Within the last year or so, I've taken two hiatuses from blogging here, one for three weeks and one for well over a month.
This past month, I was on a forced hiatus. My ISP had technical difficulties that involved a 24-7 work crew since the end of September, working to resolve the connectivity issues, giving me and everyone else in my vicinity that retained their services, access to teh Interwebz.
At first, I was apoplectic at the loss of my convenient connection to the world wide web at my domicile. In both instances of my past hiatuses, while I eschewed blogging, I was still plugged in and still reading on a daily basis.
But having no access to teh 'webz at home for almost a month has been quite the kick of cold turkey delerious tremens withdrawal mindfunks. At first, I spent hours compulsively trying to troubleshoot my computer, my network settings, my modem - broadband connection hardware and software, thinking the problem was on my end.
Then I called tech support for my digital corporate access provider in both India and the Phillipines, whereby I discovered my locally sourced portal to teh Interwebz had a total hardware meltdown and had to do a complete rebuild, and that they were so sorry I was experiencing these difficulties, but many thanks for my continued patronage of their services...they would certainly give me as much credit as they were allowed to without consulting upper management at their globally outsourced call center to compensate for any inconveniences I was experiencing due to the loss of service.
After that initial first few days of frustration, I changed my mindset and approached this drastic change of my daily routine (web browsing with my first two cups of coffee every morning), and embraced the opportunity of truly unplugged living.
I began reading actual dead-tree and ink books again. I also got busy taking on an exponential number of projects I've had on the back burner for years now. I truly did not realize how much of a time-suck reading, blogging, commenting and surfing teh Interwebz has taken out of my life until I was forced to log out for so long with no choice, and throw my effort into doing things I had previously constantly and consistently put off. Seeing my handiwork and effort producing concrete results has been rather satisfying, and illuminating as to the amount of time I've been spending in the past decade or so, logged on, plugged in and zombied out in a virtual world of reading and virtual socializing with a panoply of anonymous personalities in cyberspace.
More than a few times I contemplated closing my current ISP account and going with another service provider to regain immediate access to teh Interwebz.
But as time went on, and I found myself immersing myself in productive pursuits and I decided to turn my forced disconnection into a vacation from the dependence on virtual world immersion and just wait until the portal was repaired and my service restored.
After all, my friendly representatives and corporate customer service agents in India and the Phillipines had credited my account, so it's not like I was paying for a service I wasn't getting.
Then I got the call.
Another friend I'd known for years had passed away.
So young. So talented and full of promise. He helped me out more than a few times in the past, and I in turn helped him. He was a good man and we had shared good times. RIP Johnny.
Ruminating on his passing and our shared time together gave me quite the dose of morose contemplation. Being unable to connect to the 'net also brought a bit more clarity to my thought process.
Life is short. Much too short to waste so many hours upon hours staring at a computer screen, reading forums, blogs, news, watching youtube videos and indulging in other online distractions.
I think it's high time I emphasize getting back to cherishing and cultivating the personal, real life relationships with friends and family and all the other folks worth knowing and having involvement with, in the good ole IRL.
Time to get back to developing my talents and skills in my chosen pursuits and artistic expressions.
Time to keep doing what my sudden, unplanned vacation from internet connectivity inspired.
DO instead of reading or viewing ABOUT doing. Vicarious immersion and virtual affirmations are pleasurable pursuits...but learning knowledge in the virtual world and applying it to better your life in the real world does have a diminishing rate of return.
After awhile, your telling yourself that red pill immersion is a way of life and that one needs the constant reinforcement of logging on and reading and writing in the 'sphere of the politically incorrect zeitgeist of these fringes of the Interwebz to maintain the gains received from finding the ugly truth in a world of beautiful lies...but in the harsh light of stark reality, it really is nothing more than an excuse to continue spending time frittered away in front of the glowing screen.
My forced disconnect was the wake up call I needed.
My years spent on the 'net have been rewarding, illuminating, educational, inspirational and inspiring. They've also been indulgent, compulsive, wasteful and frivolous as well. From here on out, I will be consciously and deliberately striving to limit the worst aspects of my interwebz addiction and severely curtail my online time spent displacing productive and intrinsically rewarding behavior.
I regularly deride the palm zombies in my own mind every time I observe the pandemic of automatons compulsively peering incessantly at their smart phones everywhere I go in today's Brave New World Order... but am I really that much better off, spending four consecutive hours on my day off, sitting at my desktop PC reading thirty different blogs, forums, news articles and viewing a cornucopia of YouTube videos?
After all, If I had lived in the time before Al Gore invented the internet, spending as much time in a library reading in isolation and silence, lost in the ethereal clouds of infinite contemplation and rumination...it would undoubtedly have a similar impact on my real world life productivity and interpersonal relationships, as it does sitting here constantly plugged into cyberspace, reading or banging away at my keyboard incessantly, instead of actually living a life worth living.
I'm pretty sure I won't be on my own deathbed, wishing I had spent more time online.
