Preamble: I’m doing this because I have some feelings I need to get out of my head for my own mental health, and thusly I am just as guilty of doing what I am condemning in this post. Also, I started writing this before fully thinking it through so if it seems like my post doesn’t follow the title exactly that is why.
Pretty much as the title says, I truly believe humanity in general was never meant to know, or let others know, everything that happens in their life good or bad. The reason for this is that it is impossible to explain nuance with just words, you need verbal and/or face to face communication to adequately explain to people situations in your life. Just saying something bad happened to you on the internet doesn’t really explain to people how bad it was to people. You know what does let people know how bad of a situation you are in is? Having an emotional breakdown. It’s ugly, and terrifying to most people, and it should be because it lets people know you are going through real shit.
People can discount and simplify horrible actions on the internet without adequately experiencing the pain of the victim. They can easily ignore proof, or add what they think is context, but is actually just an excuse to victim blame. It’s easy to logically, or illogically in some cases, explain things away without taking into account how the person in the horrible situation felt. This is not me trying to victim blame, but it is me trying to say that victims having easy access to a place to post their trauma to the world without having access to proper care does not really help them in the long run, and can in fact make things worse. Yes, I am aware how loaded “proper care” is, but that is not point of this post. I do think people need to “vent” (I’m simplifying extremely here because victims do not simply “vent”) their feelings for their own mental health, I just do not think that doing so to random strangers on the internet who are not interested in listening is in the best interest of anyone who needs to vent. Most people on the internet just want to “solve” the problem. They want the problem to go away. That’s about it. I will not go into it here because this post is already long enough, but the other side is that people were also not meant to ingest random people’s trauma.
Classic case of know your audience. I don’t think this is going to be a particularly unpopular opinion here. I know my personal anecdote doesn’t mean everyone else agrees with me, but myself and most people I know with social media have dramatically backed off. I think if it weren’t for fb shoving strangers and paid content in my face, my feed would be dead. As it stands I only even log in for my bootleg weather guy’s posts.
It could be that people backing off social media is why it seems to have gotten worse on some platforms. If all the dissenting voices leave it is easier to believe you are correct. I have also stopped using social media as much since Reddit went to shit. That kind of opened my eyes to how volatile typical social media is. I pretty much only look at social media to see if someone I watch is live, but mostly I’m on Twitch and YouTube just to watch videos. Every time I look at the comments I regret it.