I swear social media is some kind of malicious worldwide experiment to kill people’s ability to feel joy.

I experience the following several times a day: See an image or read a story or watch a video that makes me laugh. Lightens my day. Dispels a tiny part of the permanent cloud of darkness over my head. I scroll on, still smiling, riding the high, and am immediately accosted with death, agony, or hatred. Perhaps all 3. I freeze with this fucking grin on my face staring at the worst, most caustic shit the world can throw at me. Genocide, murder, rape. While I smile.

I am so, so tired of it. The emotional whiplash. The punishment for feeling an instant of happiness. Just the sheer trickery of it.

You want to talk about a social media algorithm? How about one that fucking *warns you*? How about one that puts the good shit together and the bad shit together, and is like, “Brace yourself, this next part is awful, but it’s important you know it,” instead of just an endless jack-in-the-box alternating between flippant stupidity and soul-rending awfulness? Logging on is just an exercise in psychotic emotional manipulation, from start to finish. I close that fucking window and feel like my mind has been raked with hot coals.

Look at this shit. These people are fucking idiots.

Do they think that removing this shit from their site is going to somehow prevent us from realizing climate change is real? Heat index in MN was 121 F last week, they think I didn’t fucking notice that? They think my kids are too stupid to notice that the winters are getting more severe and the summers are becoming deadly? They think I’m so stupid that I’m not fucking alarmed when I read that the peat in the Arctic is now burning — the peat *beneath the fucking ground* — releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere than all the wildfires in that region for the last 6 years COMBINED?