Output 24--Are we not men?

Besides my Bipolar disorder and my Menopause and my TRAUMA (I may always capitalize that word. I wish I could give it a special effect), I am currently most concerned about the horrific, altering, devolutionary effect that the FUCKING INTERNET is having on me. On us. On everyone. The FUCKING INTERNET (always allcaps) has hijacked our curiosity and turned us into monsters.

No, I do not think I am being hyperbolic. And when I joke about living in a cave, I'm not joking all that much. And yes, I realize it's ironic to be saying this on the FUCKING INTERNET. Sigh. That's the unsolvable hypocrisy.

Unlike those poor Gen Z bastards, I remember a time before the internet and cell phones (I remember a time before answering machines. In fact, my father did accounting for a company that made one of the very first answering machines). There is no way to explain the difference to someone who didn't experience it. Are there benefits to the internet? Well, there certainly used to be, when it was still possible to control the information that you would be presented with, and before corporations started selling things there; when you would search for something, and only receive specific results for your specific search, kind of like looking in a fucking encyclopedia or dictionary; when "social media" was no more than graphics-free Reddit-ish group chats. But the information that we are now "targeted" with is not by our own choice. We do not "choose" the algorithm we absorb, nor is it based on our conscious "choices" (so insidious). We cannot possibly absorb all the information we are subjected to. I believe this leaves our brains in a constant state of agitation and mimics how our brains deliberately fail to completely process traumatic events.

I think the FUCKING INTERNET is going to kill us all a lot faster than we would all be killed without it.

And I think they only solution is, to the degree it is even possible anymore, to either get the fuck off social media and the FUCKING INTERNET to the degree that it's possible and advisable (Personal GPS is one of the most useful results of the internet age and I will never be able to drive without it, eg), or to develop a method of using the internet by which everything you see is completely curated BY YOU.

That's why I started a blog. Readers can seek it out and look at it. Or not. It's never gonna fly at anyone's face and demand to be acknowledged.

And that's why I'm getting off Facebook. Facebook is a World of Pain. Instagram will be next, maybe, but I have a much easier time streamlining Instagram so that I don't feel like it's sapping my will to live. I dig YouTube. For whatever reason, I am able to control what I see there and I kinda feel sorry for the "rabbit hole" people who can't seem to. YouTube is the closest thing we have to cable access (actually that's exptv.org, but I think I'm one of two people in the universe besides the creators who actually watch it). Until YouTube starts charging "creators" for uploading so that it becomes entirely undemocratic, I will remain. Same with online music streaming. I am too poor to buy record albums and everyone now knows CDs were just an elaborate record industry prank. I mostly listen to music in other languages that I would never have heard of if not for music streaming. It's enhanced my life. I was never on TikTok because OLD and also, I hate it when my phone makes noise unless I'm deliberately listening to music. I am reducing my movie streaming subs to the free or extremely cheap. The only one that costs over $5 a month is AppleTV and come hockey season, that will probably be paused.

Google is a problem--all my shit is stored there. All of it. I wish I could pretend it's neutral. Al uses DuckDuckGo but we're talking text docs, spreadsheets, photos... that will take time. But I'm not as concerned with who has access to my info as I am who has access to my mental processes.

Our minds are delicate things and we are all running them into the ground by accepting this state of affairs. I have a niece in her 20s who experienced issues similar to mine and solved them by quitting social media altogether and buying a dumb phone. That girl is my hero. I hope more Gen Z-ers follow her lead before their brains turn to hamburger.

Andrew Sullivan wrote this in 2016:

I tried reading books, but that skill now began to elude me. After a couple of pages, my fingers twitched for a keyboard. I tried meditation, but my mind bucked and bridled as I tried to still it. I got a steady workout routine, and it gave me the only relief I could measure for an hour or so a day. But over time in this pervasive virtual world, the online clamor grew louder and louder. Although I spent hours each day, alone and silent, attached to a laptop, it felt as if I were in a constant cacophonous crowd of words and images, sounds and ideas, emotions and tirades — a wind tunnel of deafening, deadening noise. So much of it was irresistible, as I fully understood. So much of the technology was irreversible, as I also knew. But I’d begun to fear that this new way of living was actually becoming a way of not-living.

By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time.

And so I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.

*Full article here.

I'm with him. I know the internet didn't "cause" my mental illness. That has been my lifelong companion, though I only discovered its true name a few weeks ago. But it certainly hasn't fucking helped. And I am 100% sure I will feel better when I only use it as a "tool" (ie, to find events) and not as a "platform" or a "community" (which it most certainly fucking is not anymore).

I envision a radical new social movement of people who are OK with reading books and CALLING EACH OTHER ON THE PHONE. Join me, won't you?

PS--Before you cancel your Netflix sub (the first one of mine that will go), watch that DEVO documentary. They knew everything, 50 years ago.