This question and thread make me ask a different question: how important is Fluther to each of us? We each get to decide what gets priority in our lives. We are each allowed to decide the items that will get the most energy, and we can have multiple items that get energy, and we usually assign different degrees of energy to different items.
I can think of one user on this site who actually places a get deal of energy/importance to that user’s interactions here. I can think of a user with a high lurve score who checks this site perhaps once a quarter. It varies from user to user. That’s one of the beauties of life. We each get to decide for ourselves where we want to expend our energy.
It’s very difficult to decide if any one answer is better than another. I think difficulties arise when we assign more importance to our answer versus how another user answers the question of how important this site is. We each place great importance on our own answers, because we want to be right – whatever right may mean to each of us. Wanting to be right is quite normal. It’s called seeking validation. When we are children, we seek validation from our parents. As we grow, we seek it from people further afield like friends. As adults, we seek it from colleagues in our fields. If all goes well and we mature, we finally seek it only from ourselves. Very few of us get to that point.
There is a great deal to worry about in the world today. There’s climate change and the renewed threat of nuclear war. We all have multiple worries like work stress and taxes and money for groceries. It’s also a stressful time of year, the holidays.
It’s a completely normal phenomenon to live with all this stress and to choose a relatively minor area in which to decide to express our outrage at all the other stress. It’s completely normal to be overwhelmed by financial stress and to take those overwhelmed feelings and to dump them into a disagreement with a work colleague or the cashier at the grocery store or while we’re driving or any other smaller and less consequential item.
Fluther holds great importance for some of us and little for others. We all have lives away from this site, and we all express our feelings for this site in different ways. We all want our words to be read and understood by others. How important is the validation of other users on Fluther to each of us? It can be very important for some, and it can be minor or even unimportant for others. We each get to decide. Perhaps we can each be a little more understanding that others are going to have different answers.