My love/hate relationship with the web

For the past 20 something days I have been stuck at home with something called Covid. You might have heard about it. And when you're forced to remain at home, there's only so many things you can do to preserve your mental sanity, especially when you're not feeling great and you can't really do anything that requires your attention because this stupid virus makes it extremely hard to focus on anything for more than 20 minutes at the time.

So what can you do? You ask the web to entertain you. Ah, the web, this magical land where everything is possible. Ruled by memes, weirdness and randomness.

A part of me loves the web. I love what being connected enables. The unexpected human connections with people from all over the globe, the discovery of strange niches of knowledge, the endless supply of rabbit holes to get lost in.

But these past three weeks have also taught me that a part of me hates the web in a very profound way. Because the 2021 web is filled with rage, sadness and misery. You can't go anywhere without stumbling on a depressing story. Governments screwing people over, companies doing shitty things, some fucking idiot becoming a millionaire doing some despicable things for YouTube or TikTok, the list goes on and on and on.

And what really bothers me is the fact that it's impossible to find the good bits of the web without stumbling on the shitty parts. Because everything on the web seems to be funnelled through Twitter or Reddit these days. And unless you spend a stupid amount of time curating the hell out of your profiles you get served a cocktail of 50% awfulness, 40% memes and 10% good quality content.

And I'm coming to the realisation that all this is making me miserable. I go in with the intent of reading something interesting and I come out enraged or sad or frustrated because of some random reason. And the worst part is that in most cases it is something that has nothing to do with my life directly.

It's such an odd feeling and part of me feels completely powerless. I guess the only antidote to all this is to spend more time away from the web and the screens. If only I were allowed to leave my home...