Or, digital minimalism.
400 years ago on the planet Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation flung their wooden shoes called sabots into the machines to stop them. Hence the word sabotage.
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I cannot pinpoint the exact moment it began, but for the last few years I've had this burning desire to go off grid digitally. I don't mean go live in the mountains away from people, but to not be easily reachable, and to just live a normal person's life that exists outside the barriers of social media.
When the Internet kicked off I was all about it. I spent so much time online just looking up stuff and engaging with people through chat rooms and forums. Now, what changed for me was the iteration of having to be our real selves on social media. Where I used to be able to just get away with having a photo of Gandalf as my avatar, Facebook made it impossible to be just an anonymous nobody and have an active feed to look at. Thus, I became terminally online.
Back when blogging first became the hot thing to do, there was a young lady who had a website that was entirely dedicated to her every move. On her webpage there was a location tracker, cameras in her home, a blog where she detailed every aspect of her life, and a few other creepy things that I've forgotten about. At the time I thought this was absurd. Then came a time period where we all started doing that, just not on one single webpage, but a myriad of social media platforms.
When the Internet kicked off I was all about it. I spent so much time online just looking up stuff and engaging with people through chat rooms and forums. Now, what changed for me was the iteration of having to be our real selves on social media. Where I used to be able to just get away with having a photo of Gandalf as my avatar, Facebook made it impossible to be just an anonymous nobody and have an active feed to look at. Thus, I became terminally online.
Back when blogging first became the hot thing to do, there was a young lady who had a website that was entirely dedicated to her every move. On her webpage there was a location tracker, cameras in her home, a blog where she detailed every aspect of her life, and a few other creepy things that I've forgotten about. At the time I thought this was absurd. Then came a time period where we all started doing that, just not on one single webpage, but a myriad of social media platforms.
As I stated previously, I don't know when this realization hit me that we are living our lives digitally, but I think it was around the time I saw the 2008 documentary Disconnected. In the documentary, three college students try to go without their computers for a month. Two of them adjusted fairly well, while the third failed completely. Mind you, this was filmed in 2006, when the biggest hurdle for young people was not being able to do things analog anymore. Now we're always glued to our phones.
Then I remember another time when I woke up to make breakfast and I plugged my earbuds in and I wore them the entire time and I listened to absolutely nothing. I was just so used to having them in it became second nature. This was not good. I began to wonder if we really could just go back to living how we did previously, without everything being online.
My conclusion: We can; It would just be really expensive.
The price for a physical subscription to my local newspaper is so high that a lot of people just can't afford it anymore. Thus, people in my neighborhood have dropped their subscriptions. When I did reach out recently, I was informed that they no longer deliver to my area. I guess logistically it would not be worth it to have someone come to my door and toss a paper in my yard.
Music. If you want a physical CD you have to shell out a few bucks. Nowadays with so many music streaming services around buying CDs just does not make fiscal sense. If you're just buying what you like, sure, that makes sense, but if you're constantly on the hunt for new music you will go broke. Yes, it was always this way. But now with the entire world of music at our literal fingertips you'd be a fool not to shell out $10.99 a month for an account.
This whole ordeal made me stop and wonder what it was exactly that I was trying to run from. The noise. The endless stream of noise. I can sit down and watch a movie and not have to tell anyone about it. Have we tried doing that? I can have lunch and not show the entire world what it is I am eating. Our current digital world is here to stay. I stream music, movies, even the news. That's fine. But the aspect of us having to always have our phones in our hands and always scrolling is what kills me. Even after I deleted my social media apps I still found myself scrolling on the most benign apps. If you looked at my screen time you'd see that the weather app is my new favorite app!
I've started this thing, not as an experiment, but as a new way of life. While I know I'll never go back to how I was before the Internet, I can do other things, like stay away from my phone, and spend more time with family. I'm also trying to get my attention span back by forcing myself to sit and read for long spells. Back when I was still connected to these social apps, I couldn't focus enough to read more than a page or two before putting the book down and moving onto something else, or checking out what was going on on Twitter. Well, let's see if this helps.
Then I remember another time when I woke up to make breakfast and I plugged my earbuds in and I wore them the entire time and I listened to absolutely nothing. I was just so used to having them in it became second nature. This was not good. I began to wonder if we really could just go back to living how we did previously, without everything being online.
My conclusion: We can; It would just be really expensive.
The price for a physical subscription to my local newspaper is so high that a lot of people just can't afford it anymore. Thus, people in my neighborhood have dropped their subscriptions. When I did reach out recently, I was informed that they no longer deliver to my area. I guess logistically it would not be worth it to have someone come to my door and toss a paper in my yard.
Music. If you want a physical CD you have to shell out a few bucks. Nowadays with so many music streaming services around buying CDs just does not make fiscal sense. If you're just buying what you like, sure, that makes sense, but if you're constantly on the hunt for new music you will go broke. Yes, it was always this way. But now with the entire world of music at our literal fingertips you'd be a fool not to shell out $10.99 a month for an account.
This whole ordeal made me stop and wonder what it was exactly that I was trying to run from. The noise. The endless stream of noise. I can sit down and watch a movie and not have to tell anyone about it. Have we tried doing that? I can have lunch and not show the entire world what it is I am eating. Our current digital world is here to stay. I stream music, movies, even the news. That's fine. But the aspect of us having to always have our phones in our hands and always scrolling is what kills me. Even after I deleted my social media apps I still found myself scrolling on the most benign apps. If you looked at my screen time you'd see that the weather app is my new favorite app!
I've started this thing, not as an experiment, but as a new way of life. While I know I'll never go back to how I was before the Internet, I can do other things, like stay away from my phone, and spend more time with family. I'm also trying to get my attention span back by forcing myself to sit and read for long spells. Back when I was still connected to these social apps, I couldn't focus enough to read more than a page or two before putting the book down and moving onto something else, or checking out what was going on on Twitter. Well, let's see if this helps.