no therapists in cyberspace

I should like to take this opportunity to announce that my blog has just passed the 100,000-view mark. Over a thousand poor suckers welcome visitors have clicked on my blog or one of its embedded links, and been ushered into my world (even though most of them only stayed for one second or less).

Having made this announcement, I want to say a few words about insecurity. Close your browser now or forever hold your peace.

Is it just me, or is every other blogger on the Internet a lonely, maudlin mess?

And by "every other" I mean fifty percent. One out of two. Half of the total (and considerably high) number.

Whereas people once sought out their friends, family members or therapists to bare their souls and get encouragement and reaffirmation, people are using this Internet thingy to do it. I've lost count of how many pessimists, downers, wet blankets, naysayers, doubters, foul-weather forecasters and sticks-in-the-mud I've run into online. I've read their blogs. I've assayed their oeuvre. It's uniformly dismal drivel. It may be well-written and literary drivel, even borderline poetic—but drivel it remains.

I'm afraid I have very little patience for other people's problems. I was never intended to be a therapist. I'm more inclined to put a pie in somebody's face to cheer them up than to bring them a cup of hot tea and give them an ear. Perhaps I'm narrow-minded. Perhaps I lack patience. Perhaps I'm just a selfish bastard.

Either way, I find myself turned off by these blogs—even those penned by close friends. I turn away in disgust, hitting the red "X" and closing my mind to their plights.

I suspect it has more to do with the way I was raised. My family's intensely private. You don't air your dirty laundry in public. You don't fish for sympathy. You internalize suffering and grief until time and experience grant you the clairvoyance and perspective to recover and move on.

(See what I did there? That was four instances of the word "and" in one sentence.)

Perhaps because my family is so private, I interpret others' emotional openness—in cyberspace and elsewhere—to be a form of indiscretion. At best, I consider this a minor annoyance at best. At worst—when bloggers bare their souls, wax poetic, talk about things like despair and love and hope and other abstract nouns—when the pathos becomes overwhelming, in other words—it strikes me as an egregious affront to my sensibilities. I promptly hit the "back" button.

Whatever the root cause, I'd like to make one thing clear: I've gained perspective. I don't think any less of people to pour out their sufferings in the blogsphere. (Not anymore, anyway.) This has gone on too long to be gauche any longer. It's mainstream. It's cool to unleash the travails of your mortal existence onto a consoling (and anonymous) audience.

It just weirds me out, that's all.

Same thing goes for Facebook updates.