{"id":364,"date":"2025-05-13T08:21:29","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T14:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/?p=364"},"modified":"2025-08-05T08:14:24","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T14:14:24","slug":"social-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/social-disease\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Disease"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Several years ago, I dumped all &#8220;social media&#8221; because it was doing more harm than good. I attempted to delete all that those systems would allow me to delete and just walked away, so to speak. But it has reared its ugly head again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I play video games a lot, way too much actually. I strive to break my gaming time with chores; however, there are days like today in which my body rebels in pain making the likelihood of completing chores rather slim. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I got too invested in one game, so much so, that one community board interaction had me drop that game and all I had invested in it. Then I dove into another game that ended up being bought by a predatory company I&#8217;ve long disliked, so I dropped that one too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, I&#8217;m in another game, and for the most part the people are extremely kind and far less &#8220;toxic&#8221; than the &#8220;free to play&#8221; games. However, I recently made the mistake of getting too involved in &#8220;community events&#8221;. I ended up creating a new Discord account and connecting to these communities, even though I was afraid of what may happen, and it happened. In short, in responding to someone else&#8217;s request for assistance, I felt left &#8220;twisting in the wind&#8221; as they baled with no explanation that made sense to me. My rage then felt rather dismissed in the community as if that&#8217;s just the way it is. However, I found it very unacceptable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, I&#8217;m left wondering how to back out of all this to keep my time enjoyable, and I haven&#8217;t found an answer yet. For the last couple of days, I&#8217;ve played grumpy, and that&#8217;s not fun. Every request for help I ignore because I don&#8217;t want to get burned again. And on my end, I either refuse to ask for help or do not get responses to my requests for help, making me even more irritated. I feel ignored because I expressed my frustration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I knew better. I knew all forms of &#8220;social media&#8221; end in more frustration than enjoyment. But I did it anyhow. I&#8217;m a fool. For all my years, I still make the dumbest mistakes. Now, I feel screwed. I&#8217;ve taken something I enjoyed and have tainted it with &#8220;social media&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s depressing. I want to go back to my point of ignorance, to the point before I new all these chat channels and servers existed. However, without some strangely specific amnesia, that ain&#8217;t happening, so I remain sad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Did I do this to myself subconsciously? If so, how could I know? Now that I&#8217;m stuck here, how can I compartmentalize those negative bits from potentially positive bits? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t have answers. I want them but don&#8217;t hold hope that they&#8217;ll ever come. Instead, I&#8217;m infected with this disease while blindly grasping for a cure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Several years ago, I dumped all &#8220;social media&#8221; because it was doing more harm than good. I attempted to delete all that those systems would allow me to delete and just walked away, so to speak. But it has reared its ugly head again. I play video games a lot, way too much actually. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":365,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-random"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions\/397"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedragoncorps.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}