The one where my little corner of the internet came screeching to a juddering halt
While browsing the internet this afternoon I tripped over a Tumblr post from a distant friend that brought the world to a screeching halt. I'm not going to name anybody, or quote anythinglet's just say it was the “it's all over” message.
The longer I spend on the internet, the less I feel I understand about people, relationships, or life really. Any period of stability invariably seems to be a portent for future chaos, heartache, destruction, and devastation.
While I sit on the opposite side of the world to a lot of the people I have come to know, in some ways I feel I know them better than their friends or family. People hide behind a username on a social blogging platform, and share thoughts, hopes, and dreams they might never share with their family, or real-world friends.
I'm too paranoid to walk that path. Almost every word, photo, comment, and like has an element of thought behind it. I've been burned too many times. I've also read about the insane behaviour others have enduredwith their social circle being used as an indirect means of discoverykind of a “discovery by averted vision”.
In astronomy, it is well known that the light receptors at the edge of your eye are more light sensitive than those in the centerso by looking at the surroundings of a blank area in the firmament, the hunted for object invariably appears at the edge of your field of view. The same is true of the internetno matter how careful people think they are being. Unless they cease all interaction with others, enough traces are left to distill their locationtheir identity.
When you find out how far some people are willing to go in order to pursue redemption or revenge for some slight they feel they have suffered, it chips away at our faith in the essential goodness of people as a whole.
When you find out that people you thought were wonderful together are no longer together, it serves as a reminderthat nothing is permanent in this worldnothing and nobody can be entirely trusted, or relied upon. I don't necessarily mean this in a mean-spirited wayit's just a realisation that “shit happens”, and we need to almost expect it to happen from time to time.