I was always taught to be patient and understanding. I’ve also tried to develop some emotional resilience. Ironically, this hyper-vigilance of my mental state and the corresponding behaviour patterns results in paradoxical lack of emotional control. Social media doesn’t help, allowing an individual to cull their entire worldviews into the shortest possible utterances and congratulate themselves for being clever, when it reality, they are being toxic, while accusing others of that same toxicity. I feel dirty when reading it.
I used to think it was good for me to expose myself to some of this, joining various Facebook fan pages for things I like, watching people very poorly analyze the TV shows and movies and games we all supposedly enjoy, and maybe we do enjoy them. What we don’t seem to enjoy is other people, and so the war of opinions rages on in the comment sections, turning memes into an arena for people who have nothing better going on in their days than to argue with strangers. I used to think it was good practice to be exposed to all this. Maybe I would know what to do when faced with the same simplistic arguments, the gaslighting, the baiting, the obvious mockery I might experience in daily life. The opposite is true. I just notice the bad arguments, and I find myself allowing myself to feel angry, which might even be acceptable if I were to be engaging in these unnecessary debates, but I’m not. I’m on the sidelines, patting myself on the back for not being as stupid, while still being as angry as the rest of them.
My parents always told me to be patient with people. To bear with them. “They know not what they do” and so on and so forth. How valid is that for a page I view for enjoyment? I have no choice but to automatically be shown the most popular comment, which has a tendency to be the most toxic of them all. I HATE IT.
So, I realized, maybe later than I’d like, that I am free to just leave the groups that contain people I don’t like. I can also mute the people that I actually know that share things I don’t consider healthy! Shocker, I know. It has made quite the difference. If only I could spend less time on there in general. One thing at a time.