Today’s post is more a little rant and just letting my fingers exercise themselves over my keyboard than an actual attempt at a long post. It’s something that has been on my mind for a while and has stopped me from posting on this site if I’m honest. I was living a fake life online and felt a fraud and a liar. How could I be living the life I wanted when I was a slave to the online drum of my electronic overlords?
Do you come out in a cold sweat when you can’t find your phone? Do you miss the beauty of things outside as you slave over facebook posts and youtube videos? Do you tell yourself you are only going online for a few minutes ‘to check something’, only to be shocked when you spot a clock and notice hours have gone by?
I know I was. I spent nearly all day online. I would use the computer at work, banging through the usual and then aimlessly surf online when I wanted a break from my work duties. I’d go home and spend hours watching Youtube videos, the last TV show or online movie, check email repeatedly throughout the night, craving a new notification on my Facebook account. It felt like a drug. I craved the little red light flashing or the beep to say someone had sent me something or liked something I posted. I got a high when it happened. I felt bad when I didn’t. I judged myself and how I saw my life by how others valued it on social media. I was living a fake life online. Not living a life.
Slowly I have been working through it and building an actual physical world. One with girls. One with hobbies. One with things done outside! It can be done but it takes a while to build. I won;t dare try and give some tips just now as I had a real dependency on the life I created and trying to make others see me as that person and not the scared boy I felt inside. Thankfully now the real me is the now the me that is on and off line. But I’m still working on it. Something that really helped me clarify my thinking was the following video. It is very hard hitting and should really make you think.
We are worried about the zombie apocalypse. Of brain dead people, in lines, unkempt, with unfocused eyes, glaring at their prize of eating the living. Sadly we have our own zombie apocalypse but there is no dead. We are brain dead and focused only on the online world they live. They fight to keep the lies they tell about themselves. They bully and insult others to feel better about themselves and avoid attacks from others. They spend hours on the phone or the laptop, avoiding daylight or speaking to the warm bloodied creatures around them, needing their fix of likes and follows. The apocalypse is now. Look at how few can get through a meal or talk to you without checking some form of social media or switching to watch the TV. We have forgotten how to interact and be in the moment and speak to one another. We have forgotten what being social really means. Social networks have actually put us further away from one another. The electronic systems that were meant to bring us closer together has actually created more walls as we aim to show off a life that doesn’t exist by using crafted photos and hashtags and hide the real feelings of despairs we hold deep down inside.
I am getting better at it. I no long er feel the need to check my phone every thirty seconds but it is something I am still fighting. Are you a zombie or one of the band of survivors fighting to remain in contact with what it means to be human now. I used to struggle to interact with people. I din’t know what to say in groups so I surfed on my phone as it was easier than trying to build relationships. This worked fine for a wee while until the dependency on the light and sounds online meant I never went out and depression took it’s dark hold on my life. I’ve not felt better since I took since I ventured online in little bursts, which I control.
It takes time and effort to do, to unplug yourself from the matrix but it is possible. Watch the video. Evaluate how you are living your life and if you need to change. I wouldn’t wish the existence I had before on anyone. It was my choice then but something I had to stop doing to become happy again. Living almost exclusively online stole away the real me and I forgot who I was. Are you doing the same?
