Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

I think…therefore I’m dangerous.

Letting Things Go

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I think about my inability to “let things go” and realize, with the help of a friend, that it might not be such a bad thing.

The Atheist's Guide to ChristmasYears ago, I went to a Solstice party at a friend’s house near my home in Washington state. This was back when I tried to spend the entire winter at home — maybe 2013? — before I realized that I needed more sun in my life than that latitude would ever offer in December and January.

The party was well attended by the “freethinkers” group I was a member of. We didn’t celebrate Christmas, but we celebrated the Solstice. I celebrated it as the end of the ever-shortening days and the return of the sun.

We had a bonfire (of course) and we gathered around it. There was snow on the ground and we’d spent some time sledding down a hill nearby before it got dark (at around 4:30 PM). One of the partiers handed out slips of paper and pens. We each wrote down something we wanted to let go of forever on that slip of paper. I’m pretty sure I wrote down something to do with my wasband or divorce or the dull, dead-end life I’d had with him. Then we each burned our slip of paper, symbolically destroying these things to remove them from our lives forever.

Ah, if only it were that easy!

As they say, time marches on. I’ve changed a lot since that winter night spent gathered around a fire with friends. I’ve achieved amazing things: building a new home on an amazing piece of land, growing my helicopter business far beyond what it could have been in Arizona, starting a successful jewelry-making business, exploring new hobbies like beekeeping and watercolor painting, and, more recently retiring from my work as helicopter pilot, selling the assets, and diving head first into a life cruising along the east coast in my own boat as a US Coast Guard-certified boat Captain.

Maria and Pups
Me and my pups during a recent stay at the dock in my dad’s backyard. While I’m not convinced that he fully understands what makes me tick, at least he has a clue, accepts the way I am, and doesn’t try to tell me how to manage my life. I appreciate that.

I’ve also resolved to keep toxic people out of my life, a decision that has cut me off from a handful of friends and most family members. After being in a mentally abusive relationship for so long — and not even realizing how it was affecting me until long after it was over — I simply decided I didn’t want to take shit from anyone ever again. Life is too short to let other people get in your head and mess you up emotionally. Why should I be laden with the baggage heaped on me by other people? Best to let them go and move on.

And that’s what I’ve done. Or at least tried to do.

Understand that I’m very happy in my life right now. I have the freedom that I need to do the things I want to make myself whole, to feel fulfilled. For a very long time, I didn’t have that. There’s so much in life that I wanted to do but was held back by people who either didn’t understand what made me tick or were actively trying to prevent me from achieving my own goals because of their own personal failures or jealousies. While I’m not by any means “rich,” I have enough retirement money socked away to do the things I want to before I get too old to do them. (As I’ve said elsewhere, I named my boat Do It Now for a reason.)

Jupiter Island Beach
Dawn at the beach near here the other day. Today’s sky isn’t quite dramatic, but I’m hoping for more sun when I do today’s walk.

As I type this, I’m sitting on my boat at an anchorage along Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway, feeling it rock in the wind. Later this morning, I’ll take my dinghy ashore, cross the little island there, and take a good, long walk on a deserted beach, picking up shells along the way and feeling the warm wet sand on my bare feet. Sometime before New Year’s Eve, I’ll travel down the ICW past Fort Lauderdale and Miami, and cruise down the Florida Keys to Key West. Along the way, I’ll anchor out and snorkel in aqua blue waters from the swim platform of my boat, along reefs full of coral and tropical fish. I’ll do this on my terms, on my schedule. And if I want or need to change my plans, I’ll do it without pushback from anyone else.

How can I feel anything other than joy?

But lurking behind the daily joy I experience in life is sadness. It comes mostly from the betrayal of someone I loved and trusted and it has been made worse by the knowledge that people in my family don’t understand or care about me. They say that blood is thicker than water, but in my life, most blood is like a poison acid that burns. Casting these people from my life stops the pain they were causing and helps me move on with the life I want, but I retain the sorrow of lost relationships that once meant a lot to me.

Simply said, I can’t let go of my past and memories that haunt me. So here I am.

I related all this to my friend Jason just this morning as I was preparing to write this blog post. Jason is a very smart, thoughtful, and intuitive guy. His response via text was extremely helpful and worth sharing (with his permission, of course):

Part of being alive might be living through pain. As in … while it doesn’t feel good, it may be an essential part of the human experience.

I’ve also heard that pain can be a messenger. And sometimes we learn more about ourselves by sitting with and reflecting on our pain.

I always love this chapter on joy and sorrow from The Prophet. It helps me think of pain in a positive way:

The Prophet Book Cover

I won’t share the whole quote here; you can read it for yourself. But here’s the meat of it (for me):

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

– Kahlil Gibran

What does this mean to me? I think it explains why I feel so much joy in my everyday life — it’s because I’ve had so much pain in the past. The pain dug a hole that the joy can fill.

