>I've only recently
>become aware of how much stress it was adding to my life, and I'll be
>doing all that I can to alleviate it. Part of that involves not
>writing right now "an awful lot about the net.politics I get to see ..."
Watch that. Now that I'm running apple I'm getting back into that stuff,
too, and it makes me really snarky. My public burnouts (I did it more than
once; it wasn't pretty) are pretty legendary, which is one reason why I
finally decided to get away from doing official usenet stuff completely (of
course, I'm doing it again. sigh. Do I look thrilled?).
The key, whihc took me years to learn, is to back off when it starts getting
to you, not when you can't stand it any more. Better pacing. Disappear for a
week here, learn to sit on your hands and stay out of an argument over
there, and generally realize that you don't have to be involved in solving
every crisis you see -- either it'll muddle through or someone else will
step up.
I find that by simply refusing to get into flame wars except when it's to my
advantage, and wandering in and out of the net as my time, energy and
interest allow, I keep a much healthier perspective of everything. For me
AND for the net. I was not always a positive influence on usenet, even when
I was trying my hardest to fix it. Probably especially when I was trying my
hardest to fix it.
(the hardest truism I ever learned: you really DON'T have to get in the last
word, and you really don't even have to 'win' the argument. Sometimes
shutting up and letting the thread die off neglected is the smartest thing
you can do...)
My biggest fear now that I'm running a piece of usenet again is not that it'll
make me crazy (which it probably will), but that I'll export that craziness
out to the net again. Hopefully, I'm smart enough now to back off and let
it flow a little more smoothly. We'll see.
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16