I am a millennial. And at that, I am considered the grandfather of the millennials as I was born in 1982 while the cutoff is mostly known to be 1980. Even though I am starting to get grey hairs, injured more, and weird skin tags here and there, I feel lucky to be an older millennial because it means I came to be in a childhood that was mostly not influenced by tech as it is today. It wasn’t until earlier in high school for me that computers started to resemble what they are now coupled with the internet. Until then, computers were more or less, high tech type writers that could store some information and you could play some games on. Before I was in high school, my tech influence was TV and video games. TV had been around for many decades so that was normalized and video games were big at the time as something new kids were into but nothing compared to the infiltration of video games and other types of tech that rages today. Largely, most of my childhood was spent outside interacting and playing with other kids. I was and still am a big fan of the spontaneous door knock and asking if people “can play.” I am fortunate for this type of upbringing as it is rare kids these days don’t spend an insane amount of hours on their devices.
In high school in 1999, a choice appeared to me. I was in a typing class during my Sophomore year and was doing horribly at it. “Why can’t my finger’s move right on the keyboard? This is stupid. Who would type when you could write?” I remember saying these things to myself and it wasn’t until I got home and interacted with the internet at night that I realized I needed to learn to type. With the coming of the internet, AOL instant messenger was a big thing with kids. You could sit and type with your friends all night. You could have ten windows of conversation open at once thus making the phone obsolete. I spent most nights over the next years of high school doing this and became a superb typist. There really wasn’t any other choice. To not type, meant I had less friends. What did kids do at night who couldn’t type or didn’t have the internet? It was an easy choice to take it on and as internet became faster, email also took on a new form of communication and “the letter” was so much easier to write vs actually writing a hand-written letter.
Things more or less cruised on over the next many years. I got a cell phone my freshman year of college. Socially, I still relied on instant messaging a lot as all my best friends went away to college. Years passed by, I dropped out of college, took on other colleges, and my cell phone got better as I bought a razor! So cool! “Hello Moto” ring tone comes to mind. In the year 2005 I realized the benefits of text messaging. Now I could basically have “AOL instant messaging” on my phone. Why would I ever have to call anyone again? The world seemed to be getting easier and easier. I quickly went from not knowing how to text to being a superb texter. After all, if I didn’t take this on then I wouldn’t be able to communicate as much with people and I would have less friends. The choice was natural.
In 2007 I was student teaching while getting my teaching credential and one of my students made me a Myspace account. I would go online and poke fun at this new social media world and often make condescending comments about people who express themselves on social media. Eventually, I realized a lot of my friends were on my space and they could post funny pictures of their lives and it was easy to see what they were up to. I started to use the service more, as if I didn’t I would be less in contact with my friends. As the years progressed, I eventually merged onto Facebook as that seemed the more popular of the two and it seemed ridiculous to have two of the same type of social medias. The condescending comments continued but I was turning into more of a regular user and now I was expressing myself on Facebook and feeling fulfilled. I posted all the pics I ever took on Facebook and commenting with friends was really important to me. It was like a convenient, easy to use digital bulletin board of events and how people felt about things.
A little bit more time went by and I had a stellar time living in San Francisco. In 2009 I was approached with my first smart phone. The HTC hero I took on and instantly everything became more convenient. I bought a MacBook laptop as well and life seemed to be moving ever so smoothly into more convenience. Now I could do email and Facebook on my phone, text messaging was easier, and I could get notified by different sounds if it was a text message, an email, or whatever else. My laptop and phone were now much one in the same. Being a writer, I did have a unique purpose for my laptop but my cell phone basically filled in as my laptop wherever I went. I was always connected. After all, not being so would not make me as connected with my friends or getting important messages about jobs, etc. It all was seeming too convenient to communicate with all of my important people and situations all at once, using one device.