So maybe it isn’t necessary to let things go completely to move forward. Maybe having some pain is necessary to have an equal amount of joy. Maybe I should stop thinking about letting things go and just keep moving forward. I’ve been doing pretty well so far.

How about you? How are you doing? What do you think of all this? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments on this post so we can all get something from what you have to add.

And, by the way, Joyous Solstice to everyone!

Is Social Media Destroying Your Mind?

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Take a moment to question why you’re on social media, what you gain (or lose) from your involvement, and how you can make your life better with or without it.

I’ve been a very active user of social media since around 2006 or 2007. I might have started with MySpace — who can remember back then? — but I definitely jumped on the bandwagon at Twitter and Facebook, spending well over an hour almost every day scrolling through new content, clicking Like and Share and Retweet buttons, and posting content of my own.

Has your focus been stolen?

I cannot say enough good things about Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus. It talks about all kinds of things that are distracting us and preventing us from achieving what we want or need to. If, like me, you’ve begun to realize that you’re less productive at home or work or having trouble maintaining relationships with friends and family members, put down your phone and pick up this book.

I preferred Twitter because the people I interacted with there seemed smarter and more dialed into reality. Not that there weren’t good, smart people on Facebook and idiotic assholes on Twitter. There definitely were.

But the difference between Facebook and Twitter — at least in my world — is that most of the Facebook folks were real-world friends and the Twitter folks were strangers. It’s hard to see posts from friends and relatives that clearly indicate their racist, homophobic, white suprematist, or conspiracy theory views. It’s hard to see them lose their minds to manipulative memes that spur hate and anger. It’s hard to realize that they probably aren’t as smart as I’d hoped they were.

And that’s one of the reasons I dumped Facebook a few years ago — the other being the realization that the algorithm was feeding me crap and preventing my posts from being displayed to friends and followers — and haven’t looked back.

I’m on the verge of fully stepping away from Twitter now. It has become a hate-filled cesspool so full of paid-for misinformation and random advertising that I honestly don’t know how folks can still visit it regularly. Elon Musk has revealed to the world what an absolutely crappy businessman he is, first by overpaying for Twitter and then by instituting policies that, little by little, have been alienating long-time users to the point that they’re leaving in droves.

The writing on the wall for me was Musk’s changing of the verified checkmark, which always indicated that an account had been verified to be what it said it was, to be some sort of revenue generating badge. What I quickly came to learn when I was stripped of my blue check was that anyone who now had a blue check had paid to get it and obviously had some sort of revenue generating agenda that made all of their tweets questionable.

In the 15 years I’d been a Twitter user, it had changed dramatically. I stepped away in November 2022, shifting my focus on Mastodon and the Fediverse for my social networking needs. I’m now in the process of deleting my 147,000 (not a typo) tweets and may even permanently delete my Twitter account.

Avoiding the Mind-Rotting Crap on Social Media

But is Mastodon any better? I can argue that it is, mostly because there’s no algorithm to manipulate and no ads to distract.

But I think the main reason Mastodon has been a breath of fresh air for me is the simple fact that I absolutely refuse to be dragged into any discussions about topics that generate a negative emotional response. Those include (but are not limited to) politics, climate change, gender issues, and race issues. Of course, all of those fall under the broad umbrella of politics in the U.S. because everything in this country of idiots has been politicized.

How do I avoid these topics? By setting up filters that prevent toots with specific key words from appearing in my feed. By not following — or sometimes even muting or blocking — accounts that toot or boost about these topics.

Poll
I put this poll on Mastodon mostly to help people realize how dumb it was to post political stuff. I didn’t expect many votes and didn’t get many. I was just hoping it would get boosted and seen and thought about a lot more. People need to wake the hell up and realize how they’re being played.

And that’s the problem these days. People spend too much time spreading information that supports their opinions on these matters. They don’t care if the information is true or false or some mixture of the two. They don’t care if it generates hate or anger — in fact, I believe they want it to do just that. Make us angry, make us hate the “other side.” Make us want to share the same crap and perpetuate the same anger and hate.

People who share this don’t seem the care — or maybe even realize — that they’re pushing the Us vs. Them mentality that keeps Americans divided and easy to conquer by power-hungry politicians and the corporate lobbyists who feed them in return for subsidies and favors. They’re playing right into the hands of the people who are destroying us for their own benefit.

And I won’t be a part of it.

Social Media is Not My News Source

And no, I’m not living with my head in the sand. I am probably more aware of what’s going on in the world than the idiot who gets all of his or her information from social media.

