I’ve been out of work for almost two months. I’m a month and a half behind on rent and I spend a lot of time contemplating homelessness and trying to nap away the world. I lost my job for a gradually increasing inability to focus on what it was I was doing. There were several, kind of telescoping factors involved: primarily my depression, and the growing ineffectiveness (shrinking effectiveness?) of the medication I take for it. This exacerbated the secondary factor: my job was boring and I hated it. Mostly. And this in turn supported and ‘excused’ my passive-aggressive indulgence in worktime distractions, chief among which was the SDMB. No; I wasn’t fired for excessive time spent here. I was fired for neglecting my work. But when I was neglecting my work, I could usually be found here.
Even so, I had been trying for a long time to reduce the amount of time I spent at SDMB. One of the strategies I employed to that end was to ‘raise my threshold’ for posting. I.e., I would read and lurk, but refrain from joining in on most of the discussions. I would only participated when, well, when I couldn’t help myself. This usually meant that I would read and lurk and skim and sample until I came upon some subject or post that just rankled me beyond endurance and made it necessary for me to post. The unintended result was that, for that time period, I posted more rarely, but when I did I was usually pissed off. So most of my posts were like all flamey and junk.
The second strategy I devised was to try to maintain some control over the signal-to-noise ratio, both incoming and outgoing. I undertook, in other words, to ignore posts that were not (in my entirely subjective judgment) made in good faith; posts that addressed issues already raised and discussed; posts that displayed an inattention to the subject at hand; posts that were (in my entirely subjective judgment) disingenuous. I would spend little or no time explaining the obvious, or repeating myself, or shooting at decoys. The unintended result of this second strategy was that I usually came off as patronizing and aloof (a “self-centered twit”).
All around, then, an unfortunate plan: it served to put me the habit of broadcasting almost nothing but snooty, sooty posts. Before I really became aware of it, most of my posts became hotted-up variations on a theme: *“Pearls to pigs!” *
Add to that, this: seems to me that, nowadays, when I read something here that gets my back up, instead of simply addressing the issue clearly and straightforwardly, I indulge the immature urge to punish its poster for the egregious sin of daring to say something that made me angry. I seem to blame the author of a contentious post for my reaction to it and lash out him or her accordingly. (And I swore I would never become my father!)
So anyway.
[Honestly not looking for feedback here; just thought I owed it to some of you to post this.]