Good morning Crickets. Welcome to day number fifty of Operation Achieve Anything. Apparently, the Achieve Anything…book finds this day that notes the halfway to a hundred day point to be a day worth celebrating by reflecting on my accomplishments since starting this year-long challenge.

I find it funny how we often arbitrarily celebrate certain numbers like 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100, especially when in reference to a 365 day year where dividing by these numbers leads to results without any celebratory significance. I mean where else would you celebrate being 13.7% of the way done with anything? This isn’t meant to be a complaint but an interest observation meant to introduce today’s update.

Now that I’m past the intro phase, it’s time to delve into yesterday’s assignment which I thought for sure wouldn’t be interesting at all considering that the assignment had to do with interacting with others during a day where I had paid, first come first serve, work. This style of gig that allows me to work as many hours as I can until the queue of tasks runs out leads me to work the day away with very limited extra time for human interaction.

Luckily, the job I was working on had me reading people’s Tweets to others and rate how toxic the people of Twitter are being towards one another. Though I never actually interacted with anyone, I probably learned more of a lesson that matched up with the point of the book through reading these Tweets than I would have from physically talking to anyone.

First off, let me explain my political views since that was the source of most of the toxicity that found while working on the task. I’ve never liked the two-party system since I’ve never fully agreed with either side and always thought A or B voting only provides an illusion of a choice. Because of this, my trust is limited to specific politicians and though my views are mostly left-leaning, I’ve never blindly followed either party line.

For some reason, this outlook has never been all that acceptable amongst my mostly West Coast, Democratic friends. Any criticism I ever had toward a Democrat always led me to be treated like an idiot who was buying into the other sides lies or completely dismissed altogether for even questioning the “official storylines.” Then, any conservative people I knew dismissed me as a head in the clouds liberal since I’m an artist who doesn’t believe in God.

My view that both sides of this overly simplified approach towards creating policy can have their plusses and minuses while needing even more options to get it exactly right has always been dismissed as a daydream. Meanwhile, everyone sticking to their guns without being willing to budge has led to this divided country that only seems to be getting worse as it now seems to take even less disagreement in order to be seen as the enemy.

That said, I’m very open to listening to both sides complaints and theories knowing very well that I don’t have to agree one hundred percent and that it’s possible for both sides to be right and both sides to be wrong at the same time. I’m fully aware that there are people from both parties who genuinely have the people they represent in their mind but as far as the parties as a whole go, neither side is clear from corruption, so I’m willing to listen to anything that’s out there and am both outraged and annoyed by the scandals coming out of both camps.

This set up to my political views in hopes that it shows that the insights that I’m about to share about this toxicity task that I worked on, aren’t singling out either side. With that, here are my findings about how treating others, even those whom you disagree, with respect while communicating can get you much further than arrogantly trying to force your opinions on people who may disagree.

I found this toxicity task to be much more complex than I was expecting because of how often I felt that a response that could be considered toxic on its own was actually encouraging when you consider the Tweet they were responding to. For example, a person might say something like, “Fuck the Colts and their dumbass fans,” which on it’s own is toxic but considering that this person was actually adding encouragements to a post that read, “The Colts suck,” leads me to feel that it’s only toxic to an outsider but as far as the conversation between these two sports fans, the post is actually a positive.

I might have still noted something like the sample above as being slightly toxic since it brings the innocent fans into the equation but as far as the interaction between these two without the social media aspect, I see nothing wrong with this playful sports taunt, even though it’s not an approach that I’d use.

The main thing that blew me away was how often someone would respond to someone else’s political post by making an extremely valid and well-worded argument only to add something like, “You fucking idiot,” at the very end, completely negating any chance to win said person over to actually see their side. I read posts like this for over twenty-one hours and I couldn’t tell you how many times I would be impressed by the efforts to calmly explain a side to an issue, only to have the post go off the rails by the end.

The other thing that surprised me was how it wasn’t one side that did this more than the other, the only difference was the choice in words with one side complaining that everyone who doesn’t agree with them one-hundred percent was a racist Russian sympathizer while the other side liked to accuse everyone who disagrees as libtard socialist. Again, the most disappointing part was how often both sides have valid, fear-based concerns that really should be addressed or at least looked into but this vile approach only works to widen the divide.

I found that I would often throw out the baby with the bathwater whenever I’d see this toxic approach towards trying to share a point of view in that, even if I agreed with the underlying view I even dismissed the valid points when I saw people were being this rude since it only works to amplify the poster's bias.

This unintentional experiment got me to rethink my approach to how I use social media. I used to think it was funny to add a bit of aggression when complaining to a company about a product or service, like asking Amazon, “What the fuck is wrong with your dumb fucking Fire TV remote to where I have to change the batteries every other week, meanwhile I have the same shitty batteries for my VCR that I haven’t replaced since I bought it.”

I think I used this approach because I didn’t think Amazon would actually get the message so I figured that the exaggerated anger might either be found funny or tap into the rage of Fire TV owners who also agree to retweet my outrage and double my chances of being seen. This approach never worked to get my fellow villagers to grab their pitchforks and torches, instead, it’s often led to me having to switch gears and lighten my tone when the poor customer support representative checked in to see if they could help.

Though I’ve always avoided personally attacking anyone via social media by even adding small jabs like calling someone stupid after I prove a point, I definitely have used exaggerated outrage as an attempt to get attention while using anger as comedic effect. I’ve also always known that negativity is never the right approach towards winning someone over but now, between the lesson from the book and what I’ve witnessed over the past couple days of work, I’m going to be more active in my efforts to stay positive even when sharing what might be considered a negative point of view because there is nothing wrong with having to share something bad but you don’t have to deliver any news with such a negative attitude.

As I said up in the intro, the assignment for today is more about reflecting on the tasks from the past while celebrating the fact that I’m still fully committed to this project. As far as an actual task goes, the book seems to be giving me a day off since it did the reflecting for me by sharing a recap as part of the lesson for the day.

With that, even I’m intrigued to see what I end up reporting on when I check in with tomorrow’s update. Until then, it’s now that time for me to sign off in my usual way by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.