Feeling cut off

TheCatWoman said:

Why dose everything have to be seasoned with with video's and stuff?

I think that this is because social media is the zeiteist and pervades almost everyones lives now.

As a society we seem to be developing a very short attention span and use videos as our dopamine hits to give constant stimulation and as a result don't find things like reading or talking stimulating enough to be worth the time required.

Availability of other people to talk with is also a challenge as we can't just assume the other person is available when we want to talk - they are proably busy making a TikTok video and don't want to be interrupted. Social media on the other hand is always available and ready for our pleasure.

You can continue with your refusal to engage in things like smart phones and social media but you will find yourself in an ever diminishing group of people.

It's not just that I don't want to use social media, but I don't know how to use, I don't know how to keep myself safe, I can't even use the phone properly as a phone! I did have a smart phone and I stuck with it for about 6 weeks trying daily to do something different with it. I learnt how to store contacts and how to bring them up and phone them, but I found text messaging totally confusing and I didn't know how to turn the predictive text off so I ended up with sentences that made no sense. I never worked out how to answer a call because the screen was just black. The screen would go black a lot and so quickly I ever found the icon that would allow me to even look at how to change it.

It also dosen't help that I have memory problems in certain areas, some sorts of information seems to bypass short term memory and go straight to long term memory without having any synaptic links, so whilst I know that I have done something like C&P before, I don't know how I did it and it never gets better, everytime I do it its like the first time.

To be honest Iain people like yourself don't really help, your obvious frustrantion and annoyance with me make me less willing to engage with tech, because it makes me more afraid of getting wrong and having people being cross and shouting at me for being stupid or ending up causing something weird to happen creates a viscious circle where I am the perpetual villain through not understanding what someone is trying to teach me. What's worse is that I understand why the person is so frustrated, because I'd be frustrated too, I'm frustrated by my inability to cope with it too. You don't seem to accept that I have the diagnosed memory problems either which is really frustrating, probably for both of us as I really can't help it.

TheCatWoman said:

It's not just that I don't want to use social media, but I don't know how to use,

Let me phrase this a different way. You have managed to learn how to use the computer enough to login and get online, connect to this forum and be able to respond to posts in a nested format.

This demonstrates that you are capable of understanding how to use the computer. the site and reply to the messages in the correct way. You are clearly intelegent, competent and capable.

You can access social media on the computer too so it would just be a learning curve similar to connecting to NAS and participating.

TheCatWoman said:

To be honest Iain people like yourself don't really help

This hurts. I have spent a very long career helping people be able to use technical tools to be able to do their jobs, whether it is an electric typewiter, security system, computer, martphone/tablet or whatever.

In that time I have helped tens of thousands of people on a one-to-one basis and I've never met one who couldn't learn when they were willing to try and be patient while I found ways to explain it to them, give analogies they understood to build on that understanding and build the confidence to do what they needed.

There have been plenty of real challenges but all were able to overcome the challenges with patience and openmindedness.

I appreciate your memory problems complicate things so an approach I would use would be to build those neural connections through repetition. This needs you to be patient as much as me.

There have been no lost causes and I don't believe for a minute that you are either.

TheCatWoman said:

it makes me more afraid of getting wrong and having people being cross and shouting at me for being stupid

From you counselling training, does this sound to you like your fear of failure and the shouting is making you avoid even trying? How would you approach this in a patient if you were the counseller.

I really believe you are capable of these things if you are willing to find the right teacher and work at it. If you don't want to learn then this is also fine but it is more authentic to say "I won't rather than "I can't".

Shopping used to be a social activity, even if you didn't buy anything, you'd meet your mates and trawl round the shops, make plans for later, chose an outfit to wear, try on make up. Now we're supposed to sit and get tutorials from influencers, but the clothes that we can't try on first, or as seems to be getting mroe common, buy the same piece of clothing in 3 different sizes in the hope that one fits and return the others, wheres the fun and socialising in that?

Shopping used to be a social activity, even if you didn't buy anything, you'd meet your mates and trawl round the shops, make plans for later, chose an outfit to wear, try on make up. Now we're supposed to sit and get tutorials from influencers, but the clothes that we can't try on first, or as seems to be getting mroe common, buy the same piece of clothing in 3 different sizes in the hope that one fits and return the others, wheres the fun and socialising in that?