I listen to two news brief podcasts every morning — First Up on NPR and The Seven from the Washington Post — that give me the headlines and a little more; I follow up when I want to by visiting reputable news sites. I follow news, not opinion — I don’t need someone to think for me. I can think for myself. I suspect that most Americans can’t anymore. Our education system no longer teaches us how.

Is Social Media Destroying Your Mind?

But do we really need social networking? Do we really need to communicate with strangers online?

I can argue either way, but I will say this: face to face relationships with other people are far better for us than communicating with often anonymized strangers in the ether. Knowing this has pushed me into being more socially active after Covid and my crazy travel schedule pushed me into an ever more hermit-like existence.

I live alone and work mostly at home, so I don’t get the kind of interaction during the day that most folks have. I lean on social media for content by others to stimulate my mind and get me thinking about things I normally wouldn’t think about. I build relationships with some of these people. They are, for the most part, my only option when I’m home. And they’re a plausible option for anyone in a similar situation.

The danger is when we let these people think for us or sway our opinions or get into our heads to the point where they’re manipulating our emotions.

If you spend a lot of time on social media, why not take a few moments to think about its affect on you? Put aside your phone and other distractions, take out a sheet of paper and a pen, and honestly answer the following questions:

  • Why am I on social media? What does it do to benefit me?
  • Do I use social media as an escape from what’s going on around me?
  • Does my social media activity make me happy? What about it makes me happy?
  • Does my social media activity make me angry? What about it makes me angry?
  • Do I learn anything on social media? Am I certain that what I learned is true?
  • Why do people I follow share what they do? What are their intentions?
  • Why do I share what I do on social media? What are my intentions?
  • Am I building relationships with the people I meet on social media?
  • Am I seeing what I want to see on social media?
  • How much time do I spend, on average, every day on social media? Is it time well spent or would some or all of that time be better spent doing something else?
  • Am I neglecting responsibilities because social media is taking up too much of my time?
  • What can I do to make social media more fulfilling or useful?
  • What can I do to make social media take up less of my time?

I did say to answer those honestly, right? This isn’t something anyone else will ever see. Be honest with yourself. There are no right or wrong answers. Hopefully, the answers you come up with will help you understand how your use of social media affects you and how you can make it better.

Time Wasted

I wish that I could somehow get back all the time I spent doomscrolling on Twitter and Facebook — especially Facebook, since for about two years it really sucked me in hard. There was a time when every idle moment was spent with my phone in my hand trying to see what was going on in an online world that was prioritized by computers for the sheer purpose of keeping us coming back for more.

But I can’t.

These days, I see myself leaning on Mastodon the same way. I enjoy my experience there more because of the way I’ve fine-tuned it and because of the people I’ve met. But I’ve come to realize that it, like Twitter and Facebook, are sucking away my time, making me less productive. So I’m going to dial back a bit, limiting access to specific times of the morning and evening. Time is limited and I simply can’t afford to waste it on things that don’t matter.

Can you?

The Joys of Social Media

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My ever-changing take on social networking.

I’ve been thinking a lot about socialization these days and I thought I’d say a few things about how I stay in touch with friends (and strangers) while living a relatively solitary life.

Twitter and Mastodon (and Facebook)

I’ve been on Twitter since April 2007 and have tweeted more than 147,000 times. (I have a lot to say.) I’ve always liked Twitter since it filled a gap in my working life. In the years when I worked from home writing computer how-to books and articles and video training materials, I had no social interaction with co-workers. Twitter became my “water cooler” — the place I’d go when I needed a short break from work and some interaction with other people.


I don’t tolerate bullshit. I block all trolls and assholes and mute all advertisers.

Twitter changed over the years, of course. It was weaponized by political parties and states through the use of misinformation, bots, and trolls. I kept ahead of most of this by simply blocking the accounts I didn’t want to see. I’d also mute accounts that promoted their tweets. And I curated my timeline by being very careful who I followed and unfollowing people who tweeted or retweeted a lot of crap. Still, doomscrollling became a thing, even in my carefully curated timeline.

Of course, in recent days, after the takeover by Elon Musk, Space Karen, Twitter has pretty much gone to hell. It started with the new policy that allowed users to buy a Verified tag for their account and the rampant impersonation of real people and companies. Some are funny, some aren’t. One impersonation cost Eli Lilly (and Twitter) millions of dollars. Then there was the return of hate speech, in force, starting with rampant anti-semitism. That was only made worse with the reactivation of the previously suspended accounts for Donald Trump and Kanye West. Thanks to the loss of more than 75% of its staff, Twitter has become somewhat unreliable and there’s virtually no moderation of content.

Basically, Twitter is flushing itself down the toilet and there’s not much anyone can do about it.

