(taking as a prompt the first link off this node, which is proselytize.)

It's become de rigeur these days to perform a social persona on the Internet. Social media is clearly to blame: others have gone on in more length than I have about the phenomena, and likely in a more erudite way than I can do in a daylog I'm dashing off late in an afternoon the day after an attempted coup of the United States.

Over the last decade, the pressure to react, to take a stand, to perform loudly and clearly tribal allegiances (and be damned, one way or another), has intensified to a fever pitch. As someone more prone to sit in the corner with a book and avoid trouble, I'm damn tired of it. I don't have the energy to react or spend my time sharing memes or declaring whose lives matter or what tragedy I'm mourning. Or to point out the grifters in any part of the political spectrum. I'm too busy living through the damn thing, and living my life. Everybody has been either proselytizing or condemning those who do, or don't.

Shit, earlier this year I was mourning the death of a bookstore I grew up in, and within thirty minutes, some rando decided to talk to me about how it was all due to national action by antifa bussed into Minneapolis. And you know what? Fuck that guy, fuck that conversation, fuck the people who immediately decided to pile logs on the fire arguing with him.

That is not a conversation I am getting sucked into. It is not my job to argue with idiots on the Internet, and it's not yours either. They're not going to stop being idiots.

I can't purge it completely from my life without cutting all comms with large swathes of my friends, so instead I've mostly chosen to opt out and not react. You will not find me performing my political and social views (and oh, how they're the same these days and I hate it) on Facebook or Instagram. If I trust someone not to divebomb the conversation into them ranting at me as I try with decreasing levels of politeness to escape, I'll talk to them. Otherwise, I won't.

To quote Hamilton: "The world has no right to my heart." I'm not going to spend what time I have on this earth having pointless conversations. I'm not going to spend it trying to talk the afraid around to sanity.

It's not my job to proselytize.