Around the same time, I took a teaching job in China and explored Nepal and South-East Asia and a year after that went to Guatemala to take on rugged traveling. During these trips, as connection to my phone and laptop was virtually non-existent I had massive tech and friend withdrawals. All of my fears about not being connected and bringing about less friends and contacts, and ease of communication in my life, were coming true. I felt extreme loneliness and I fulfilled this by journaling for often many hours during the day in internet cafes, and then sending these mammoth long emails to my email contact list. It was ridiculous. I would be in these amazing foreign countries but would most look forward to the internet cafe in order to connect and not feel isolated. This did solidify me as a writer so I am thankful for that but it also exposed something in me. I was addicted to and a product of the tech world of connection. Without it, I felt naked and insecure and like I had no friends or people who cared about me. I somewhere lost my ability I had as a child to just be with people who were physically in front of me. I lost my confidence to just go up and talk to people and have experiences because that was the only way to approach people. I had associated making friends and being social with going through my handy cell phone and laptop devices for setting up social outings and, overall, socializing online. How did you just go up to people and talk to them? My shyness and insecurity flourished during these trips. I seemed at a loss for how to communicate. And what was the point of it, if I could just go to an internet cafe and feel the comfort of my own friends and family through my devices? It was much easier to do that and after all I didn’t want to lose all the friends I had or not be kept up to date with them. Making new friends and experiences seemed to get in the way of old ones.
Upon arriving home from traveling I was beyond relieved to be back in familiar lands with familiar technology. In 2010 I got a new smart phone and it was beyond convenient. I returned to the wonderful land of San Francisco and organized events and outings with my friends and it was a grand old time.
Somewhere around 2011 I started to feel burned out regarding my social life. My phone was always beeping with message grabbing attention. My jobs were all through paying attention to online web-sites and text messaging and emailing was starting to get insane. I moved to Philadelphia to invest in an intimate relationship and to take a much-needed break from my insane social life in San Francisco. However, moving to Philly is not the best place known for warm-hearted, open people. I really embraced not being social for once and still had a business in SF so it was easy to just be alone in my apartment in Philly and rely on my social media and devices to make me feel I was still connected to important people in my life, not to mention going home every few months to be with friends and family. Somewhere during these few years, I went from being someone with no more than ten messages at a time in my email and text messaging inbox and no more than a few tabs open on my laptop, to commonly having thirty plus text messages in my inbox, numerous different folders with loads of different emails for logged away friends, connections or ideas, and 10 different tabs open on my computer. I also watched loads more TV during this time as well. I looked at this time period as one in which I was investing in my introverted side for once but in reality, my tech extroversion went through the roof and brought about new types of depressions and anxieties. I started to feel much more disconnected to my own physical life and what I was doing on this earth through taking on more connection digitally. It was harder for me to make new friends as the ease of the digital friends and world was much easier to handle. I started to feel more stress and anxiety around social situations that resulted in me wanting to take off and go live differently, or feel relaxed on my own. I didn’t know what to do with people other than smoke a bowl, do outdoor adventures, or have conversations about deep things. And when those social outings went on for too long, anxiety and stress would take over about how I would end these outings and go back to my comfort zone of my social devices and digital world.
The next many years were a period of massive ambivalence regarding what I was doing, why I was doing it, what I could I be doing, and often catering to my comfort zones regarding tech. My realities between real life and tech were becoming skewed. I didn’t need to live in any one place as I could communicate with my friends and family through email, text messages, social media, etc. Living in one spot felt inconvenient. Dedicating to a lover or a few friends in the “physically being with them sense” felt inconvenient, not efficient, and limiting. My attention span grew less. My anxieties and depressions increased. I couldn’t keep from thinking about my digital communications and social media and what I could be doing somewhere else that would make me happy. I often felt like I was just a fly buzzing around looking for the next poop stimulating adventure. There was too much distraction constantly swirling around in my head from my tech connections. I had trouble focusing on anything for too long and would grow impatient constantly and relied often on grandiose ideas that spurred out of nowhere and didn’t really focus on anything but my short-term well-being.
