#I'm tired of hearing about booktok I don't care if these people don't like reading but force themselves to do it anyway

[nebulaad]

so many modern posts can be boiled down into a sticky "I hate this thing that all my friends do that I, by extension, feel expected to do with them because it's a fairly common activity/task, but my fear of being left out of my friend group because I don't share any common interests with them forces me to engage with it in spite of my distaste for it and my refusal to actually admit that I dislike it reveals an inherent dissonance in how I live and how I want to live and the enormous gulf between them and so I have to assume that everyone struggles to enjoy this thing because it is impossible to me that the thing I hate and force myself to do anyway is a pleasant experience for anyone because as you can probably tell my underlying anxiety has made me solipsistic to the point where it's difficult for me to honestly engage with life outside of social media which at its worst is just a series of extremely personal snapshots into a highly curated personal experience being traded back and forth" syrup. I'm actually a little tired of it like. You don't have to go to the movies if you don't like sitting at least mostly quietly in a dark room. You don't have to read long, lore-heavy novels just because your timeline is full of series speculation. Most importantly of all, you don't have to write a ten page dissertation about your perfectly legitimate hatred for something you constantly insist upon doing because you don't know how to honestly engage with the people around you. People's opinions of you are, realistically, hugely agnostic about whether or not you routinely finish long books or series or movies. Pretty much the only benefit to seeming as if you do these tasks with pleasure and regularity is clout chasing in those particular communities and more and more it seems like communities spring up around clout chasing for these niche hobbies that seem to associate no true pleasure in the act of actually participating.