#ooc stuff

And none of you will get to hear it.

High

Horny

Hwriting

So reply to a starter or two and then I'll post all my replies.

-@champion-of-luck

There's no rule that forces you to engage with them. Like, at all. The universe is expanding forever in all directions at a scale our minds are too small to comprehend and we occupy one fraction of a speck of a tiny corner and we think it's all so important and the stakes are so high but they really are not. They are not.

It's the only way to survive. Especially on the internet. Especially on Tumblr. You can see something that makes you angry, that makes you upset, and say, like a little prayer to yourself, "no shut up" and keep scrolling.

Because here's the thing: no one wins on the Internet. No one. No one. No minds are changed. Nothing happens. The Internet is one-way communication. You think we can reply to each other, because the technology allows us to do that, but that's not what's happening. ONe person posts something, and either people agree, or someone takes that as an excuse to say their own thing. People talk at each other. No one talks to each other.

Real change, real growth, happens when you can look someone in the eye, and see that they're a person. It is very, very hard to look at a post on a website written by someone with an avatar of a cartoon duck or whatever and their URL is like my-armpits-piss-gold and keep their personhood in your head. It's possible, but our brains and our hearts can handle but so much. Especially when scrolls are infinite. We have limits. Our hearts and brains have limits. We are not designed to hold the weight of the world in our minds and in our hearts and in our souls.

We are designed to hold the hands of the people around us and look at them and listen to them and understand them. We have but so much time and energy and space.

The good news is that the world can be connected by hands. I can hold your hand, and you can hold someone else's hand, and little acts of empathy can nudge the world. Kindness and empathy really are contagious.

But you won't get that on the Internet. You'll get tastes of it, sure, but the fact that we're all faceless means kindness is outpaced by the urge to be angry.

Because we're all angry. We really are. The world we live in is designed to be as hard as possible, to keep us as broken as possible, as numb as possible, and that takes a toll. The people responsible seem untouchable so we look for things we can get mad at, to feel like we're doing something and guess what--it's a lot easier to hit the person to your left or right than it is to hit the person all the way at the top. So we do it because we need to feel something. We need to feel power.

But that won't accomplish anything. It'll just keep us angry and hitting while we get buried deeper and deeper.

So no, you can't win on the Internet, no matter how many likes and reblogs and retweets and reblorbs and what-the-fuck-ever. Because soon that number will become meaningless and then you'll be empty again and nothing will have changed. The Internet can do so many good things but it has its limits, and when we push past those limits we hurt ourselves. We hurt ourselves and we hurt each other.