By 2014 I had moved to Salt Lake City. The city felt calm with nature and with its people and it was affordable so this is where I moved. I got a new smart phone and flowed into the grace of a new, efficient device. In these years, I made a declaration that I wanted to stand for more in my social media. Whatever I posted would have to cater to informing people of something authentic. As the Bernie Sanders movement came into being it was a perfect opportunity to blast forth with positivity and this overall plan. I dove in head first and put my writing and research efforts into trying to spread the Bernie Sanders movement positivity. I catered my Facebook feed to start following people I admired online. It was also an era of many other people doing the same thing. It because insane how much time I spent paying attention to my notifications and on social media reading a million articles about the same thing and wanting to post them all. At times, I would try and limit myself with one post per day but often it was hard to do that. People needed to read these articles I was reading! How could they not. There was too much at stake. Meanwhile, I was having a harder and harder time of getting up in the morning. Depression sank in. I didn’t feel like I was living a real life. Something didn’t feel right.
Well as you know, the Bernie Sanders campaign had a disastrous end. Democrats proved to be just about as corrupt as Republicans in standing against him, and crazy man, asshole Trump got elected. I know better than to base the value of my life on having certain expectations about yearned for outcomes but it was hard to take. I withdrew from posting so much and felt like how I had conducted myself on social media was rather overwhelming. It is not just my feed people are seeing. They are seeing hundreds of people like me who are barraging them with, “must see and read info.” I know because that’s how myself and a lot of my friends felt. Suddenly, nothing seemed worth it and however I conducted myself on social media, didn’t seem to matter as nobody is really paying attention to mostly anything other than what they are posting and who is liking their stuff anyway.
Many years ago I had made fun of the social media world. Now I was beyond fully engaged in it and was losing my ability to want to relate to others in a non-digital sense. My disgust was high in viewing how others present themselves as “fakes” online vs how they are in real life, but was I much different? Here I am trying to profess a world of connection and positivity but either can’t or don’t want to relate to people in person because of anxieties I have about taking people on. After all of these years, I was left with a social media and tech device wormhole that was ever increasing its vacuum on me to solely go through it to feel connection for and from others. Suddenly, I had felt like I was lost in this whole other world that had manifested over the years. How do I conduct myself now?
The present time is the last few days of 2017 and I got a new smart phone a few months back. It is the biggest one I’ve ever had and I really wish I would have gotten a smaller one. From here on out I will move in the opposite direction with size. On my phone, I am connected in just about every way. On my home screen I have my text messages, email messages, Facebook messenger messages, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Venmo (yes Venmo even has a social networking feature). I often say to myself that I could spend most of the day just texting and messaging away with people and do basically nothing else. It’s a time suck. I often think about if this is really interacting with them. Is this real or is it just words from a person in a tiny little message that usually never leads to anything in the flesh, hence nothing that sticks with people because it isn’t really being noticed and taken in by them? It’s confusing. I’ll pick up my phone or go on my laptop and end up on it for WAY longer than I had originally intended and often forget the reason I went on in the first place. Within the last year or two I took on snapchat and Instagram. Now when I post, I usually post on all three (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat). A girl I had dated last year was a marketing and branding expert and she got me into using consistently Snapchat and Instagram. After all, if my friends and pretty girls I’m trying to date are on those things then I’m limiting myself by not potentially connecting myself to people I want to be around. This is the whole crux of the situation, and I suppose given my history this has been it for my whole life. How do you not involve yourself in something that will lead to more connections and contacts? By not involving yourself in all of these things you will have less opportunities, however, the irony of always wanting more does have its limits, but if you’re never settled and content with what you have then it means nothing and you will never be satiated for endlessly wanting more. If you’re constantly trying to make yourself available to be exposed to people you want to be around, how do you turn it off and ever value people when in fact you are around them? The urge to connect always to “others” is never ending and it is easy to grow impatient in one’s presence when the looming desire and fantasy of other connections are waiting for you through your devices in social media. It is as addicting as anything else in our society. It is taking over our brains and attention and our focus and actually limiting those things too by the obsessive approach to connect with others but not actually really “connecting” with them. It’s weird.
