I spent all morning typing up a massive post about how divided we’ve become as a nation. Why guns are bad. How things will probably get worse before they get better. By the time I was done with the first draft, I hit CTRL + A and then promptly smashed the backspace key.

Why do I feel like I need to cover big news stories? This is a blog. A personal blog. Every major news outlet has been covering Charlie Kirk’s assassination from every angle for the last 48 hours.

I have a lot of thoughts and opinions on it, sure. I could’ve published a long-winded post about the irony, and how political extremism is good for nobody, but I’m not a talking head. I’m not in the business of breaking news. And I don’t want to post rage bait, or disrespect the dead. I don’t want to contribute to the polarization.

That’s not why I started this blog.

I started it to share links and opinions on things, but that doesn’t always have to be my opinion on the same shit we’re all being bombarded with from multiple screens and speakers every waking moment of life. Sometimes it can be, but mostly I want to share things everyone isn’t already talking about. I’ve drifted away from that a bit, unfortunately.

Everyone has their own thing. For some people it’s waking up at 4am, driving to the local news station, sitting behind a teleprompter and reading today’s news to millions of people. For others, it might mean coding software, or building houses.

We’re all so connected to so many streams of information, it’s easy to feel like we’re all podcasters or TV personalities. We’re being sucked into algorithms designed to invoke rage because it encourages conversations and makes a spectacle. Then other people join in, share the post, more people jump in, and suddenly marketing firms are seeing an uptick in ad impressions. Then the rest of us walk away a little angrier.

I don’t have to talk about what everyone else is talking about all the time.

On the indie web, there’s no race to publish the latest developments in every national or world news story. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m here to escape the monotony of the rest of the web, and the 24 hour news cycle. Things are happening all the time, and I read about them plenty. I watch plenty of news clips, and maybe even engage in discussions about them.

This space is my escape from a lot of that. I’m not going to hide my head in the sand and tune out every bad thing that happens, but I don’t want to be hardwired to everything that’s happening everywhere all the time, either. Today? I’m gonna sit this one out.