I’ll Bet You Bicker With a Lot of Interesting People, Too

My eyes are killing me. I've been spending far too much time online. Social media and the news — and the news on social media! — I can't look away from it. I want to delete all my accounts again. The years in which I didn't use social media were better. Of course, there wasn't a plague then, and society hadn't gone completely off the rails, either. I don't know how I feel about it, but my eyes hurt.

The problem with deleting accounts is you lose your screen name, and the last time that happened, someone(s) took mine over on various services and did not leave a good impression. I believe several people were involved because they all seemed different. One may have even committed suicide on the internet. My opinion has always been that abandoned screen names are fair game, and if the person who picks up your old handle isn't pretending to be you, they've got a right to be their authentic self with it. I won't complain about that.

Unfortunately for me, long ago and on a lark, I had set up one of those free online "about.you" pages back when they were new. I then promptly forgot all about it. For years I had a "personal homepage" featuring a brief bio with links to my professional profile, an angry football fan's Twitter account (you know that's not me), and the Instagram of a suicidal anime aficionado (again, clearly not me). You can imagine why I'm reluctant to delete my accounts again. I'll have to find a way to leave them active while not using them often, which is difficult because the internet is wildly entertaining, but it hurts my eyes to use the computer so much as I do.