Always Online
It was one of those days again. Up early, grabbed a cold Starbucks from the fridge, sat down, opened the laptop. Connection established. The first article from yesterday is still broken somewhere—some system error eating at me since six. Emails from PR people in five time zones. A translation needing work. Image research. Corrections. Another article. Chats. Social media. Some guy asking if I can write about his band by Friday. Meanwhile I ordered food from the Greek place, jerked off, took a call, and by the time I looked up the sun was gone. I hadn’t been outside.
I just stood there, angry, thinking: Is this it? Is this actually my life? When did I agree to this? Fresh air is luxury now. Time with people who matter is negotiable. Sex is something you fit between deadlines. Everything real is scarce because everyone I know is drowning in the same thing—overworked, online, rotting in jobs or school or both, no dog, no relationship, no travel. Just work. Keep it running. For me it’s worse because I get too deep in everything.
I looked around and saw everyone in the exact same position. Everyone. Sitting at screens day and night, hunting through the world on their phones, always connected, never stopping. Because rest is dead—something new could break any second. A photo. A video. Disaster. Tweet tweet tweet, blog blog blog, post post post, chat chat chat, refresh refresh refresh. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Formspring, Google+, Skype, WhatsApp, Reddit. It doesn’t stop.
Sometimes I want to grab people and yell: Does this actually make you happy? You’re typing your life into the void every minute, watching two seasons at a time, keeping up with the internet better than any real journalist, and you think you’re balanced? You think this is a life?
The worst ones have completely merged with their online image. They make fun of World of Warcraft players but mourn every follower who leaves. They use TinyChat for intimacy and wake up soaking wet at five because they dreamed someone unfollowed them. Everything is screens now. They obsess over Wikipedia edits. They update DailyBooth every night from the office. They buy food on eBay. They know SoundCloud by heart. They click a weather app instead of looking out the window. Their actual bodies are foreign to them.
I love this place. I love what I do. I love most of the people I’ve met through all this. But sometimes I want to pack it all up, find some street vendor with something magical, and escape to a different world. One without Tim Berners-Lee or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. Just old villages like the ones in Astrid Lindgren’s books. Those kids in Bullerbü seemed genuinely happy. Michel from Lönneberga too, at least when his father wasn’t hitting him.
I don’t know who’s dumber anymore. The ones who surrendered completely and don’t feel guilty because they’re digital natives and they work online (when their mom calls asking what the hell they’re doing). Or people like me, who think it’s all insane but can’t remember the last time they shut down the computer.
What I’ve figured out is that the internet hurts least when I actually live some kind of real life at the same time. Movement. Sunlight. Sex when it happens. That’s it. A good evening with actual people. A week driving somewhere. Discovering something new. We have to know when to close the laptop and turn off the phone. Because the days when you can’t leave the computer have become normal, and if we’re not careful we’ll all become zombies in some government-funded recovery house by a lake, drooling the words circles and algorithm and meme.