12 comments:
One last red pill before you leave this matrix for good: have you any knowledge of the foreskin restoration movement, or of what an incredibly damaging hoax circumcision has been? I am shocked to find that there is hardly a word on all these paleo or MRA blogs, etc., that address this. This is the single biggest problem facing American sexual/gender culture (it harms both sexes, definitely), yet no one will touch it! As far as I can tell, you've never brought it up on your blog...I'm interested to hear your take on it, given all the other blue pills you've smashed to bits. A great explanation of exactly what it has done and how much we have lost because of this mass unethical, pointless experiment on American males this past century can be found in the pdf book (free to read online) on sexasnatureintendedit dot com. It explains so much of why men and women have such a hard time connecting, and indeed there was a blog on roosh describing the exact sexual dysfunction it could cause, but because he was unaware of the root problem, he attributed it to "awful women". I found this concept to be a revelation (as a woman), and have been trying to get as many afflicted men as possible to restore or not do it to their children. It's barbaric and it is destroying society, and spurring womens' "unhappiness" in marriage way more than you'd think, not to mention how crippling it is to the men. Again, I'd love to hear your take on it.
These same revelations are precisely the reason that i shut it down several years ago and stopped blogging. I spend more time now with hobbies, fostering interpersonal relationships, reading books and family. It has been a great ride, i don't regret it, but there are far more important things in life than the internet. Best of luck.
-Chicagoman
Even more depressingly, it doesn't really matter what you do. The man most satisfied on his deathbed is the suicide. Of course you might as well do what you feel like doing, and since this is a trial-and-error process, time is working against you.
So long and farewell.
"Beyond the Breaking Point" remains, to this day, my favorite article. You wrote it shortly after I had experienced a similar mental test.
By all means get off the net and out into the world. The net is a good thing but like any good thing it is only good in moderation.
Lilana:
I think there are a lot of people who read these sorts of blogs who oppose "circumcision" and who are taking efforts to repair the genital mutilation they suffered. I've been doing that for the last 4 years with substantial success, and have taken efforts to discuss the issue whenever possible. I think I even left a comment on the Roosh post you mentioned (although I might have invented that in a drunken stupor, dunno).
It's still very difficult for people to address the issue. There isn't much pleasure in discussing it. The more you think about it, the more unpleasant it is. I try to do something everything day which contributes to repairing the damage I suffered, and when I do it, it makes me think about what happened to me. It brings up difficult emotions. Discussing it on blogs and listening to people who know nothing about the issue prattle on about it is, when I'm in a certain place, emotionally painful.
To link this back to the message of the post we're commenting on, I think that we are ever more aware of what the mass of people think thanks to the internet. We have a greater sense of what "society" thinks and there's less hope of changing it. If we focused on the person who's about to give birth to a boy and contemplating introducing them to the world by excising their prepuce and causing them agonizing and disfiguring pain, we have a much better shot of convincing them that this is absurd than if we care that "everybody knows" that circumcision is normal.
Well, if I don't see you online... I'll see you in Heaven. Pesky sibs-in-Christ, you're stuck with us for all eternity. :)
You've been a gift, Keoni. Thank you for your contribution to my life.
Hey folks, I never said goodbye, and I don't intend on quitting blogging.
This was more of a statement of my intention to deliberately and consciously spend a lot less time online.
Days like today (where we are experiencing a lot of rain from the passing of Hurricane Ana) are times where I'm stuck in the house and all my outdoor projects are impossible to get to, so I will be logging on from time to time.
As for the whole circumcision issue....seth datta got that right - The jooz are behind it!
lozlozlzol
Been reading you for a long time - since at least 2008. Really enjoyed reading you, and I'm sorry to see you go.
My secret dream was someday to go pig hunting with you. =)
I hope you still do post, though not as often. The Floyd Time has more meaning now to me at 53 than when it did when I was 19 and listening to it.
The famous Boycott American Women blog has returned! We're accepting submissions so if you have any bad experiences with American women and want to share them, just go to the Submit Your Story tab on our site, tell us your story, and we'll publish it, anonymously of course.
www.boycottamericanwomen.com
More pig hunting stories, please.
It's all about balance. After all, even most ADD companies need staff to take occasional vacations.
Most writers had friends and other diversions. It wasn't years of isolation in locked rooms with a typewriter.
Sometimes folks spend to much times with hobbies or "working with their hands" than cogitating. But while the unexamined life may not be worth living, the over-examined one isn't much better.
Since we all come from different beginnngs and experiences, "balancing" is not a one-size-fits-all operation. The timid might need to get bolder. The brazen might need to become more cautious. Etc.
It sounds like you were so engrossed in Cyberia that you forgot you were mortal and needed thing is "reality:- friendship, dancing, etc.
Spending too much time "computing" makes us into Major Toms. We're like astronauts lost in space, losing contact with the importance of real-life contacts.
Balance.
Talking walks. Dining with friends. Watching movies with lovers. Cranking up music. It's all good, all important.
Plus sometimes, when you think blogs are shite, unworthy of our time, you wil read something that nails "it" and you're glad someone wrote it.
It's a dynamic process. Sometimes I get too lost in my head and line up some massages. Or I'll go dancing. Or will drop into a bar and talk to strangers.
We're social creaters for sure. And we sometimes need to be alone to feed our souls.
I have no answers, just commenting. I, too, struggle with trying to feel "fully alive."
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