything new to say about them.  It’s all personal blogging, even the abstract, detached kind of stuff.  And if you like what I say, that’s cool and I’m flattered, but remember I’m saying it just because it’s on my mind, not because I’m trying to have a Real Blog about my Super Credible Expert Opinions or something.  Not legal advice, I’m not a doctor, your warranty is void, read at your own risk, etc. etc.