I've "gone viral" before and I don't recommend it!
Back in 2020, when if you'll recall we had a lot going on, I was annoyed about something and dashed off a tweet about it and that tweet ended up getting 30K likes and escaped the website as a screencap, and now fairly frequently pops up on various social media websites. This is the post.
Maybe you've even seen this!
How does this feel? Mostly not great!
On one hand, it's certainly kind of validating people did agree with this and think it was funny. I'll own that! This was especially true when it was being shared among my friends and acquaintances in the original context1.
It quickly got overwhelming though, it was so many notifications. So many eyes on my account the next few days. A lot of times when that happens people will look at your posts for things they don't like. I like to think I only post things people will like, but we all know that's not true! A kind of paranoia set in.
That exposed feeling kind of continues to this day, to a degree. My estranged mother basically lives on Facebook and has probably seen that post. Friends send it to me regularly saying, "Woah, is this you? I saw it on Reddit!" or whatever.
People also use it to argue a point that I didn't intend: that young people can't understand events as well as those who lived them contemporaneously. I don't think that, and never did, and in fact carefully worded my tweet to exclude that point; I wrote "verifiable historical events"2! I was talking about how weird it is to have a younger person tell you, basically, "that didn't happen", and you can remember it and you can find it on Wikipedia! It messes with your head, like you came from another dimension. It's a very specific situation, and it really does happen to you more and more as you get older, but it's not generic "kids these days" grumbling. It's so specific I doubt the post would have taken off like it did if people had understood how specific I was being.
Which brings me to the worst point of all, for somebody argumentative like me. Occasionally people will read my post, assume I made that point I just described, and argue about how just because you're old enough to remember the moon landing doesn't make you an expert on politics, or fashion, or television or whatever. Which I totally agree with, but they're misreading me.
It's not even misreading, really. The post has escaped me too, and it represents its own idea now, as a meme. It's got my face and name on it though, so it's hard not to feel a kind of way about it.
So if you enjoy the anxiety of the eye of the Internet falling upon you, and all the threats that represents, and having literally thousands of people argue with the ghost of what they thought you meant for years on end, and to receive in return nothing whatsoever, maybe going viral is for you! But this is a 4/10 experience, I say.
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This post was last edited 8 minutes ago.
Reply by email.The original context was people bickering about how Democrats had squandered their filibuster-proof majority in 2009, but Senator Ted Kennedy spent much of that year unable to vote due to his brain tumor and Senator Joe Lieberman spent much of his life being a total dick, so they were pretty hamstrung and it was frankly a miracle we even got the ACA out of it all.↩
It is funny now in retrospect how confident I was that just by adding the word "verifiable" people would be forcibly prevented from misunderstanding me. I was not excited to have the "well actually..." responses start building up and now often see them when I have no power to even reply and "ACTUALLY" them back. Agonizing!↩