Over the past many weeks, we’ve received countless messages. After yesterday’s post here, in which we addressed our health issues, we received many more. If I didn’t respond to you directly after receiving your message, please know I am doing my best to respond to every one of you. However, with so many messages, I may miss a few, and we extend our heartfelt appreciation for reaching out.
Gosh, we appreciate the fact that we don’t have ‘haters.” Even with the best of health and circumstances, it’s disheartening to receive hateful messages and impossible not to read them. Over the years, we’ve had a few hateful messages; in 90% of the cases, we chose to ignore and delete them. Not many hateful messages deserve a response.
Who are these people who write to bloggers and who post comments on social media? I don’t get it. Certainly, we’re all entitled to voice an opinion, but doing so with grace and dignity should be the order of the day. Unfortunately, it is not. Sure, we’ve had some strong opinions sent to us via the comments section on this site or by email.
We have often responded to those trying to avoid being defensive. But, when one expresses a strong opinion to which the recipient may disagree, it’s not always easy not to defend one’s case for the opinions shared.
While we were in lockdown in India in a hotel room for ten months, we wrote a post, found here, entitled,
“Please “unfriend me” if…Social media during lockdown.”
This post was directed at Facebook friends who may be posting negative, hateful messages, not necessarily directed at us but directed to others, which may be construed as attacking, racially profiling, gender bashing, or offensive to some people, including groups, celebrities, and politicians.
My goal was to exclude those “Facebook friends” who wrote negative comments that appeared on my feed for any of my chosen friends to see, passing on the negativity down the line.
We prefer to use Facebook to see what our friends and family are doing, places they’ve been, people they’ve seen, and a wide array of life experiences. I don’t add everyone who “friends” me, especially if I don’t know them. As a result, I don’t have a huge number of Facebook friends. Otherwise, it takes too long to go through each day’s feeds and updates to see information and photos from those people we do know.
I don’t spend more than 15 minutes each day looking at Facebook. As I’ve mentioned, once I am done posting, I don’t use my laptop other than for travel research, financial matters (using Express VPN for security), recordkeeping, and streaming shows at night since my laptop has an HDMI outlet to hook it up to the TV so that we can watch on the big screen. Tom’s Chromebook doesn’t have such an outlet, although we could purchase an adapter if needed. But we’re OK with the current set-up as is.
Many have asked if we use Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and other forms of social media. We choose not to. The reason is very easy for us…we don’t want our entire lives to be about social media. The pressure of constantly taking photos and coming up with clever quips and opinions is not in our wheelhouse.
As our readers so well know, we do not use our posts to espouse opinions about everything in life. Instead, we prefer to keep our site free of negative opinions that may offend, annoy, or upset any of our readers. Sure, we freely share opinions on inanimate situations and travel venues, trying to stay focused on our day-to-day lives and how travel impacts our daily lives.
Again, thank you, dear readers, for reaching out. We always appreciate hearing from you and your positive perspectives.
Be well.
Photo from ten years ago today, November 18, 2013:
