I was watching something on TV talking about how social media is such a one-sided view of a person's life, made worse by the fact that some people use it as a means to build a persona that is impossibly unrealistic. That kind of bothers me. It's not really that different from real life. You rarely encountered water cooler chat before the Internet where people would describe their weekend as "terrible and here's why."
Keep in mind, I'm not talking about the Negative Nancy personality, which is intolerable in real life and on social media. That person who is always complaining about innocuous things that suck (coffee, lines for getting coffee, traffic, rain, etc.) is not fun to be around in any circumstances. But the person who is enduring hardship, or struggles with depression, we tend to have a cultural contract that expects us to repress these things. We need to figure out how to change that. Any time I've written about such things here, and it's rare despite the frequency, it has been met with empathy and "me too" reactions. Clearly the need to share is real.
Team Puzzoni has collectively been taking a beating since the year started. All three of us have had more than our share of difficulty, bad news, conflict and just general bullshittery. Some of the challenges are transient, some of them have long-term impacts, and most frustratingly, few have really been in our sphere of control. The last month has been exhausting.
Fortunately, we've got each other, and that's a big deal. It's still frustrating that it isn't cool to allow more bean spillage with the prospect of getting a random "you've got this" from a stranger. It feels like we live in a world that generally lacks empathy and people are all suspect of each other for a hundred stupid reasons.
So that's my release. We need a break, and I've said it out loud. Here's to better days going forward.
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