Ranting...

Despite it being past my usual bedtime, I don't want to turn my laptop off and go to bed. I've been so tired lately that I could do with all the sleep I could get. And yet, here I am. Why? Because I feel this weird need to write something. But everything I've started writing about has felt so personal... too personal to put out there, even though I don't really share on social media a lot of my more personal writing anymore.

But why not? When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I had this blog on a website called Kiwibox. It wasn't shared across social media as such, but the site itself had this community that would read each other's writing and share our thoughts with each other. Back then, I wrote about everything that crossed my mind. The good, the bad, the sad, the embarrassing, it was documented for the world to read. And I felt comfortable doing that, even when people I knew personally read it.

But over the years, something changed. A friend recently confessed to not having written a poem in years. I think I said it was the same with me, even though that's not the case. I do still write on and off, but I never share them online or rather, on social media, because I guess they feel too personal. It's garbage writing, but that didn't stop me before, did it? I didn't care that my writing was bad, I felt comfortable sharing whatever I wrote.

Now, there's something that stops me from giving others access to certain parts of my life. Maybe it's part of growing up. You find it easier to lock certain things away. Or maybe it's the unsolicited advice, because dear lord, some people need to shut up. Let people talk about things without being told they have this disorder or that condition. Let people rant without telling them they are being ungrateful and should think about the poor starving kids. Let people be without projectile vomiting your goddamn expert advice on them.

Gingie didn't type this but I needed a picture for the post so...

But maybe it all comes down to something else: these thoughts, those garbage poems, everything is content now. They aren't rants or stories or posts or us opening up or making sense of things. Everything is content. Should my nth post of the day be some badly worded blog post or should it be a clever meme someone else made? Should I share some silly thought I had on Twitter or should I just retweet something that seems relatable?

And I think because everything is content, we treat what we see online in a rather sterile manner. I don't know if sterile is the right word, actually, but what I mean is that we no longer see the joke as a joke, the rant as a rant, the silliness as silliness. We feel the need to break things down, analyse them, share our feedback, criticise. We can't just engage like normal fucking people. We feel this weird need to make it some kind of commentary. A goddamn essay on why we think the tweet is funny or the story stupid or the post hypocritical.

So we slowly remove ourselves from our online content. It's so devoid of our real selves, our thoughts, our feelings. We don't say what we want to say unless it's a well-worded, ChatGPTed status that we hope people will share. We don't post that slightly blurry picture of our food and instead take a hundred pictures out of which we pick the one that perfectly captures the exact life we want people to believe we are living. And we don't have our friends just spend time together, laughing, caring about each other. We want our friends to do some trending dance or whatever.

And I'm not saying such content is bad. It's fine. It's good. It's just that it feels so factory manufactured. So bland. So... not us.

And in all of this, are we losing ourselves? Are we forgetting who we are? As people, as individuals, but also as friends, as people who care about each other, as people who read or watch movies or enjoy a good cup of coffee or a slice of cake. As people who are part of this great big world with our own thoughts and feelings and experiences and ideas.

Following each other on social media used to be a way to get to know each other. It used to strengthen relationships. It used to be a safe space. And now, it's about being relatable (as ironic as it is) or employable. It's about being politically correct to the world, even if you aren't in real life. It's about creating this brand, this product with your name and face and selling it to the world. It's about creating a self the world will like or find funny, instead of just being authentic.

And in this manufactured world, we are losing writing that is just... honest.

Maybe this is why I hate ChatGPT and similar AI tools. It's not only because it's lazy, but also because it's replacing blogs and rants and poems, which, shitty as they may be do still hold emotion, with sterile, bland writing that is just so hard to connect with.

Adding a little note to say that I went to bed after posting this only to think about how curated (and not sterile) was the word I was looking for and how I should have used a better title and wondered if the post was just too ranty to be shared on social media only to realise that I was trying to do to this post the very thing I was ranting about. Oh well.