Don’t Read The Comments.

Nietzsche said we shouldn't look into the abyss, but it's pretty tough these days. The abyss is everywhere - it's all over the shelves at the supermarket and broadcast 24/7 into our homes and burbled at us through the radio. We're all made to stare at it, every day.

Sometimes it waves.

The epicentre might be Facebook. Or at least, the public bits of Facebook. Friends' statuses might be an unreadable melange of boring dinner updates and exhortations to buy aloe vera gels (my autocorrect tried to change that to "alone vera", which sounds exactly like the name of the woman who would be selling this shit) but the public stories are so much worse. You never lose faith in humanity faster than when you let them all weigh in on something.

Knowing this, I was still dumb enough to open the comments on a Facebook post from ITV news about Greta Thunberg's recent visit to Bristol. We all know I shouldn't have done it, but I did, so let's move on.

There was the usual thicket of idiocy. "How did she get over here?!" being a personal favourite response to anything that involves Thunberg travelling - if only there was some way of finding out, like a website you could go to, dull stranger who is already demonstrably on the internet! - but one comment really caught me off guard.

A lady called Lynn (of course she was called Lynn...) chimed in with "Im glad i didn't go its not good to make any difference." [Sic]