I don’t know why it is, but against what logic I can muster, the ease of cynicism and negativity is somehow more draining than the effort it takes to make the attempt to find some small glimmer of positivity. Maybe the contradiction is easily explained by the sheer abundance of disparaging comments and thoughts that I find myself presented with on a daily basis, or maybe a hopeless, terrible world built piecemeal weighs too heavily on the soul. The bottom line though is that I have found myself feeling much like Bilbo Baggins described, being “butter spread over too much bread.” The realization that the feeling stems from an overabundance of negativity is something that I’ve been flirting with on and off for a while – I had previously completely stopped paying any attention to the news for example, and whenever it comes up in social media I find myself distressed by it and what reactions it garners. Why it took me so long to extend the teachings of this lesson into other aspects of my life is troubling, but the steps that I am taking now make the old idiom of “better late than never” apt.
Internet Comments & reddit
Somehow over the past few years I became a “redditor,” a user of the site reddit that aggregates user-submitted posts and links to new stories. While it is possible on reddit to get news quickly and see some neat user-created content, the trade-off is a “democratic” cesspool where vile, backwards comments are rewarded with high visibility as a bunch of like-minded people pat themselves on the back and take pride in a false shell of “discussion” that they claim to value. The irony is that there are internal factions within reddit that try to counter the biases of the site while resorting to the same petty, childish, ignorant tactics that they themselves decry. The result is that from the view point of a lone individual, reddit is irredeemable and any effort spent to improve the site is wasted.
