I really hope you start feeling more like yourself soon... you’re going to need all that energy for the new stuff coming your way. Seriously, you've gotta look out for yourself first. I mean, who else is going to do it if you don't?
Honestly, nothing recharges my batteries quite like a long weekend or a holiday break. It gives me all the energy I need to dive back into some serious reading and get chatting with everyone here on the forum.
We all know how this works, right? People drift in and out, some folks barely ever post, and then there are those few who are actually friends with both sides—you know, them and me too. It’s just how it goes, I guess!
Jamie Adams6 said:I honestly can’t get hooked on anything because I just don't care for mindless chat or those subforums where the younger crowd hangs out—plus, I avoid that whole "talking just to talk" vibe and the endless emoji spam. I only really follow maybe three or four subforums regularly, and I mostly stick to writing on one or two specific threads while dodging the general chat topics entirely. With that many filters in place, even the mildest addiction is basically impossible.
Look, I don't have a problem with people hitting that 70k post mark. When you see all the ways people kill time nowadays, typing is actually the least of their worries. But there's a huge difference between being active in topical forums—like tech or health stuff—and seeing someone with 60 or 70 thousand posts who spends all day just chatting about absolutely nothing. Someone with a habit like that is almost certainly doomscrolling on Facebook or hopping between other sites too... how else are you supposed to form an opinion on it?
That article above isn't the first one to claim that internet usage causes social issues. Usually, the argument is that social dysfunction stems from addiction, but for a lot of people, it's actually the reverse; they struggle in the real world or deal with health issues, so they look for an escape online. People didn't suddenly become "socially maladjusted" just because high-speed internet became common in the US or because they signed up for a forum or some social media site. While I totally agree that social media acts as a "sort of escape from reality," saying that doesn't really offer any deep insight. People aren't actually stupid enough to miss that, but clearly, they struggle to handle things the way they want in real life, so they settle for whatever outlet is available to them.
...people aren't actually stupid enough not to realize that; it's just that in real life, things often don't go the way they want, so they take whatever outlet is available to them...
Yeah... exactly that... outlets are incredibly important. If hardly anyone understands me in real life—and yeah, sometimes I even try talking to random people, like older folks at a bus stop or a subway station—then in a massive city, I can end up feeling even lonelier than I actually am. A forum, and the internet in general, feels like a gift. It's a relatively comfortable place to be.
Yeah, relatively speaking... I mean, it used to be so much easier to just meet up with people in person, wasn't it? But what can you do nowadays? Still, there's no reason to lose hope.