These days I often find I am distracted by the internet mostly, like I’ll just look at the news headlines but that makes me think oh I wonder what happened to so and so and the next thing I’ve been down a rabbit hole for 20 minutes. I also find that often my peace of mind is disturbed by the thoughts and experiences of other people as expressed in forums online. Like I will have a scroll on mumsnet, read some thread about the difficulties teacher face in school these days and then spend the next couple of hours thinking about that and worrying about it when I am not a teacher and don’t even have any kids yet.
Or I will read some misogynistic rubbish about women how we are all hypergamous monsters who can’t love men but only strip them of resources or have no value over the age of 30 or 40 or whatever or how women who aren’t below a certain body weight have no value, that women all have over inflated opinions of themselves and it really gets to me even though I’m happily married, slim and not even 30 yet. It just disturbs and upsets me that there are people who think like this, it gets under my skin. In the past I tried to interact with people online I disagreed with on a range of topics but I understand now that you can’t do that online and so I rarely post now but it still bothers me.
I watched a video on YouTube yesterday where a woman in her 50s wrote in to a psychologist about how she worried about her husband leaving her now because she felt she had “declining mate value” as an ageing woman with “several cues of ageing” while her husband also in his 50s was only gaining more money and success increasing his mate value and that she was bound to lose him to a younger woman even though there was no indication her husband actually felt that way.
It just made me sad that she would think that way about herself but then Incan see why she would because there is so much crap like that online people absorb. The same with anything, climate change, the economy, immigration there is just so much negativity and our brains are very much attracted to that kind of stuff because it seems like it is helpful to our survival but it really isn’t.
I need to use the internet for certain things and I like to be informed, I just wish I could tune out the rest of it,