Technology Tantrum
OK am I the only one who has like two or maybe three Apple ID’s? Am I the only one who cannot remember the password to most of my accounts, Apple or otherwise? And I don’t know if I can create one more password, there are not enough special characters left on the keyboard for me to create something original. No, I don’t have a spreadsheet with all my passwords. I have never made a spreadsheet. I barely know what a spreadsheet is. Excel is sort of beyond me.
I am not capable of much technologically. It’s a miracle that I have managed to maintain a blog. If anything technical happens to my website, I freak out and try to talk to outsourced phone operators named Shelly in the middle of New Delhi. They may have fake names, but they usually know their shit.
I’ve lost all my pictures on my website from the past, I have to apparently put them all back manually. Manually. There isn’t a button I can push and I don’t have the money to hire anyone to do it. And on top of it all, I just somehow downloaded some weird malware into my browser and I don’t know how to get rid of it. It keeps telling my mac is infected and I know they will kill my first born child if I click on their website. They are evil.
Computers amaze me, confuse me, and baffle me all at once. I don’t know what I would do without them, and I’m not sure what to do with them. I used to write everything by hand, even after computers were very common. I was slow to accept that my first thoughts should be written on a machine.
Now I have changed, I don’t remember the last time I wrote anything, including a list, by hand. It could be useful to try it sometime though because different parts of your brain are activated when using handwriting versus using the keyboard.
Sometimes it gives you a creative push to do something in a different way, like handwriting instead of typing. I feel like I probably think differently when I type as opposed to when I handwrite something. I have even thought it might be cool to type something on a typewriter like they used to do back in the day.
The problem with using a computer is that there is the Internet attached to it. Every time I sit down to write, I find myself browsing through other websites between sentences. I just did it right now. I can’t stop, it’s a sickness. But I have to stop.
I also go to my phone like every few minutes as well and see if there is someone I can text. Technology is taking over my life, OMG I did it again. Ooops. WTF? When I’m in the middle of creative thought or any thought at all, I would be much better off if I didn’t dive into the interwebs every five minutes.
I’ve
What to do? I know people who have gone off of social media, I literally can’t do that because I promote my blog on social media. But it has occurred to me that all this negative bullshit I read is affecting my mentality. I just took a breath between sentences and almost clicked on my email, but stopped myself. That’s a start.
Honestly, if anything, I would like to slow my mind down. Does that sound counterintuitive? I feel like most people want to make their mind move faster these days, but what about the fact that it’s moving too fast for me to take a breath? I feel like I’m jumping from one website to another, to my phone, to my life, to whatever else I’m trying to do.
I want to just sit and do nothing for a moment, or think nothing, or be nothing. I am sitting here writing this, and that is all I want to be doing. Nothing else. I want to really be doing this. Writing is a very lonely profession, I think that’s part of why I like to go on social media or text in the middle of it. I want to pretend like I’m not doing this alone. But I am, and it has to be done alone. I need to be alone to get to my real self.
I mean there are so many cool things about the computer, I could go on for ages. I have Grammarly, which is absolutely amazing, it corrects my grammar and spelling. I am a mess without it. On the computer itself, I can edit and cut and paste and do whatever I feel like with hardly any effort. It’s like what a printing press used to be, but instead of printing hundreds of newspapers all day long, I just push a button and the world can see my work. It is truly amazing.
I wonder though if my writing is different on this blog than it is in my books that I have written that are waiting to be published. In those books no one sees my work right away, in this blog, I could write something and post it in like five minutes. It’s like magic. But I wonder if that’s making my writing junk. I mean I know it’s not all trash, but still.
Oh my god, it’s a like a reflex to go to other websites every time I take a moment’s break from writing. I should be staring at the ceiling, looking out the window, and thinking. When is the last time you did nothing but just think? No devices, no technology?
It is quite an effort to stop myself from browsing the interwebs. I should just close all my browser windows, but that is so inconvenient, god forbid I have to put extra effort into my life. Do you ever wonder how much productive time at work, whatever work you do, you lose because of the World Wide Web? I think it’s probably worse than we realize.
The screens are an addiction, the whole thing is a sickness. However, what would we do without it? We would not even know how to live at this point without all these gadgets? Our life is kind of a reality show or a website. We have become these machines. We are very much robots at this point. It scares me.
I now have a laptop, a phone, an
I am making an effort to stop this madness in my life.
Think about it.
nina