There’s an old Taoist saying that goes “Do not judge other people’s mistakes, but learn from them” (or maybe there isn’t, but I’m sure as hell there should be). Or maybe I am overthinking this whole business, but… OK, it goes like this.

It happens sometimes that I catch myself, when choosing, say, a book to read, or a movie to watch, or a comic book… it happens that I find myself weighing alternatives like this

• book/movie/comic A looks like fun
• but book/movie/comic B looks just as fun, and might provide matter for a post on Karavansara

And there’s nothing wrong with that, really – because often it is not a matter of chosing one and losing the other. I can read/watch B tonight and A over the weekend, or something. So, why not look for blog-fodder?

On the other hand, I have started to notice a lot of people out there that seem never to take a breath if it’s not a breath they can share on their socials: we get Instagram photos of their cat, Facebooks statuses about the stuff they had for dinner (photo included), tweets about them in line at the ticket booth for a certain movie AND further tweets during the movie, plus an Instagram photo of the ticket. Photos of the pages of the book they are reading, commercial links shared for the same T-shorts they just bought…

It probably signals how old I am, but it makes me uneasy. It makes me fear a world in which a number of people are not living but acting out a social media friendly version of their life.
The fact that some of these apparently do it as a way to further their “platform”, makes it even more unpleasant.

So yes, I sometimes hesitate while browsing Amazon.
What a nice little ebook of early 20th century weird short stories set in India… and the finger stops before I hit “Buy it now.”
I like to sleep over the decision for a night at least, these days.
Because I’d like the web to be my tool, not the other way around.

Just this, I felt like sharing.
Catch you later.