I recently went 48 hours without internet, a deliberate challenge to see how it would affect my sense of worth. I've noticed I only feel good when I've done something my brain deems "productive". I can get the same amount of satisfaction from reading a good book (I've started re-reading InuYasha) as from working on a project or YouTube video, however something inside me tells me that, at the end of the day, I can only feel good about the latter. I need to learn to feel equally content when doing something "unproductive" as opposed to something "productive." It's a side effect of years and years of mandatory education focused on producing satisfactory results instead of focused on learning. I fully blame the horrible high school I attended.
Anyway, those 48 hours without internet did put some things into perspective, but not in the way I expected. I've come to realise that we tend to romanticise the analog, and demonise the digital. These last two days have been peaceful, but they haven't been as soothing as they have been intensely boring (accept for the time I went out shopping with a friend, that was fun). I wish I could relay the wise lessons I have learned in my two days away from the web, but I didn't really learn any.
If anything, I've learned that the internet is just where I belong. I'm a cyberspace traveler. I did, however, get a better sense of how the internet can also fill my mind with unnecessary clutter, and I intend to surf the web more mindfully in the future. At the end of my journey I was just excited to get back to work, sharing my interests with people online. Isn't it amazing how we can just do that with a few simple clicks? I don't understand how people can complain about that and say it was better before. I'm so happy to live in this time of worldwide digital connection.
It's summer on the Northern Hemisphere and I spend my days inside my spaceship, coding this very site. I'm having a real hard time visualising what I want to do with it. I want to do so much but I just don't know how to format it all. I need to have a functional index page at least before I start working on any of the other shit. But I lose so much time staring at my screen, squeezing my brain to visualise a proper layout. But the brain is smoothe. The think-wrinkles are gone. I have no more inventive juice left to squeeze out. Do I sacrifice practicality for diegesis, or sacrifice diegesis for practicality??? Maybe I should browse the latest updated Neocities some more...