To end up here you'll have had to spend a significant amount of time online so I have to ask something I've been wondering lately:
I'd say that the internet both takes up a significant portion of my own time and has significantly shaped who I am as a person. Since about age 14 I've spent a lot of my life on computers and even during times when I'm constantly around people I'll still find time to post online. It's like an outlet for me and a way of exploring the world built into one.
What's interesting when I reflect on all of this is that I can't now imagine who I'd be had I been born a decade or two earlier. It's largely inseparable as a tool from who I have become, outside of being naturally gregarious all my insights and my value in the workplace seems to come from the experiance of being raised by the internet. But I do wonder, with my life seemingly getting busier and busier whether it's a part of my schedule I should do without, or to put it another way whether the random disjointed and circular knowledge it provides has an end point that justifies any further use. I imagine that hour or two spent in a thread arguing with someone being used more productively toward a straightforward goal for example.
There's a Youtuber who always bangs on about how people need to get out and 'touch grass' and it's making me wonder whether I should do the same.
But then part of me wonders whether I'd lose something by trying to go without, I'd lose a community, a social outlet and a source of unique knowledge and viewpoints that I wouldn't get in my daily life. I feel I'd be more ignorant if anything. I'm at a loss, I'm sure you've all thought about this in the past so I'm interested to here your perspective.
It's probably a good idea to set yourself a limit for time spent online, but don't leave completely. Most of the stimulation you get from our thrilling debates will come in the first ten minutes or so of being here, and then you're just refreshing the page hoping something exciting happens. Also, consider only doing one thing at a time; I can feel my attention span crumbling away to nothing and it's honestly a bit scary. And I am by no means the most online person I know.
As someone old enough to remember life before the internet, it's really hard to overstate how much boredom was a part of everyday life. We'd watch Ski Sunday or Songs of Praise, because it was the least bad option out of three or four channels. We spent an implausible amount of time standing around outside of places, waiting for our mates to turn up. If and when they did turn up, we'd often just sit on a wall for an hour or two doing nothing, or just aimlessly wander around the streets. We'd drink cans and smoke cheap hash and try to think of things to talk about. Sometimes we'd throw stones at a bin or smash up a bus stop or have a fight for literally no reason at all.
I think there's a lot of rose-tinted nostalgia about what life was like before phones and the internet. We weren't doing lots of fulfilling things in our spare time, we were just bored shitless.
>>463799 That's actually another thing I thought about after I posted >>463798. In the past, everyone was bored and so you went out and were bored together. But now, you could completely swear off the Internet and go cold-turkey and leave and never come back, but a lot of the people you would hang out with are now terminally online too, so you will wind up even lonelier than you would have been without sites like this one. It might be productive to quit (I have noticed that the least-online people I know do seem to be so much happier a lot of the time), but there's nothing to really replace it with if you do quit. If you have a hobby, or some books that need reading, then great, but otherwise you're just abandoning something you do so that you can do absolutely nothing instead. If you want to get your music without algorithmic influence, the radio still exists but Top of the Pops is fucking gone. I still watch plenty of Freeview TV, but I really do watch just the news and nothing else, because it's an absolute polar now. I touch grass regularly, and it's not that productive.
It gets said a lot around here, but that's why hobbies and clubs exist. Cycling or fishing or golf is mostly just an excuse to spend a few hours afternoon hanging out with some mates. Women bond face-to-face, men bond shoulder-to-shoulder.
