Polluted interwebs

I wish everything wasn't online. Strange to say for a girl my age who's been pretty much raised on the internet. I actually have been on it since I was round 8 years old, but my usage ramped up after I turned 12, and I spent my whole teens and early to mid 20s on it. Interacting with the world at large through the Internet. Its golden age has long passed for sure. Now it has entered the age of inescapable hellscape. 

It's full of shit. The old Internet was great. You could just exist online. You could be as zany, as politically incorrect, as politically correct, as good or bad or creative or uncreative or whatever else as you wanted, it was good. There was a spot for you. There was no endless analysis of relationships and therapy speak at every fucking corner. There was no endless advertising, no endless corporatization, no monetization BS, no sanitized search results designed to push only the five biggest platforms and have everything else fall into obscurity. No pointless drama, or hardly. People were just here. I think this is something that we all cruelly lack in life: a space to just be. And like everything good, it ended up being taken away. Because we can't have nice things.

I was addicted to the web before it was cool. Back when I was 11-12 I had discovered memes and people didn't get what I was all about. They had no idea what Nyan Cat was. Or what This is Sparta was, or the Youtube Poops with Link and King Harkinian were. They weren't on their laptop 24/7 researching and talking and messing around like I was. 

Then 2016 ish rolled around and suddenly everyone knew what memes were. 2019, 2020. Everyone became terminally online thanks to Covid. Internet addiction wasn't so much really a thing anymore as it was an effect of the times (and perhaps it is not so much an addiction for me as it is... simply that it was my backdoor when I was younger, and I just ended up adapting to whatever I had, which was this very tool). Meanwhile, I was already feeling like maybe it would be good to return to more analog things. I noodled around with Neocities, Ichi.city and the likes in 2022 and 2023. 

2025, I make my identity of Hi'iaka and my Dreamwidth blog (which I've deleted after moving all my posts to this one). Nobody really blogs anymore. It's all lonely really. But I do hope that just like I've seen it time and time again, I'm just early in the game. Whether it's in fashion (if I'm looking for a specific piece, you can be sure it's going to be in style the next year or in a couple years), or in behaviours... 

But anyway, back to the original topic. You open the internet and you see a dominant thought. You see the endless hyper-individualistic bullshit that is touted by self-help books and therapists alike. Therapists which mind you are NOT scientists and which discipline evolves with the trends of time, so I've concluded that for the most part it's complete poppycock. 

It DOES have some beneficial things in it, like learning to trust yourself, helping with accepting your past, raising your self-confidence, not getting walked all over by people, but I find that even by practicioners themselves, it's wildly oversimplified, applied to situations where more nuance would be better, and the chase for the golden Grail of a "healthy" relationship leads to constant overanalysis and almost a sort of "relationship orthorexia". I swear. Everything is rules, red flags, green flags, as if people can't decide for themselves? As if they need a guide for every single move they make? Can't trust their goddamn common sense and human intuition? Oh wait.

Wait.

That sounds oddly like religion. I mean, you go tell everything you wouldn't tell to a person who is supposedly above you by some sort of power (either God or... academics), they give you advice you must follow otherwise you are a bad follower or you "don't want to do the work"... you either get heaven (a perfect life) or go to hell with all the sinners who won't improve themselves. 

Crazy how religion permeates literally everything? 

This aside, I'm starting to consider hanging out on IRC channels. But also... I find myself wishing computers were not so stimulating. Because that is also a big part as to why we are pretty much all screen addicts now. Those things are built to make you addicted. Good job, engineers, powers that be. You managed to fulfil your goal. A society of docile, distracted humans who massively look away and would rather numb out than feel the gravity of things.

I probably am part of them, in my own way.

Yeah.

Anyway. I'm tired. Good night, internet.