blog.djstead.net

Every time you encounter a new person, you essentially are trying to share your world view with them, and see if you are a comfortable fit. Except you don’t share it all in one go - you would literally have to recount your life experiences to that point; all the changes you’ve gone through - and of course the other person is effectively doing exactly the same; sharing their world-view. It is literally impossible for one individual to share their world-view instantly with every single person they encounter. If we could, you could therefore plot the entirety of human social relationships as one GIANT Venn diagram. And by that I mean that you would see your Venn diagram that includes your world-view to date; your views, your opinions, your tastes, your standpoints (political and otherwise), why exactly you are you and not anybody else. And, intersecting your Venn diagram, would be everyone else’s. So you could identify the people that share most of your worldview (...

I’ve been thinking a lot about coping mechanisms recently. More accurately, I’ve needed to use these quite a lot in recent months; and that got me thinking. In times of loss, frustration, upset, anger, bewilderment; I have turned to Twitter and (on occasion) Facebook. And this is nothing new for me - before these I put my thoughts together in a blog (who remembers Revelations Online?), and I have continued this blog in the same vein. And here is my key point - very often this is the coping mechanism through which I express my self; my inner thoughts. My immediate thoughts. Some of them are well-formed, but the majority are not - they are new, unfiltered, immediate thoughts. That occasionally are - in hindsight - pretty poor, and they have on occasion upset people close to me. And here’s the thing which I wonder might be an issue not just for me - but for many in this brave new world: Social media is my primary outlet of emotion. And at my darkest times, it is my...