Posts tagged: reality
The internet… real life… reality… friendship… relationships… modern society… solitude… happiness… peace…
These are the things that occupy my thoughts often. And they are, in one way or another, the reasons I took some time off from the Internet again this Fall. Why do I do it? Why do I turn my back on all the amazing people and sights and sounds and the never-ending buzz of this great hive we call the internet? Because it is the single most effectual action I know of for adjusting my perspective on my life and the world around me. I don’t know if there is some sort of psychological scale for measuring cognition and focus and a sense of being present in one’s own life, but if there is I am positive that whenever I step away from the buzz my score goes off the charts. I can’t quite figure out an easy clever way of describing the phenomenon, but it is absolutely real.
What I’m finding is that, as a 33 year old man, I’m still not sure how I feel about this brave new world of technology. The irony being that I make my entire living designing and building web applications! I literally help MAKE the internet! Ha! This thing I love, and am pretty damn good at, is the thing my subconscious mind (and my conscious one) is somehow trying to get away from.
So you see my dilemma. I love the internet! I think you all are spectacularly fascinating people! I honestly do. However, when I ignore your collective cacophony and retreat into the quiet solitude of a more analog existence, my mind literally changes. (And I use the word literally with total understanding of what it means. I do believe that it literally changes. Any cheap brain scanners on eBay?) The rhythm and meter of life begin to change. The change is quick and dramatic, and as the new groove overtakes the old one, the living of it starts to sound like a whole new song. The syncopated staccato crash-pattern of the digital morphs itself into the long and lyrical aria of the analog. The change always surprises me. It feels foreign at first, and then quickly feels like home. And when it comes, the craving for an unbroken real life state of mind becomes, at times, overwhelming. Part of me sincerely hopes I am not fading off into the Grey Havens of the internet, but I cannot deny that another part of me wants nothing more.
I may write more on this, as it is on my mind often these days (though I often wonder if I’m getting more eye-rolls than amens when I talk about it). For now just know that it’s not you — it’s me.
[I just emailed this to most of my friends:]
I quit Facebook.
It feels fantastic.
I was not going to say anything, to see how long it would take for anyone to notice. Then it dawned on me that I actually wanted to tell you why I quit, because perhaps the reasons might ring true with you as well. I’ve given it a lot of thought over the last season or two and I’ve slowly arrived at a few conclusions about this topic. (For the record, it’s certainly beyond Facebook itself. Facebook is an easily identifiable iceberg atop a very large underwater cultural mass.) So here’s the nutshell version of why I’m cutting the cord:
I miss connecting with people. I’m not connecting like I want to — with people, and with the world.
I’m talking about REAL connection. It is missing. At the least, it is diminishing faster than it is growing.
It seems to me that the connecting that many of us think we do with the people in our “social networks,” both real-life and digital, is not nearly as authentic as we think it is. What we seem to have now is a spectacularly complex and refined system of digital programs. These programs remind us to do things or prompt us to ‘connect’ or encourage us to chatter. Naturally, their allure is obvious and intoxicating because they offer something we all want and can’t get enough of: inside information. The ‘knowing,’ real or imagined, that warms our lonely bellies and makes us feel like part of a connected circle of friends, a great gallery of mutual onlookers. It’s a good feeling that most of us enjoy. However, the very nature of our present state of connectedness, efficient and stimulating as it may be, is simply not what people have experienced for many thousands of years before us in the history of this earth.
Indulge me a brief philosophical rabbit-trail… I don’t believe that a snippetted, condensed, comfortably opaque layer of digital social pseudo-correspondence is what our immortal souls are looking for. What we really crave is a sensation of belonging. To belong, first, to the purest version of ourselves; to belong to a person; to belong to many people; to the world we inhabit; and, ultimately, to a way of being that feels true.
We know the difference. In our core understanding as humans we know how to deeply connect. We sense somehow that this always-new, always-connected, always-on-sale, always-talking, ever-more-informed culture is less authentic than we thought it was going to be. And knowing this, we are quietly sad when we sit alone in our houses at night, watching TV, watching movies, watching something, always watching…
Many of us remember the old days more fondly than the present ones. Yet many of us, it seems to me, do not willfully attempt to live according to the way we believe our life ‘ought’ to be. We resign to the tide of this present culture as we exist passively in a world where people type to each other all day long, then read and type back all night.
“But we connect with people all the time!,” I hear from the comment section. Yeah, we do… but what if in all our ‘connecting’ we may not actually be doing very much of it? What if we have become acclimated to the diluted nature of this new way of connecting without realizing it? Frogs in a proverbial pot of boiling human boredom. What does a person do when they find themself somewhere they never intended to be?
I hope that if you, like me, feel startlingly less connected to the real world around you than you did when you were young, you’ll not ignore that sensation and find your own way to return. This is a small part of mine. And if you don’t, than I thank you kindly for enduring the ramblings of an awakening 30-something, and offer you my sincerest congratulations, trusting that you’ll continue to enjoy your time here.
Also… if, when you put this down and pause for a moment, you consider me your friend (by the old definition), then know that I consider you my friend as well. No confirmation required.
