Logged In, Checked Out
The sun goes down and I haven’t seen it. That’s how I know it’s been one of those days.
Woke up, grabbed a cold Starbucks coffee from the fridge without technically getting out of bed, opened the laptop. First article not finished. System error chewing on my brain. PR emails from three continents. A translation here, an image search there, corrections, the next post, texts, chats, subject hunting, social media garbage. In between: ordered food from the Greek place around the corner, jerked off, made a phone call. And then suddenly it’s dark outside and I’ve been breathing recycled apartment air for sixteen straight hours without once feeling wind on my face.
I stand there and think: Is this it? Is this my life? Did I actually choose this? Every minute of fresh air has become something to treasure. An evening with friends, sex with someone willing, a real conversation with someone interesting—these things feel like contraband now. Because the circle of people I actually know has quietly become a collection of overworked career types who are either rotting in front of a screen or buried in a degree program. Relationship, travel, a dog? No time. Deadlines here, appointments there, keep everything running. For someone as constitutionally chaotic as me, that’s a double weight.
In a brief moment of clarity I look up and see myself everywhere. People sitting in front of screens day and night, iPhone in hand even while walking, always connected, no downtime, constantly producing. Rest is dead. Any moment a new topic can materialize and demand attention—a photo set, a video, a disaster. The machine just churns: tweeting, posting, blogging, chatting, reading, reading, reading. Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Skype, WhatsApp, and whatever else launched this week.
Sometimes I feel like I’m living inside a permanent quarter-life crisis subscription service and I want to grab people by the collar and yell. Does this actually make you happy? More network time, more joy? Someone who types their thoughts into the void every few seconds, watches two seasons of something in a single sitting, and maintains a better real-time grip on the internet’s daily circus than any news aggregator—can that person lead a genuinely balanced life? I genuinely don’t know anymore.
The worst ones are the people who’ve completely fused with their online persona. They’ll mock World of Warcraft players while mourning every unfollowed account like a small bereavement. They use video chat as a substitute for human warmth and wake up at five in the morning in a cold sweat because they dreamed someone took back a favorite. They read everything on an iPad and file Wikipedia deletion requests and sit in their apartment past midnight and document every single evening online and order groceries through an app and have entire music platforms memorized and load English novels onto their Kindle and would rather tap a shitty weather app than stick their fat head out the fucking window for two seconds.
I love this journal and I love what I do and I love most of the people I’ve met through all of this. But sometimes I want to pack the whole thing into a bag, trade it to some sketchy street vendor for magic LSD drops, and launch myself somewhere else entirely. Somewhere without Tim Berners-Lee or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates—just old villages out of some Astrid Lindgren story, kids running through fields in perpetual summer. The children in The Six Bullerby Children always seemed genuinely happy to me. Or Emil of Lönneberga, when he wasn’t getting beaten by his father.
After all these years I still don’t know who’s dumber. The ones who’ve given themselves over completely—no guilt, no ambivalence—because they call themselves Digital Natives and they work online (useful cover for when their mother calls and asks what their wayward offspring is doing all day). Or people like me: suspicious of the whole thing, slightly revolted by it, and yet completely unable to remember the last time I shut the computer down before midnight.
What I’ve figured out, at least for myself, is that the internet makes me happiest when I force enough real life into the margins around it. Movement. Sunlight. Sex when I can get it. A decent evening with friends. A week of going somewhere new without needing to document it. That’s the whole formula, and it’s embarrassingly simple. We just have to know when enough digital garbage is enough—when to close the laptop, put down the phone, and stop feeding the machine. Before the days when you can’t get off the computer stop feeling like an anomaly and just become what life is.