I was a part of the forum towards the end.

I enjoyed your no-BS writing style there and on the JOS boards. Even though we were in different worlds (me in corporate IT and you in consulting), I thought "I could relate to this guy".

Personal insight: this probably says that I really never learned how to decisively leave really bad situations, and instead dug into bad scenes as a sort of personal honor code thing that eventually metastasized into a degree of self hatred.

I am guilty of this as well. Finally left a bad job long after I should have. At least I thought I left it....had a nightmare last night that I went back.....and it went on and on.

Almost all of my personal business posts from 2010 onward were about pain, insult, being demeaned and insulted, being screwed, being threatened. Not one thing seemed to ever even vaguely go my way. If I wrote some nice marketing copy for a business they would not pay me or would insult it childishly. If I built a web site to specs I would be threatened with legal process.

Sorry you had to deal with all that. Some people always seem to end up in the right environment, fall into the right cliques and social groups, make the right contacts, and end up in cushy high paying jobs. The rest of us have to struggle and grind to make a buck.

I sit on the fence and say to myself at times "I f*cking wasted decades on these forums" but CCF was a legitimate, valid community of highly intelligent raconteurs that overall behaved pretty decently.

Looking back, I think I've spent too much time on the Internet in general. Then again, without the Internet, it's more difficult to converse with intelligent people.

I'm kind of in awe of what used to be, and is no longer possible. Social media killed off that clubbiness, and people today are impatient about anything that isn't directly functional to themselves.

It's a shame. Social media may have its positives but so much has been ruined by it.