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I Don’t Want to Write Anymore
Social media exhausts me. No one reads. So, why bother?
Last I checked, child murderer Casey Anthony has fifty thousand followers on TikTok. People raised their hand and said, sure, I’d love to hear from a killer who got away with it. Perhaps Anthony thought she’d get the Gypsy Rose fanfare and confetti, lest she forget Rose didn’t make it out glorious and clean too.
Downloading TikTok was the worst decision I made this year because I was confronted with two opposing truths — powerful voices who used social media to find truth and those who couldn’t spell the word or discern its meaning. People misused common words (narcissist, nuance, dismantle, demure) and made memes of them when they only had to read a book or do more than scroll into oblivion. Maybe I should’ve been nervous when children in schools stopped learning cursive — the physical act of putting hand to paper — or when the books I cherished as a child were banned and thought to be evil by people who practiced cruelty as easily as deciding dinner options.
Or maybe I should’ve entered a state of catatonia when someone said, with a straight face, I did a ton of research — I fed all these articles into ChatGPT and it told me what to think. Because outsourcing our critical thinking skills to a flawed, biased technology is normal to a point where…