I mentioned the other day that I had was going through old blog entries and noticed a bunch of photos missing. The photos weren’t really missing, it was just that the JetPack plugin (a service I paid for, mind you) was doing something to the images and keeping them from showing. It was also slowing down the performance of the blog. A lot. I’m much happier without the JetPack service activated. Plus, I’ll save a little bit of money.
One of the harder things about reading old blog entries is seeing a difference in exuberance levels between then (usually before 2016 or so) and today. Yes, I purposely picked 2016 because, as well know, the United States changed a lot when Trump won the Presidential election in November of that year. In my opinion, the country has been in a steady tail spin since that day and things only got marginally better once Trump was out of office. The seeds of destruction were well planted during the Trump years, throughout government, and through the populace.
It’s rather depressing.
I don’t like writing about depressing things. I try to find the happy where I gaze and generally I can find it, but since the Trump years it feels like there’s been less happy to be found. Now, I don’t completely blame the Trump years for all of this, because it coincides with a lot of other things, including the explosion of social media, the general attitude shift to one of “less trust” throughout society, and the general tendency for folks to fear science and reason in favor of opinion and superstition.
Ironically, a blog post I wrote in October 2013 talks about me finding little joy in Facebook. Twitter wasn’t completely off the rails back then, but Facebook was being Facebook and I found that depressing. Here it is a decade later and I could write a blog entry today that would probably go word for word with what I wrote 10 years ago on the subject. That’s a long rut.
I will continue to try to find the happy as I look over this world. I will focus on the pleasant. But I will also be a realist. It’s important to keep it real.
But oh, to have that pre-2016 feeling of optimism again.
