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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • I appreciate the sentiment. One of the core conflicts I’ve had with family over the past couple decades has been their unrepentant usage of my data on these platforms. As a result, I never take or share pictures. They’ve responded over the years by casting suspicion on me, for not capitulating to the status quo, and for wanting to understand the nuts-and-bolts of technology. I’ve never shared mine nor others’ data. I worked in the data economy for about a decade and still, they’d dismiss my well-founded concerns in favor of corporate propaganda and the ego-dopamine loop. “What do you have to hide?” Dumb fucks.


  • Sounds like you consume useful information. I wager she uses socials as many: to compare herself to others, perusing a mix of ego-affirming and ego-damning content. These are powerful emotional hooks and oscillating between those states can be confounding. Add a dash of fatalism, which is not hard to come by in this culture, when at a low, and I think it easy to see how one might capitulate.

    There are a lot of people out there that think their personality traits are inherent and that their physical attributes are static. In fact, my brother was one of these people. He passed away at 40 years old due to morbid obesity. I attribute his downfall to capitulation by way of comparison. He came to think the hole was too big and that his genetics were too poor to make changes, despite me providing an example to the contrary. Sadly, my parents fanned the flames of his dissonance with their own identity-bound delusions.

    So, my guess is that you have developed a healthy personal philosophy and have not surrounded yourself with the type of people or digital content that renders that philosophy dissonant.

    edit: Check out Daniel Dennett’s book “Freedom Evolves” for an appropriate take on the folly of genetic determinism.