chronically online and i hate it here

بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ

It’s around 4am as I write this. Light is cautiously seeping through small slits in the windows shutters, but beside this intrusion my body feels relaxed cocooned in the blue-tinged darkness of the living room.

Lately it feels like I’ve been running on autopilot; senses dulled as I muscle memory my way through the day.

Hours pass me by like a familiar stranger. I acknowledge them with a head nod and weak smile, but no pause, no embrace.

I’ve been consuming a lot of “content” in the background. I really dislike the word but with the absent mindedness and frequency at which its been washing over me, its fitting. Music, podcasts, lectures, social media posts on my favourite topics, even the best of them, are beginning to feel more like pacifiers than experiences.

In short, I’m fried.

When I feel like this, a solution that comes to mind is a meme of yesteryear. It’s a cartoon depicting a person being wrung out in a series of freakish contortions, before being hung up on a drying line. Never mind my body, I need that for my brain.

Every molecule of culture war discourse. Apocalyptic fear-mongering about AI. Utopian visions about AI. Ads selling online courses (about AI). There’s no way in hell I should be privy to this much curated posturing. All must be purged.

Sometimes I wonder what an alternative reality where I never jumped on Bebo or MySpace or Facebook or whatever else, would look like. How much does the Kwaku of that realm differ from the one writing this. I imagine hugely. For better or for worse though?

I met my wife at work after she applied for a role I tweeted about.

I found my last job in an Instagram story.

My first business basically survived on a social media pipeline.

My current business works with YouTube creators.

I’m not a technophobe or a luddite. I know that these tools enhance opportunity when utilised with clear intent and discipline.

I also know that the world’s brightest minds are paid handsomely to design features that elicit the perfect chemical cocktail in our brains to keep us hooked. Their goals and our goals are not aligned.

When I think about habits, an observation springs to mind. They mirror the socio-economic paradigm we exist in: an insatiable appetite for ill-defined growth, facilitated by exploitation.

Overconsumption is a feature. Overexertion is a feature. Burnout is a feature.

So yeah, I think that’s where I’m at with it. I’m chronically online and kind of hate it here.

The low fidelity, high frequency mirage of a life has definitively lost its charm. It’s not for me.

I want to get back to slow and intentional engagement with the world.

When I say online, I don’t just mean the internet. I mean that networked frame of thinking that made art, storytelling and conversation, a hollow-shell called “content” and follow counts "community".

To purpose and balance, in pursuit of truth and beauty.

May this reflection find you in a state of peace.

Love, as always.

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