Chapters

I think one of the biggest problems with the internet is continuity. Your online experience is continuous, there's no break, no stopping point, no logical partition. For everyone, with every platform you use, the presence you have on it grows and with that growth, the weight of what you contribute to that platform is carried with you.

Memories in real life fade for a reason, we hold on to what is important and we let go of the things that no longer serve us but the internet doesn't let you do that unless you go out of your way to make the conscious decision to "reset" your online presence but as a creator or as someone with a reputation that's pretty much impossible to do.

Momentary Relief

If you've been following my recent updates regarding my health this post is just a minor update, if you have no interest in that then feel free to skip it.

I still don't have the answers I wanted from Doctors, I don't have a diagnosis and that's the most frustrating part right now. I kept track of my diet for 6 months and how many times I threw up, in the end the total came to 36 which averages once or twice a week. I was prescribed a tablet called Pantoprazole to see if it would remedy the situation but for the two weeks I was on it I threw up every single day, so after consulting my Doctor we agreed to stop it.

The good news is that means it's probably not a stomach ulcer as Pantoprazole and all other -prazole tablets are a class of drugs called Proton Pump Inhibitors which act by lowering stomach acid levels. The fact this made my symptoms worse is a good indication this isn't a problem with stomach acid, and likely not an ulcer. This provided me with some relief mentally but it didn't last long as I still don't know what else it might be.

Sociological Imagination

Let's talk about Sociological Imagination. Quite simply, this concept is a measure of how deep you can imagine the impact of your actions and interactions on society more widely. Let's use a mug of coffee with 'Live. Laugh. Love.' printed on the side of it as an example.

If your Sociological Imagination is shallow then you will smell the coffee, taste the coffee, and drink the entire mug with little thought perhaps beyond whether it tastes good or bad, you may contemplate your existence or the day ahead and that's about all, you don't stop to really consider the mug of coffee.

If your Sociological Imagination is deep, then you will be able to look at that mug of coffee and see the engineering, economics, finance, industrial design, social, and cultural implications of your simple act of drinking that mug.

Telesocial Relationships

Fair warning I just need to vent so a lot of this post may seem repetitive and retracing old ground.

I live in a city that really has no business calling itself that because it's about the same size as a small town. City status in the UK is a bit of an odd concept because it has its traditions rooted in archaic practices rather than being relative to the size of the population or some other metric that would imply it has reached a certain milestone. This city in particular gained city status because of the number of cathedrals that were built in it, which again is quite an archaic concept but harkens back to the fact that the UK is technically a Theocracy as the Head of State is also the Head of the Church and as a monarch if you believe in the Divine Right of Kings supposedly was chosen by God to rule.

That's sort of a tangent to the main focus of this post but will become relevant later. I am gay, single, 36 years old, and did not expect to still be single at this point in my life if I am honest. Meeting guys here is difficult though, like I said this is essentially a small town and like any small town when you use apps or dating websites where you're inevitably presented with a grid, the faces on that grid might as well be static because they never change. When you've explored those options and come to the conclusion for each that either they're not interested in you or you're not interested in them, you're left with the conclusion that you're going to be single for the foreseeable future.

Sick and Tired

I never realised just how much I live in the past until I tried to practise speaking the languages I have been learning. I have quite a reflective and retrospective personality, which ironically in hindsight now seems obvious. This wasn't really brought to my attention though until I reached the units of the Duolingo Spanish course that deal with the past tense.

The bulk of the course leading up to that point deal with the present tense and to a very limited extent some future tense statements but you generally construct nonsensical statements and learn grammar and syntax organically through a process of osmosis - this is intentional, Duolingo has posted on their blog a few times detailing their ethos and their approach to teaching, the absurdity of the sentences is supposed to make them stand out in your mind, of course the drawback is that they are sentences you're never going to use.

The Need To Know

Some things we want to share, there will never be a right time to do that, some things people will never be ready to hear, but that doesn't mean they won't be able to handle what you have to say. Understanding the difference between these two things is something it took me the better part of a decade to grasp. The desire to live your life openly is noble and virtuous to a point but it isn't altruistic because intensity of the emotions we carry and the weight of the memories we hold aren't the same for everyone, just because we can shoulder that burden doesn't mean that everyone else can.

Sometimes in life you have to simply decide whether you're ever going to share something at all and if the answer is yes, then the time is now because there will never be a "right" time to do it, and if you wait for that to happen you will only amplify the anxiety associated with sharing that truth. If the answer is no then you have to learn to let go of your past and let go of that burden because carrying it with you forever also increases anxiety but in a much more generalised way. "Ambient" anxiety comes from an unease with your sense of self, and how it fits into the environment you exist within.

The Wrong Impression

If you judge the value of a person's life based on the contents of their trash can you'd be forgiven for thinking their life is nothing but waste. Most people know not to do this because there's a general consensus and convention agreed upon that a trash can is for, trash. When it comes to things that have many different use-cases however, your own use-case informs your judgement of others whether they use it the same way or not.

If you judge others lives by what they post on social media, you'll form an impression of their life that most of the time isn't accurate. Part of the reason for the inaccuracy is because of that lack of convention, there is no collective agreement as yet reached by humanity as to what social media should actually be used for, and ironically despite it's name it often ends up being antisocial and divisive more often than it unites.