Online or offline. News keeps reporting about loneliness and disconnection, but in my experience it’s just that it’s harder to interact with people in a civil way because they are so hostile, angry, and arrogantly convinced their viewpoints and experiences are the only legitimate ones.
Not to mention the lack of civility towards servers and other service workers. I can’t recall if I was just indifferent 10 years ago, but on a almost daily basis it blows my mind how openly rude many people are to servers and such, which seemed like a much more rare thing when I was younger.
In so many words I agree. I find socialization to be difficult when you try to make an offhand comment about, generally, ‘the bad stuff going on’ and there’s a 30% chance the person you’re talking to will suddenly and very loudly start agreeing with and cheering on the ‘bad stuff’.
And then if it’s not that then you have a 30 percent chance that they will shut down and say ‘I don’t have enough information about the blatantly bad and terrible things to have an opinion or want to talk about it’, and then you’re left wondering what kind of conversation you could have with a person like that.
And I fucking hate Magic the Gathering so that’s right out. Admittedly it’s all on me, I get way too table flippy about TCG’s.