The Search for a Niche Social Circle

I saw Roger mention Void’s post Finding A New Internet Home on the Blaugust Discord and again in his recent post.

It’s a post I could have written. In my opinion, social media as a general concept for socializing is long since “over.” It’s now dominated by an overarching stain of the sales industry, as so many things in life are these days. As a place to socialize and hang out with people? Ugh. No thanks.

The mutual-following medium itself is what makes it feel anti-social to me. Nobody is really interacting with each other. It’s just an endless stream of saying hopeful one-liners into a vacuum, like the world’s biggest open mic night.

Anyway, the point is that over the last few years, I’ve come to accept that the Internet is no longer a social “home” for me and never will be again. It was fun while it lasted.

In the old days, many of the people on the Internet with me had similar attitudes and quirkiness. It was a weird sort of pioneer spirit.

Today, I’m an oddity among the overall Internet demographic, just like I am in real life. Now it’s just as hard to find “people like me” on the Internet as it is in the real world.

Currently the social circle I’m looking for in my old age has such a niche string of descriptors that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the world would fit into it:

• Gen-X
• Software engineer
• Generally artistic and creative
• Likes to record and play games
• Likes to write
• Used to like writing music
• Probably autistic to some degree
• Has social anxiety
• Has cancer

That last one is the newest addition and the one that really puts me in a pretty tiny circle of people. I can assure you that I don’t see very many people who look like gamers at the local chemo infusion center.

By way of conclusion I can only say that I sympathize greatly with the search for an online home. I imagine it’s a fairly common sentiment out there. These days I focus only on my own web site.

P.S. I deployed my new blog theme.