Even as I sit here and write, my phone beeps with notifications and it’s hard not to instantly respond back. The cell phone and connection overall is ultimately controlling. We no longer control them. It is a constant distraction interrupting whatever else we are doing. Our minds race thinking about a million different things at once at whatever our phones or internet connections give to us. Social media goes after our insecurities of wanting to be noticed, comparing ourselves to others, wanting to have as many options as possible, and caters to creating ever more short attention spans which somehow seem “cool and normal” to be as entertained as much as possible. The feeling of wanting to spend more time in nature or holed up in your house with your devices off completely taking a break from this type of obsessive world seems more appealing. However, boredom and loneliness strike and the conditioning of our phones, connection to tech, and social media has conditioned us so. So much in fact, that it would take a major effort and your life would change a lot if you really wanted to encounter more calm, balance, and peace with it all. We as human beings, in how we think and process information and our overall brain firings, seemed to have changed in a shorter amount of time than any other time in history. Tech and the digitized world has a grip over our brains and perspective and it only is going to get exponentially more powerful over us. How do we go forth in this type of world with sanity, especially when younger and younger children are born and this is all seen as “normal” and tech has fully taken over our bodies as an appendage to whatever role and function it has when there are still many of us alive who remember when it was the other way around? As artificial intelligence is becoming more of a thing it begs the question if people will fall under being labeled as artificial intelligence as they continue to allow tech to penetrate their brain functioning. What will be human and what will be AI?
I don’t know what the answer is but I feel like I know the things it consists of. “Less is more” mentality is something that will become more important for us to abide by. For myself, this means that I will have less contacts and exposure in general to people that I may want to connect with. This will have to sit okay with me as in the past it didn’t and I thought if I didn’t participate I would get left behind. Well, if the feeling of being connected is this anxietal, depressing and distracting then what would be the feeling of being left behind feel like? Somehow, I don’t think it could be worse with investing in less friends and contacts and activities and going deeper with those. After all, you could always just tap back in and try and make more and participate like you always have.
Also, up until rather recently in my life I didn’t think about my progression with tech. I just participated blindly, mostly out of not wanting to be isolated from friends or people in general. The future with bringing balance to this situation will have to be a thoughtful one. If you care about something you keep track of it and pay attention to how you’re doing with it. It will be imperative to feel like we have control over our devices and tech again in order to remain sane moving forward. What does this look like? Well my thoughts are that there needs to be intentional moments of declared disconnection. How do we either put our phones on airplane mode, turn off the data, or only open windows on our web browser that cater to what we are actually trying to do? There needs to be moments scheduled in the day that we allow ourselves to turn on that connection, pay attention to it directly, and then turn it off when it is done. If this is not done, then we are allowing an energy to constantly penetrate our lives and change us absolutely in unforeseen ways moving forward. In a way, it’s no different than the effects brought on by repetitious advertising. Inaction in this regard will lead to being infected and that’s why this is so hard as it takes a grand effort to not allow something to naturally passively penetrate you in every way. It would almost be like if the air was poisonous and you had to pay attention to when you could and couldn’t breath. It will always be hard to just ignore whatever pops up on your phone if you choose to be exposed to it and the sounds and all. That doesn’t seem to work as we are easily distracted creatures and discipline in that kind of way is aggravatingly hard.
Whatever way we choose to take on for finding balance in our obsessions, addictions, depressions, overall mental health, etc. is not going to be easy. We need process oriented approaches for such things and we need to keep paying attention to them and adapting them towards health in whatever comes up. In this day in age having discipline seems to be more important than ever.
The Avid Fan 
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