Unchained: Just For Instant Gratification

I log on to Hive today and see a post muted by a community with no explanation or even a comment.

I raise an eyebrow and sigh inwardly. Then I step back for a bit and wander around thunking about how to respond to this. This repetition of the exact behaviour that has broken the internet with which I was once so enamoured.

The “new” internet. Run by kids who were raised on smart devices. Little first hand parenting. Their Praimary Care-givers were Apple and Microsoft.

While the Tech Giants, ahead of the curve by light years, didn’t even allow their own kids to use their own products.

I was already an adult, legally, before there was an internet. And the "vibe" online, these days, is the answer to a question that we casually wondered about for some years. WE old timers.

What would the effect of all of this internet be on our still developing Youth?

Here we are. In 2025. Living parts of the answer.

I read a post last week by a someone who noted what our society has become.

Today I find it ironic that the exact thing that led to this, lack of eye contact; present parenting and the consistently unfulfilled desperate desire to be seen and validated, as a result of this, is what drives our younger generation to keep hammering away online.

Just to feel okay for a few seconds of “wow I got so many likes” this instant gratifation.

And the cancelling in between.

And the shouting into the void. Only embedding the childhood trauma further.
An unconscious and baffling, strange(r) engagement and internet when you know a bit about multi-generational trauma.

And the mechanics of this in the human brain.

We old timers go on about the good ol’ days and the lack of respect and general decline of “society” in fits and starts.

But when you’ve had the privilege of being raised in the physical world, with sound and eye contact and - with social skills not only passed on and down in person but , with this, the *actual * "real-life" experience of *feeling *the impact of a social faux pas or the consequences of your own misaligned behaviour...

you learn and grown because first-hand knowledge that is both invaluable and very necessary to function in a world that is, in all Truth, entirely based on a mutual consensus of “right” and/or “okay.

Or even “real”.

Now we have an internet being run by a generation who barely makes eye contact or knows the sound of a human voice beyond their own four walls of life.

Nor wants to.

You can be right all of the time if nobody is around to question anything in person.

I think, today, that this is why so many of us who were there before the dawn of this new “society”, are backing away slowily from too much of "their" brave new world 'round about now.

This isn’t any real community or connection any longer. On many levels. Not the way we old timers experienced community and connection in person.

Not much of that anymore.

Things have changed.

Perhaps this is simply "progress".

I feel so old when I ponder these wonderings. Briefly. Because I also remember old timers saying the exact same thing to me when I was both young and naively omnipotent to the same "progress(ion)" my elderws complained about.

I decide to not say anything to the community.

But I sigh inwardly and miss "the good old days".

When even the internet was still young, naive and honest.

I’m at an age, and stage, in my journey where I honestly have overcome the need for validation at all.

Jung might call this “authentic individuation”.

Some might call it apathy.

As usual, these days and with more authentic on-the-ground life experience, I understand full well that it's both of these things.

At the same time.

And I also accept that this learning can't really be taught or passed on by words, words, words alone.

This is life experience and one can only receive the knowledge by testing it, in the material world, to gain the answers for oneself.

Fuck that sounds pretentious.

But I guess language has also become passe these days. In many ways.

So it's not pretentious. Just old fashioned.

Perspective.

But who cares to talk about it?

Conversation used to happen. And subsequent, inevitable, fuck ups and learning.

In the "real" world.

A world that barely exits, for our youth, these days.

Is it better or worse?

It's different.

Which is also inevitable.

Change happens.

I don't bother to ask the community about why hidden.

Today.

Once-upon-a-life-ago I would have.

I’d have begun a conversation and tried to understand.

These days I accept that this is a different world. A world where strangers stay strangers and the focus is something I'm not much interested in. Mostly.

A focus I'm not sure of. Or even aware of at times. I thought this was about connection and information?

If not. Then why even have this thing we call “the world wide web”.

The world wide web of what exactly, is it now?

With more years of life-on-the-ground life experience I’ve also come to understand that there's little reason to respond or take action at all. Much.

Life; Nature; God, or whatever word you prefer to use to define whatever “it” is, has a way of balancing things out.

We all have our part to play in this mutual experience of “being” in this particular layer of conscious and whatever we are manifest as - in whatever multi-verse we find ourselves in.

Together for a brief flash in the *far *greater picture of existence.

How important we think we ourselves. And how irrelevant we all are in relation to All It Is.

It becomes pretty funny when you “get this” for realisies.

Hilarious at times.

No. I don’t bother to ask about other people's judgements and reactions a lot of the time. Not anymore.

I get it.

Most of what I have to say, these days, is so simple most people wouldn’t bother to respond because they’d think I’m an idiot.

Yet all of what I may be bothered to say is so incredibly complex when it's walked in action – and the results; experience and learning are so astounding – that it still bears repeating a hundred times in a million ways. Some with the same four chords ^{Bo Burnham, “Repeat Stuff” misquoted}

But Others have said it far better4. And far more eloquently.

SO why should I say it. Again and again.

I guess repetition can be both a positive and a negative thing.

And there it is again. “Duality” in experience as I write this.

I’ve had some experience that led to some more actual “Truth”, that leaves me separate from our current society in many ways. I’m keeping it though.

I could have stepped in to argue about manners, respect and community today. About social skills and the internet and you and me. And them.

Instead I just curate my own experience and block them in return.

It’s a hard boundary.

But, these days, I stick to my boundaries.

And I try to stay awake.

It’s not done in anger.

It’s done because I “get it”.

But, knowing a bit about how this world was before behaviour like this became our new “normal”, I also no longer accept it.

My response is to “let it be”.

But my choice is to not participate in that “reality”.

Or enable it.

I'm curating my own experience as I go, these days.

This is freedom.

They say that for every action there is an equal, and opposite reaction.

It’s not my place to “teach” other people how to “be” or to try to instill my will on to them.

This is the me I have become today.

I’m working on understanding more about when to step in and when to step out of this dance we call “life”.

Mostly, I’m finding, a person can simply wait. And, as I’ve said before...

waiting is a skill.

I'm testing when and how to respond at all and my current understanding is to mirror behaviour and simply give people what they want.

I'm in the Non-Resistance! ^{MetaPhysics Study goin' on here}

So simple physics for the beginner physicists.

For every action there is an equal, opposite reaction.

Okay, Community.

Hide each other we shall.

You are right. *nods

#NonResistanceIsMyNewFormOfResistance

#YouWinOrDoYou

And Quantum Physics for the Quantum Physicists. “Have a great day!” “God bless”. Or whatever.

I’m (back to) studying MetaPhysics.

So sending you all Metta.

And I haven’t been meditating.

Which is prolly why my response was to sit down and write this post.

p.s. I do circle back and check on the Pippins I find along the way. And it seems most of them have been hacked and disappeared AF as well. Roughly all at same time.

In June 2024.

And some of us a couple of years prior.

Enough said.

Or is it?

_{Almost Fully Human
Beta than before
Maybe
...}

 

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_{Images mine and edited with Gimp}

 

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_{I am in an extended ai hack because cencorship and eh. Typ-ops ^{: D} are not, often, "mine" and my content is, regularly, altered to make me look flaky and stoopid. ^{intentional typo again :D}}

 

[ai free]