I don’t know the guy. I never met the guy. Probably never will.

I used to like his tumblelog because he took pics of himself every morning and that was interesting. I unfollowed him when he became unemployed and started posting 42 or so of his ‘deep thoughts’ all day long every day.

I’d have liked to have seen him just continue the morning photos.

Futhermore there was no possible way to contact him and join in on his ‘deep thoughts’.

Since he was not having interaction with me, I saw no need to be made aware of his every passing thought on my dashboard.

Besides, he has such a huge group of followers that inevitably I was made aware whenever he said or did anything noteworthy.

But I’ve seen him “quit blogging” once before, which didn’t last long. It didn’t shock me at all when he started up again. Which I was made aware of by the rebloggers.

It won’t shock me next time he returns either, which will be in a few weeks I’m sure.

Unfortunately, just as some people will like you for no good reason, some people will hate you for no good reason. It is the price of popularity.

This is a lesson I didn’t learn until I was well into my 30’s, having never really been popular anywhere with anybody until then.

While the cheerleaders and football players were learning this in high school, I was learning the other lessons, about being yourself even if you’re a nerd or weirdo and you don’t fit in.

I have a hunch Jakob’s story might go something like that too.

The other big lesson I’ve learned as I’ve grown up is that you want to be the ones who keep on learning lessons, not the people who don’t.

Other people’s behavior is irrelevant. Because when it comes right down to it, when you look back, the only thing you’ll be concerned with is whether or not you handled the tough stuff with dignity and grace (a lesson I’m still learning the hard way sometimes).

Jakob does get made fun of relentlessly but we’re all just learning out here in cyberspace about how to have real lives both on and off the computers.

You weren’t meant to know what people say about you when you’re not around. Now it can easily be published in a ‘hate’ site devoted to you which remains forever and can be called up any time by anyone anywhere.

It’s hard to imagine that that one sweaty fat guy in his underwear who’s jealous cause no one reads his blog so he started a campaign against you isn’t the whole internet when you are the one under attack.

But then you remember there are 6,704,845,726 or so people in the world, most of whom couldn’t give a toss about you. Even if a couple thousand were to hate you it’s still not that many.

Jakob’s tumblelog used to chronicle his life. And it was easily one of the most interesting ones. Its when he started to blog AT his mass followers that it became tiresome, and then he got hecklers.

My advice to Jakob is to blog for yourself.
Take pictures of yourself every morning.
Don’t even look to see what people are saying.