The northlondonhippy

Hello. My name is the northlon­don­hippy and I’m here to help.

As I men­tioned a few days ago, on Weds 16th June, I will be mostly spend­ing the day online, try­ing to offer help and assis­tance to as many peo­ple on Twit­ter as I can, whether its try­ing to answer ques­tions, retweet­ing impor­tant and wor­thy mes­sages, or, well, pretty much any­thing else I can think of that might help.

I’m call­ing it #help­ful­hippy day and that will be the hash­tag I use on all my attempts at being help­ful. If you would like to play along at home, you can also tag things with #help­ful­hippy or you can just tweet me old school-style to my Twit­ter name, @nthlondonhippy — either way, I’ll hope­fully see it and respond quickly and helpfully.

I’m doing this because I want to give some­thing back to Twit­ter because I get so much from it. I’m hop­ing that by try­ing to engage with peo­ple on a pos­i­tive, life-affirming level will help alle­vi­ate my per­ceived debt to you all.

I’ll give you a small exam­ple. There are lots of peo­ple I fol­low on Twit­ter, who I think fol­low me, yet I’ve never (or rarely) tweeted them directly. That’s my fault, what with being a some­what shy, with­drawn, socially awk­ward mis­an­thrope, who lives in his own make-believe hippy world. On #help­ful­hippy day, I hope to let these peo­ple know I enjoy fol­low­ing them. If I played along with #fol­lowfri­day, I could have done it already, but I don’t, remem­ber the whole mis­an­thrope thing?

What I am not really aim­ing to do is exploit #help­ful­hippy day as a way to raise my online pro­file or increase my fol­low­ers. For a change this is not about shame­less self pro­mo­tion, its about gen­uinely help­ing oth­ers. If any­thing, I’ll prob­a­bly lose fol­low­ers because I plan on being a very full-on, #help­ful­hippy — search­ing for unan­swered ques­tions and pleas for assistance.

Tomorrow’s the big day, I’ll either fall flat on my face or in some small way, I’ll make the world a bet­ter place for a short time. Either way, I’ll know I’ve tried my best to pay some­thing back and maybe, just maybe I’ll despise myself just a lit­tle less.

Nah. Self-loathing is for life, you can’t shake it like you shake the com­mon cold.

See ya on Weds!