Living on the Small Web As a HikkiNEET

2024-10-21

Yo whaddup n0thanky0u blog readers, welcome back to another blog post. Before we get started I'd like to remind you to subscribe (via rss/atom) and thank you if you have already done so. This post is sponsored by the eternal call of the void. Have you heard it? Can you hear it? It sounds like it's getting closer. Use code "n0thanky0u" at checkout for 50% off.

Ok that's the joke about "what if blog posts were formatted like YouTube videos" I wanted to do, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

As you may know, I am somewhat of a hikkiNEET. Well I'm 100% of a NEET, but the hikki part would depend on how strict your definition is. Whatever you want to call me, I'm someone who does not leave my house very often, and I spend almost all of my time on The Computer. The thing about that is, there's a lot of time to spend. It's surprisingly hard to kill a whole day. Well thankfully, I live in the era where humanity has finally solved the technological problem of the existence of boredom. The solution was social media. Unfortunately, social media is terrible and I hate it.

Recently, for whatever reason, social media has been really disgusting me. I made an account on bluesky, but then I ended up getting rid of my account because I didn't like the idea of making a new social media account. More social media couldn't possibly be the solution to my problems. I am more and more disgusted by the format of these platforms. The way their infinite feeds show you random posts you never asked for. The way the random quality of these posts is designed to act like a slot machine, playing with the vulnerability in the human brain which enables "gambling" type attacks. (I have a random theory that this vulnerability was introduced in part due to evolutionary pressure selecting for people who enjoyed fishing.) Anyway I really have started to hate that. I hate the corporate design of these sites, the way people post. Everyone is really begging for attention. One hundred million million people all desperately trying to be "mildly amusing". The whole thing has really been getting on my nerves recently. Getting on my nerves enough for me to actually break the psychological addiction and push me off these sites.

I prefer imageboards, textboards, BBSs, and forums. However, these places are small and slow (the good ones at least). As well as that, I'm building up an growing collection of sites which I follow via rss. And on top of that, gemini and gopher pages which I follow. But even all of this is not enough to actually fill up a whole day, every day. If it's a slow day on youtube (it's hypocritical to insult social media and then say I still use youtube, I'll make a whole post about that at some point), I can easily just run out of shit to do. Which is how we end up here.

One thing about all of these blogs and shit is, it's a lot of reading. It's just nothing but text. Doing nothing but reading prose for 16 hours is surprisingly tiring. Today, things have been fairly ok. Even though I have run out of stuff to do, I am reading a visual novel right now, and so I can spend many hours of the day reading that rather than trying to hang out online. But again, that's even more reading. It's a lot of reading is what I'm saying here. And eventually, I will finish reading this visual novel, and I will not have that supplemental activity. What am I to do when I don't have things to do?

This is how we end up here, where I end up just making stuff because I'm bored. Here, I'm writing a blog post because it's easy and I'm bored. I could also be creative in a different way, most likely making some music or recording a youtube video. But this doesn't solve the actual problem that social media solves. I want to fucking chilllllll. I don't want to have to actively do shit all the time. I'm fine with actively doing shit which requires my brain to be active like 85% of the day (assuming I'm not in the depths of a depressive episode, where that number dramatically lowers). But that last 15% of the day I want to lay back passively. With social media, it's very easy for that 15% to balloon in a way I do not like. But just because it can lead to overdose doesn't mean the demand goes away. Presumably, a lot of people have a mundane job which fills this brain off part of their lives. When I worked mundane jobs, yeah, I was desperate to go home and do something intellectually stimulating. But as a NEET I have the opposite problem. Without social media bullshit, it's hard to find some way to just passively relax, and fill up the time before I go to bed.

So I'm investing this time to try and build out the list of things to do online as far as possible. I'd also like to find a video game I can play on my thinkpad x220 for hours at a time. Well I don't have much more to say on that topic, I'm just still dealing with this transitional phase as I move away from the surfacenet / meta-meatspace / anti-social media / whatever you want to call it.

Thanks for watching guys don't forget to smash that (rss) subscribe button and I'll catch you in the next one. Peace. (outro music plays)