My wife’s boss died two weeks ago. He was relatively young, in great shape, fairly well-to-do and stress-free, from all accounts. He just had a heart attack and instantly died.

He had a blog that we discovered after he died. It was inspirational in the sense that he documented all the places he went and seen during his year long sabbatical. That inspired me to start this blog, humble as it is.

I had also been wanting a space besides Facebook where I could air out my thoughts. I feel like Facebook has outlived its usefulness. In the beginning it was a cool way to catch up with people that I hadn’t talked to in a while. Then the forums came and I got in heated, educated discussions. Then I stopped the heated discussions when they devolved into name-calling. Now Facebook is only good for getting notices of events, finding out what people’s kids are up to, and looking at vacation photos.

My wife works in the public sector, which in today’s environment requires a large amount of discretion when it comes to dealing with social media. So this blog will be a good place to post items that I don’t want on Facebook, which is almost everything nowadays. Chances are that only two people will ever see anything on here – you and myself. So I feel more freedom here in my little space.

I think that a lot of animosity today can be traced to social media, mainly how Facebook presents others’ posts. In the old days of the internet you would have to make a conscious effort to go to individual forums, websites, blogs, whatever, to get people’s opinions. There was still a lot of crackpots and conspiracy theories, but at least you knew what you were getting into beforehand. But Facebook created The Wall, where other’s post were unwittingly thrust into your view. So you could be laying in bed, looking at Facebook on your phone, looking at benign stuff like vacation photos, when you scroll and see some acquaintance that you friended years ago post some dumb political meme. And this unexpected post has invaded your bubble, your safe space inside your house. So the base-level instinctual thing to do is to respond and fight back, to defend your little territory. Basically it’s road rage, only in the home now. It’s this dumb arguing that has lead to the level of hateful rhetoric today.

In conclusion, thank you for consciously choosing to come to my blog to see my thoughts and opinions.