Living Online or Offline?

Posting 2-3 times a week consistently over the last 12 weeks has been a challenge.  I’ve had to motivate myself to keep going, to keep finding reasons to write, to record, to share stuff, and even then, I ask myself — what is this all really for?  

I’m exhausted.  

There was a TED talk I once watched, where one thing really stuck with me (I couldn’t tell you who was speaking or what the talk was even about), where the guy basically said that one day, we’d have to choose — to live online or offline.

No doubt, the social distancing forced onto us by the pandemic has thrown a great majority of us to living most of our waking moments online.  If we were spending our free time on FB and IG, now most of us spend our entire work days online.  It’s nuts.  I can’t even listen to the radio on my phone without being hooked up to my data.  Seriously??

Technology and life online is moving at such great speeds these days that if we don’t train ourselves to keep up, we’ll basically get left behind.  I not only think of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, I also think about myself.  I am barely social media literate.  I refuse to let Siri/Google/Alexa into my personal bubble.  I’ve got poor GIF searching skills and group chats make me anxious.  

With almost everything pointing to life online, I want to believe that there’s still hope to choose a life where I get to live offline, where human contact is still a thing.  Have you noticed that at Dollarama, you have no choice but to do self-checkout these days?  Our choice for human contact has officially begun to disappear.

And where there’s no choice, there is no freedom.  I definitely don’t like where this is going.

Will I be forced to build a presence online in order to be taken seriously?  And just when I was getting good at being present offline.  Will that even matter anymore in 10 years?

Stories, feeds, reels, likes, views, followers, following, hashtags, distractions, no attention span, a bottomless pit of click after swipe, after scroll, after click, swipe, scroll, click.

There must be another way.  What are your thoughts??