Committing The Treason of Solitude

Misunderstood Perceptions

How I am viewed by others leaves me baffled, if not surprised. If I am not generally considered a curmudgeon, it is assumed I have a temperament easily disposed to petty angst and fits of pique, with a tendency to take offence without cause.

How this figment of imagination takes hold and plays out, as if an alter ego of mine has supplanted my reality and taken my place interacting with others, escapes me. It would be unkind to suggest others are getting ahead of themselves.

My True Nature

In my mind, I would think those with whom I have issues would be in no doubt that I have issues with them, despite every desire for them to think they have done nothing wrong.

Much as I tend to be a loner, keeping to myself and enjoying my own company in the confines of my bedroom, oblivious of the world, I do not pick a grudge for the sake of being contrarian.

The Demands of Others

Indeed, there are times I want to be left well alone. It is a prerogative I seem to have no unilateral licence to exercise without question; there are people who simply need my engagement regardless of my situation.

Tribute, attention, communication and calls must be made or answered, or an inquiry is instituted bordering on an inquisition. My guilt is decided without the option for innocence, all in a day, or even shorter, between dawn and dusk.

No Hiding Place

In this, I have no hiding place. My solitude is a room with too many keys, distributed freely to others who enter at will, demanding tribute in the form of my time, my attention and my immediate response. No excuse is ever good enough for breaking formation; I must meet expectations or face sanction.

If I had the temerity to consider changing the locks, just imagine how the charge of treason would stick, because I belong to something beyond myself. My boundaries and borders are without demarcation, access taken rather than given.

Why does a moment cloud and crowd out the significance of the enduring, from which the narrative and story bear their existence? I suppose I would never understand where, for some, the spectrum of security is transient, whilst for others it is a bond of endurance that cannot be nicked by ephemeral conniptions.

A Google NotebookLM AI Audio Overview Discussion of this blog

If You Could Read My Mind

What are you looking for?

If you could read my mind, what will you do with the thoughts that you find therein? Will you with your knowledge of the predictable and already known seek to change the thought process to suit something else or some other purpose under your own control?

What would you want to influence by knowing what I am thinking long before it is expressed and acted on? Why would you want to pre-empt if not checkmate me at a game of chess having known all my forward moves that you can anticipate them and compensate for each variation in the way I play?

Cheating at the game

The chess analogy brings it to the fore, to seek to rummage through my mind is to cheat at the game, the game of unpredictability, of individuality, of uniqueness and whatever sense of mystery I might have. More so, my thoughts are processed in the confines of mental privacy, I having the choice of what I reveal and what I conceal.

Even with an open book, you can only be on a page or two at a time, you have to flip to other pages, and the order in which you read the book might give you a story or a jumble of incoherent writing. No one reads a book by just reading the last page. You might find out the conclusion from the synopsis on the dust cover, but what is the joy in that, if you have not followed the telling of the whole story.

A poor choice of occupation

In our impatience to unravel and discover we excuse ourselves from the world of mystery and the mystique of the person, we lose the element of surprise and spontaneity, the accident of moments that makes things worth cherishing.

If we were aware that our minds were being read, I do wonder if we would even be rational or out of wanting to thwart or confuse, we become impulsive, disconnecting ourselves from thought to act almost like animals, uninformed of drive, inclination, passion, or intention, we might be groping in the dark and crash shins against the sharp edges of glass-edged coffee tables.

The mind is part of what defines our humanity, to inveigle one’s way into the mind of another is to rob them of agency and dehumanise them. Each person does have enough going on in their minds, I would think that the idea of sitting in the limbo of another’s cranial activity must be an ambition not suffused with elegance or achievement.

Thought Picnic: It is happening on Facebook

It is happening on Facebook

There is a discussion happening on Facebook that you have to be a part of, in fact, there are many discussions that do not appear on blogs, on Twitter or in the news but it is wholesome, interesting and engaging.

I joined Facebook just over a year ago after years of taking the media reviews of it being fickle, feckless and hardly rewarding.

More so, we are told it is inherently evil, every missing person, abused person or unfortunate victim of crimes, some as heinous as rape or murder appears to have some Facebook assailant.

You manage your Facebook

The problem is really not Facebook, you can have as many friends as you want on Facebook; a good many you will know from all walks of life and others would just latch onto you, however, you can clearly choose what you want to share and with whom, primarily by making lists and managing permissions to your content by lists.

Very personal and private information should only be shared with those you know, in fact, the people you really know probably have other means of contacting you and it is best to use those channels than Facebook messaging.

If you properly compartmentalise the wealth of information you share on Facebook, distinguishing between the groups of people you meet just as you do not get too familiar with strange and unfamiliar people in real life, you should be generally safe.

You manage your Facebook, do not let it manage you, you have the right to click Cancel, click No, click Ignore, click Later, you do not have to click OK, Proceed, Accept, Allow – DO NOT feel compelled to do anything and do not let your curiosity get the better of you; you can wait until you have acquired more knowledge about a setting or situation before proceeding – a simple Google search could give you a general risk profile of the option.

Boxing your friends

The groups you can manage range from parents – these might include other relations with whom certain levels of openness have not been established; relations – these might be cousins and many others removed who you have grown to know through the relationships established through your parents.

Friends – you probably want to separate your current friends from those you have long lost contact with and these might well be different from another group or supposed friends; ex-schoolmates – ranging from those you met in primary school who would be quite different from those you met in secondary school and ultimately different from those you met in college or university.

Each set of friends probably know different things about you and you either want them to collide or you manage their access to your details.

There are levels of granularity of access to information that Facebook offers from who can see what like your birthday and age, who can send you messages, you can update your statuses, where you want to get notifications from and so on.

Acquaintances may be fans not friends

You do have to take your time to put the people in your life in the right context of relationship they have with you, you will probably be uncomfortable with people you barely know being all too familiar with you and that brings us to another group of Facebook befrienders – acquaintances – people you hardly know but have networked themselves to you through other contacts; if in doubt, ignore them, if you must do due diligence, ask one of your other closer friends about them.

You can also acquire friends through their interest in what you have been saying on Facebook and since it is difficult to make the distinction of those being fans rather than your friends, they are probably the ones you do not want to share your photo albums with and other intimate information you have shared on Facebook.

Keep true but manage it

Facebook has a tendency to draw out all your interests, likes and peeves than create relationships borne of those choices, just remember that everything you put in Facebook becomes a reference data point for analysis and suggestion – in most cases; you probably do not want to put those things online.

Obviously, you do not want to be an Internet schizophrenic, you want to maintain one true identity about yourself based on fact and truth or else you are left with the unmanageable portfolio of lies told to different people at different times with the impossibility of keeping track of who have been give what information and when.

Think about if you are being extrovert, an exhibitionist or a subject for voyeurism; think about why you are sharing what you are sharing and with whom; think about retaining a bit of mystery about yourself – think about the situation where your history is in the mouth and words of others completely out of your control, think about the need to be a bit reserved and exercising some discretion and Facebook could be great fun rather than a tragedy waiting to happen.

Get on Facebook but you do not have to join the bandwagon or be part of the crowd, make it unique and culture it well.