2025-02-18Pressing pause

These last few months have been a whirlwind, haven't they?

We're barely weeks into the world order imposed by the new plutocrat-led US administration and everything just fucking sucks. I'm already sick to death of hearing about your trumpses and your muskses and your departments of doggy. I reached my breaking point last week. I'm a very light sleeper and have some self-control issues around my smartphone. So the phone gets to charge in the kitchen and instead there's a proper-ass clock radio by my bed that wakes me up to a very low-volume P1 at 06:07 every morning. It's generally a good way to start the day! But now, without fail, I'm woken up by breathless news about some atrocity performed by whichever freshly appointed lunatic-fringe dipshit got the spotlight that morning, or perhaps some cool new corruption performed by Sweden's spectacularly inept Tidö government. I think the final straw was the recent Trump-Putin pact to divide Europe between them, because line must go up and, for a lot of people, that's actually what they think matters. Russian invasion of a NATO country in a year or two? Whatever. Look at the cost at the gas pump today! Murica first.

And there's nothing I can do about any of that. I donate to Drones2Ukraine to hopefully kill some invaders before we have to deal with them here in Sweden. I avoid the companies on the black list. I tell my friends to do the same. Apart from little acts like those, I am completely impotent in the face of the world at large. I especially don't need to know about bad US decisions around reproductive health, democracy, immigration, or environmental regulation: I don't live there, it doesn't affect me, all it does is rile me up for no good reason.

But the posts keep coming.

I've added a ton of filters. I have everything from "TikTok" to "layoffs" to "fascist" or even "LLM" which tells you something about the volume of hyperactive bullshit that's been flooding my zone. I've noticed myself boosting and posting more and more things about the catastrophic political situation we all find ourselves in in 2025, and... what do I think I'm accomplishing, really? A measurable increase in blood pressure for the poor bastards reading? Maybe someone donated money. Maybe someone signed a petition. But that's the extent of it. So I think I'm done, for now. I've uninstalled the excellent Ivory app. I've hostnamed away news sites and have instead started to curate a nice little array of RSS feeds instead, filled with things that matter to my daily life like code and art and music and video games. The Pax Americana is broken, the world is fucked up and hurtling towards war and distrust, but I can't pick it up and shake it and tell it to knock it off. No amount of worrying is going to help put things right. So I can't be out here chewing my nails and screaming in public. Better to dive deeper into work, pick up some new hobbies, let the chips fall where they may. That requires silence. We'll see what comes out the other side. But for now you gotta shut up, Internet, because you're bringing me down.