“I found myself getting more and more frustrated as I realized that the people I’d once held in high esteem for their intellectualism were in fact bigots, regurgitating things they’d read and passing them off as their own opinions. Fewer and fewer of the members of my immediate social circle were taking the time to become self-informed and were instead morphing into little more than ‘shared links’, to borrow the system terminology. It was at that time that I lost faith in social networks and abandoned them. I decided I would rather live in hermitage, cloistered away, than participate in the empty head-nodding or passive-aggressive commentary that was masquerading as discussion.”
“So, what did you do?” she asked.
“I turned my devices off and went outside.”
First draft: 150124
Published: 230821