When historians look back at the early part of the 21st century, they'll come to realize that the arrival of the Internet, while a tool for so much potential good, also proved to be a weapon of mass destruction.
Last year, in my post The Dark Underside of a Usually Optimistic Future: How Bad Could Things Get? Pretty Bad!, I expressed the concerns of many by identifying this issue as one of 10 extremely negative trends going forward. You can see the full list at
https://badthings.jimcarroll.com
. Hint: it's a depressing read.
Acceleration of mental illness: we are seeing a new form of collaborative mental illness driven by the connectivity of the Internet, and years from now it will be diagnosed as such. This is not any type of routine mental illness – this is full on whack-a-doodle loopy-doo full-on-gone type of crazy. Like, beyond batshit. You know them when you see them; you feel for their families. This has obviously become a massive part of the political agenda – people subscribe to the craziest of conspiracy theories. Your crazy uncle is now everywhere all at once – you are surrounded by too many crazy uncles. Crazy feeds on crazy, and so the new iterative insanity loop drives more insanity. It won’t end well.
Where does that leave us today? Many of us are just so extremely worn out to find ourselves losing our friends, and sections of society, to insanity like this:
Where does it leave us?
We're tired.
We're tired of people who make shit up simply to support their insane beliefs.
We're tired of losing friends down this rabbit hole, knowing they won't come out.
We're tired of their idiotic conspiracy theories, and tired of having to listen to them.
We're tired of their anger, grievances, outrage, resentment, and whining.
We're tired of the fact that they seem to have found so much anger in their soul that they can find no joy in their world.
We're tired of so many people falling for fake information.
We're tired of people trying to start an argument based on falsified information.
We're tired of the people who take advantage of these people
We're tired of seeing so many people who only seem to be capable of defining their actions through anger.
We're tired of seeing them spending more time tearing people down than building people up.
We're tired of their simplistic solutions to complicated problems.
We're tired that they have come to believe that one person or one group of people has caused all the massive challenges that our world faces today.
We're tired of the fact that they dispel the depth of those challenges simply because it makes them feel better or fits some inane political agenda.
We're tired of their belief that they know more about some aspect of science than the millions of scientists who have done the work and have followed the science.
We're tired of those people who can offer up only complaints and not solutions.
We're tired of people so busy complaining about everything that they are incapable of thinking about anything.
We're tired of their intolerance, xenophobia, hate racism, and bigotry.
We're tired of people who think the way out of a complex world is to invest more in leaders who are subscribing to and fueling this hate.
We're tired of the fact that sometimes we have to waste our energy on feeling sympathy for these people.
We're tired of the realization that they have no idea they've slipped over the abyss into a new form of madness that will be studied by academics well into the future.
Gosh, we're just so tired.
On the other hand, we'll continue to work hard every day to try to tune out all these idiots, choose our friends wisely, and choose to live in optimism, not pessimism.
But gosh, we're tired of it all.