Perspective
The three or four of you that have forgotten that you have me saved to your RSS reader of choice will likely suddenly realize that I’ve not written in a long time. I didn’t fall off the face of the earth or even end up in a ditch. The fact is I saturated myself in what I loved.
I love Macs and technology in general. Combine that with my work ethic-like approach to new things, and you can see how I could burn out. It became a job. An endless job of trying to turn a few grains of actual information into an expansive network of information. At one point, the site was effective enough to give you a way to track what I did minute to minute.
I’m not by any stretch of the imagination famous and it seemed to be too much. I began to feel paranoid about who knew what. It’s not even that I necessarily did anything bad or worth being ashamed about, but being approached by people about things you didn’t even give a second though to has a strange effect on one’s psyche.
As an aside, I feel that now that I’m back on Twitter. A casual mention of a product is enough to get a response from a corporate representative. Empowering and creepy at the same time.
Backing off from this site and eventually my Mac blogging job gave me some relief. It also afforded perspective about what’s really important to me. As much as I like keeping up with the latest in the technology world, treating it like a competition wasn’t making me happy. It made me frustrated.
By treating it as I should have all along, I could start to enjoy technology once again. The thrill of poking around at software had returned. I was doing it for fun and not to write another article late at night that ultimately was filled with information to keep commenters from turning into hecklers.
Make no mistake. The internet is filled with anonymity-empowered asshats. You can’t publish something to the internet without some basement dwelling, pop-tart scarfer correcting you on some minor, inconsequential piece of information. These are people so frustrated with their own situation that they’ll do anything in their power to transfer their angst to you.
The worst part is that it works. It gets to you. You can do great work. You can do it for years. You can bring great information to the table. The moment you have a typo, you’ll get the most vicious comment. It’s enough to drive you to rage and want to forsake the whole lot of them (and by whole lot of them, that include people genuinely appreciative of what you do, but don’t want to seem like sycophants by chiming in with “Great article” comments).
There are times when rather than using reason and wit to address and embarrass a jackass, you’d rather tell them “fuck you and the horse you rode in on.” You can almost taste that anger relief. It’s so sweet. You suck it up, try to be the bigger man, and bottle it.
It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with it, but it’s not far from my mind and in my travels across the web I find instances every day. These are established people in the industry that I respect and are generally the most patient I’ve found.
I think it’s time I return to the web at large, or, more aptly, a return to small portions of it. No longer am I going to try to be part of every growing trend. If the last couple of years have taught me nothing else, web services come and go. As much as I enjoy Twitter, the people that are proclaiming that it’s taking over the web are so far up their ass that they can’t see that Twitter will have its day and fade to the background, just like every other fad.
Twitter is the new Usenet. And I mean really, who remembers Vox? Do those web “experts” that proclaimed the death of email realize that all those email killers are dead?
I’m not going to get as invested as I once did. I’ll move with software and web services as the times dictate, but never build anything up as the solution to everything. Being obsessive sucks the fun out of things.
So… I’m back.
