My wife is really having a rough time of it, right now. She consumes a lot of social media, and we all know that landscape is full of the Republican apocalyptic hellscape that America is becoming. This weekend we went to our favorite little Burning Man event (the only BM thing we still do), on Vancouver Island, called Otherworld. We've been going for several years. Got lots of friends up there. (A surprising number of them not on any social media at all. It's an Island Thing.) It was gorgeous, and filled with love and happiness and people just having a really lovely time together. And we cross back into the US, and ... the Trumpian shitstorm that is everyday life in America today. I have a 9-5, and can focus on that all day. But she works for herself, and only picks up new clients when she needs/wants to. So she has a lot of time. She runs the dog. She does most of the shopping, and the standing in various government lines to get forms signed. So she flips open her phone, and ... she's back in the shit again. Yeah, yeah, yeah... curate... filter... blah blah blah. There's only so much of that you can do, because all of it requires you to have already seen the stuff you want to filter out. If you can't define what you don't want to see (because you've already seen it), then you can't filter it effectively. So yeah. It's hard to watch her spin out of control on this. I distract her, draw her out of it when I can, but she's in the passenger seat as we are passing this colossal car-wreck in process, and she can't help but look. And much of her business takes place on Facebook, Craigslist, eBay, affinity groups, etc. So turning off the tools she uses for her business would just leave her even more at sea, with even less to do. Anyway. It's hard watching someone you love trying to pass a stone like this one... there's not much you can do, but be moral support... --- Next week, we shoot fireworks (we are professionals and shoot a city's annual 4th of July fireworks show every year... ask KB for photos...), and the next day we fly to San Diego for the Major League Rugby Championship game (hopefully between the Seattle Seawolves and Glendale Raptors), and to celebrate our anniversary weekend. Visiting friends. Watching rugby. Beaches. It should be pretty dang good. Fingers crossed...
It's great that you and your wife are going to be able to spend some time away from the internet next week. It seems like a lot of us have lost sight with just how beneficial real life interactions are for us, both for our individual health as well as the health of our social groups. I'm not going to pretend to have any advice for you or your wife's situation, but I will say that the more time I spend interacting with people in meat space the more I want to dedicate my time to interacting with people in meat space. Something tells me I'm probably not alone in feeling that way and that there's probably significance in that.
Yeah... we have heavily isolated ourselves from our community ever since the election (and some intra-community kerfuffle), and we don't watch TV, so our news and information comes from the internet in various forms. It's time to get out and have drinks with friends again. And explore the world...