Is THINKING so Difficult?

I still check out social media on a regular basis... which is to say that I spend online time looking at venues other than Steemit!

Of course, one of these venues invariably is Facebook. That's actually a bit ironic because it was my disgust with Facebook that originally led me to abandon that giant site and plant my little flag here on Steemit, almost 10 years ago.

Anyway, whatever happened to critical thinking?

I see people making posts about all kinds of subjects, and half the time none of what they are sharing is actually objectively true!

This tells me that not only did they never take a moment to check whether this news story or that meme they're sharing has any basis in reality, and now there are dozens of friends who are commenting on it and sharing it... who don't even call them on the falsehoods and instead just blindly continue to share the same thing.

I understand that we do live in a very selfish age, and this "attention economy" — as people call it — revolves around (as the name implies) getting attention and maybe the only way to get attention is to stretch the truth because pure fabrication reads in a far more interesting way than actually sharing just what happened.

And it's only being made worse by the proliferation of AI!

It has always been fairly obvious — at least to me — that social media is largely a big lie. At least it's a lie in the sense that what we see on social media tends to be a highlight reel of people's very best attributes, with a complete absence (for the sake of balance) of some of the ways things weren't turning out so well.

Except, of course, if your specialty in the online world is to try to garner sympathy for how messed up everything in your life is! Victimology is alive and well...

In some ways I miss the early days of social media. When I started blogging — now more than 25 years ago — it was all about the Internet of people and stories. We wrote blog posts about our lives and what was going on as a form of recording our lives and as a way to interact with others much the same way we might interact with people in our neighborhood.

Those days seem to have more or less been lost to an era of clickbait and sensationalism. The bigger the yarn people can spin, the more potential it has to be read by someone even if their response to it it is pure outrage.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the game as it is being played today and that I'm still out there looking for human stories and actual information renders me outdated; obsolete… maybe everybody else truly is just looking for entertainment, much like people go to professional wrestling for the entertainment not for the sport.

I feel a little bit sad about it because much of it just makes me shrug and sigh deeply because it just seems so stupid and obviously fabricated.

Maybe I'm just getting old, and not keeping up with the times!

Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful remainder of your week!

How about YOU? Do you feel like web content is becoming more and more mindless? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2026.10.08 01:05 PDT
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