I’m back!
A couple months ago I got to a point where anxiety and insomnia were taking over my life and all I saw was bad news coming in on every side. So, at the suggestion of someone very important to me, I took a while off to “defrag” and regain my mental balance. Defragging, for me, came to mean disconnecting from the 24/7 constant connectedness we feel compelled to maintain. Status updates, overflowing Inbox, 1000+ unread Google Reader updates, text messages at all hours of the day — it can really drain a person, and is it worth it?
Think about that feeling you get when you turn your cell phone off. I mean really off, not just the ringer. You feel kinda twitchy right? We are ADDICTED to being ON all the time. What’s most ironic is that with all our means of “connecting” these days, I’ve never felt more disconnected from people. It occurred to me a few weeks ago when I first started this process, that I have over 600 followers on Twitter and over 200 Facebook friends, but how many of them would be able to find my house and visit me if I were sick? How many of them know when my birthday is without Facebook reminding them? How many would have a clue if I had moved to another country and didn’t mention it in a status update? Clearly this connectedness is not real. In fact, it’s more dangerous than no computer at all because it provides an illusion of connectedness, a false sense of community. It’s also an illusion of living.
We get so busy staring at these crazy glowing rectangles, we forget how to really live and we don’t make real connections with people anymore.
So — acknowledging this imbalance in my life, I logged out of Twitter and deactivated my Facebook account. I supplemented computer time with things that were REAL and satisfied my SOUL rather than my anxiety: family, delicious food, good books, animal hugs, great music, movies, camping, coffee, bike riding, fresh air, guitar playing, meditation, conversations with neighbors… the list goes on.
Of course I still love technology, it has its place and I’ll always be a geek. I love being a few clicks away from saying hi to my friends in New York and California, getting news updates in real-time on Twitter, finding out what the mainstream media isn’t covering by reading one of my dozens of RSS feeds, and posting stories for my friends on Facebook. But, as with everything, moderation is absolutely necessary — it’s so easy to overdose on information and bad news and forget to live your life.
What’s most important is to have real life experiences and cultivate real community, something no amount of clicks or pixels can bring.
I’m back now, but re-balanced. I’ll still update and post stories (I could never stay silent on the crimes of our government and cruelties against animals) but I will live life at the same time. I will no longer be a prisoner to pessimism and worry. If the plug ever gets pulled on the Internet, I’ll still have a life and a community around me, and we’ll all be just fine.
Thanks to my Dad for prompting me to unplug, and to TinyBuddha for motivating me to post this — I’d been meaning to for a couple weeks, but their latest Do Happy email update pushed me to finally do it.
“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”
- Dalai Lama