Like a few other folks I know on Twitter, I opened an account on Mastodon (@mlanger@mastodon.world), which is a Twitter-like service made possible by decentralized networked servers. It’s a lot like Twitter was in the early days, but because it’s a bit funky to set up, it’s naturally weeding out the social media idiots most of us don’t want to see anyway. I’ve decided to build my Mastodon experience to be a politics-free, hate-free, anger-free world and I’m doing that by simply not following accounts that toot (instead of tweet) politics, hate, or anger. I’m filtering out posts with topics that I don’t want to see or don’t interest me. I’m muting accounts that post primarily politics. I’m basically building a social networking bubble.

Now before you get all critical about that, try to see it my way. I don’t go on social media to get the news or to learn what’s going on in the world. I listen to NPR and have a subscription to the Washington Post. That’s where I get my news. I have no interest in the stories put out by MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, Mother Jones, or just about any other media outlet so why would I want to read social media tweets that link to them?

What am I on social media for? Well, I mentioned it right at the top of this post: social interaction with other people.

Here’s how I see it: I live alone and don’t go out to a job like most people. My daily social interaction is minimal. In addition to meeting up with friends and neighbors at occasional social gatherings, I’m pretty much limited to text and phone conversations with friends and brief messages on Twitter and Mastodon.

(Don’t talk to me about Facebook. That site will rot your mind — it’s a cesspool of hate and lies. And don’t give me the excuse that it’s the only way to keep up with family and friends. These people don’t have phones and email addresses? The only way you can communicate with them is in a toxic environment where you won’t even see their posts unless the algorithm shows you? The only thing Facebook is good for is finding out how stupid/bigoted/gullible your friends and family really are.)

Now that I’m on Mastodon and building a whole new social media world from scratch, I’m really enjoying meeting people with similar interests — especially those that aren’t trying to sell a product or idea. It really is just like the old days on Twitter. You’d meet someone and hit it off and interact, chatting about things going on in your lives. You’d build friendships. Heck, I’ve met in person at least a dozen of the people I’ve met on Twitter, including the first person I ever followed there, who lives in the UK.

Nebo and the Boating Forums

Now that I’m seriously into boating — as I once was seriously into aviation — I’m making friends in the boating world. There are two main tools I’m using to do that.

Nebo is a boating app that lets you share your boat’s location with others. The idea is that you can keep track of where your boating friends are, show them where you are, and possibly meet other boaters in your area. I used it on my other two boat trips to share each day’s cruise with friends and blog readers. But now that I’m cruising at my own pace and meeting folks along the way, I’m using it to keep track of where they are.

Nebo has a built-in chat feature to get in touch with boaters you find on the app. (There are privacy settings to keep your boat invisible or your information invisible to strangers, in case you’re wondering.) As I prepare to return to my boat very late in the season, I’m trying to connect with other boaters in my area. I’ve successfully chatted with a few, including one couple that has done the Great Loop 33 times.

Because I’m not using Nebo every day (since I’m not currently on the water), I’ve pretty much switched over to texting for my closest boating friends. But I still use Nebo to see where they are. (I can’t wait to get back to them.) And if you’re interested in seeing where my boat is, you can find it here.


I can see that this morning both Pony and Nine Lives are at the Columbus Marina with a bunch of other Loopers on Nebo. La Principessa is heading south on the Tennessee River a bit farther north. I’ll likely catch up with them before we hit the Gulf.

Other sources of social interaction with fellow boaters are the two boating forums I follow:

  • TugNuts is the Ranger Tug/Cutwater boats support forum. It’s a great place to share information about our boats. I scan the new messages every morning and participate in conversations where I have something to add. I also use it to get information when I have a question or problem. For example, I was having a heck of a time getting engine computer data to interface with my chart plotters. I posted about my problem and had two good answers within 24 hours.

  • MTOA is the Marine Trawler Owners Association. Like TugNuts, it’s a great source of information for boaters, but it’s not boat specific. I use it to get more general information about cruising, especially about places to cruise. A list of new posts comes to me in email every morning and I use that to pick out the discussions I might want to see and participate in.

Both of these forums require membership. MTOA requires an annual membership fee. Both forums have resulted in members contacting me directly via e-mail — I allow them to do so — about topics I’ve participated in. I’ve gotten a lot of excellent information and offers for meet ups with other boaters. It’s nice. (And yes, I know I did gripe about some of the old guys in these forums, but they are the exception and not the rule.)

My Point

I guess my point is this: Social networking doesn’t need to be an addictive anger- or hate -inducing doomscrolling mechanism. It can be pleasant and informative. It can be a way to meet people with similar interests and keep in touch with them.

It can be what you want it to be — if you focus on what you do and don’t want to see and take steps to get the content you really want.

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Featured image by Image by Freepik.