This year I’ve had one thing happen after another until it finally crushed me. I became exhausted and overwhelmed, jumbled, temperamental, craving solitude and isolation. So when my contract job ended, I decided to take some time off to rest and recover myself in self-imposed hermitude.
So now my phone is on silent, my chat programs turned off, and my email goes largely unanswered. I go shopping on a weekday when the stores are at their emptiest. I try and plan only one social thing a weekend if I can. I wake up, I cook lunch, I pack my husband off to work. Then I clean the house, I work on personal projects. The hubby comes home, I cook dinner, we watch Netflix or play WoW, I read before bed (FYI – I haven’t touched an actual book in years).
And slowly the noise in my head is starting to subside. I find I am so much happier with a slower pace in life, time to think and plan my next move without distraction. No knot in the pit of my stomach as I struggle to remember how smalltalk is supposed to work. No over-extending myself socially then collapsing in a heap when I come home. No need for the vague and often spurious promises of “Let’s catch up soon”.
At first I felt guilty. I’m not connecting with my friends enough, and I know that soon I will drop off many radars, just another somebody you used to know. Out of sight out of mind, time marches on, and all that jazz. I’m hoping that when I start feeling more social, I can reconnect with people again. But I also understand now just how much I need a more genuine way of living, one with less technology and more authentic contact with others.
I am done letting social media be my main form of interaction. I am done with excessive trigger warnings and tumblr, done with discussions about privilege and patriarchy, done with political correctness for its own sake, done with people whose convictions are formed from a cursory glance at mainstream news and infotainment articles, done with frivolous online petitions regarding first world problems.
I don’t want to sound rude. It’s not that I don’t care about my friends; I want to know how you all are, I want to know who got engaged, pregnant, sick, divorced. But I no longer want to find out from Facebook. More and more, I resent the use of social media to keep up with our lives.
What colour is your soul? What animal is your spirit animal? What cartoon house should you live in? This Russian artist just drew something and what happened next will amaze you! This guy made tiny people out of cheese and filmed different scenes with them every day until he had a cheese-people movie! This dude used to be a dude but now he is a woman and we should all care because his daughters are famous!!
Chalk it up to Weltschmerz, but it seems like very little of the noise and chatter in the Social Media Soapbox world actually matters. So here I am like the proverbial old codger, talking about how good things were “back in the day”, when mobile phones were the size of bricks and internet plans were charged by the hour. Back before people posted photos of their food, before people’s pets had their own Instagram accounts. I sit here like an old granny in a rocking chair on the front porch with her shotgun, plotting the destruction of Skynet.
Well… maybe not ALL of Skynet. Because I still need Pinterest for jam recipes and veggie garden tips and homesteading inspiration for when I finally go off-grid. And I guess maybe the cat videos can stay, and the one of the seal riding on the dolphin. But tumblr and 4chan are definitely going down. Make it so.
Cadence Poetica 