A Wake Up Call

When I first met my wife, around seven years ago, she was what I would call a typical internet user. She was glued to Facebook and Pinterest and spent a lot of time curating her feeds and her image. She wasn't an influencer, but having grown up with social media, she had a solid decade worth of friendships dating back to high school that she engaged with. By that point in my life, I'd left social media and I felt that my life was better for it. So, I'd gently nudge her to weigh whether the time she spent was worth it, and slowly over time, she phased out her social media.

For her, social media was the internet. She didn't have websites she visited or news that she read, so when she exited the Facebook world, she essentially exited the internet. Now, I should point out, my encouragement was not the sole reason for her leaving, there were some family issues that ultimately led her to delete her accounts, but I know my example and my encouragement played a part.

My wife no longer uses the internet recreationally. She uses it for work or when she needs to learn something, but she spends her time doing other things. She didn't leave the internet and find herself, or start some strange offline hobbies, she just uses that downtime to play video games or watch reality TV. She even enrolled in grad school. She exchanged scrolling and taking tons of pictures for doing things that she enjoys and thats pretty awesome.

I started noticing around two years ago that my wife's relationship with the internet was better than mine. Coincidently, her outlook on life was also much better.

I found myself sharing things I've read online with my wife, only for her to ask why I subject myself to the gossip or "news." She's always been kind and non-judgemental about it, and I guess, it reminds me a lot of me when I encouraged her to step away from social media.

It's almost alarming when you start to mimic the outrage of the internet in your personal life and the person you are ranting to looks at you like your crazy, or ask you why do you care so much or why do you subject yourself to this. After hearing this half a dozen times, it starts to sink in that maybe you are the one with the problem now.

This morning on our drive in to work, we were discussing the Carolina Hurricanes, then Ticketmaster, and that led me into talking about the Chicago Bears and their stadium woes. If you haven't been following, its the same story you hear everywhere, billionaire owners don't want to pay for their new stadium so they threaten to move the team to someplace that would. Right now, a town in Indiana is looking at hosting the Chicago Bears.

I told her about the issues with owners and how the costs get passed on to tax payers, and how I'd much prefer the Hurricanes move back to Hartford than for me to pay more taxes, especially as ticket prices and parking has already priced me out of attending games.

My wife casually mentioned, "You make me hate the world."

That stung.

The truth is, professional sports and stadium relocation isn't even something I care about. I'm not a die-hard fan for any team, and definitely not one locally, so it doesn't affect me the slightest. If the internet didn't get in an uproar everytime a team's stadium contract comes to an end, I'd probably have no clue about the business behind it, and while it's obviously dirty business, I don't care. Yet... I still read the articles when they come out. I obviously collect this information and this morning I felt it was relevant enough to tell my wife, who has absolutely no interest in any sports whatsoever.

I took a collective outrage I read online, internalized it, shared it, and made someone else angry. That is toxic as fuck.

I think about how things would be different had I read about the stadium relocations in the newspaper, and I realize it would be tremendously different. Sure, there'd be that twinge of "This sucks for the taxpayers" but I wouldn't see the comments and the hot takes. There wouldn't be all the fuel poured on that twinge of frustration to turn it into something else.

Look, I know I'm not saying anything new here, but I do think sometimes we hit a point in our life where we get a little wakeup call and I think that happened this morning. I've got to find a way to not internalize so much stuff I see online, or I need to change what I do online because I can't be dragging other people's rage into my daily life.