I now walk into the wild

Some time in the early nineties I threw out the TV. Those of you who like myself were grown-ups in the nineties might appreciate this was a quite profound thing to do. Ok, according to the annals, the www had already been born back then, but there was no internet yet as we know it today. No TV, and you were essentially cut off from everything in terms of light entertainment and sociocultural streamlining by Seinfeld, SATC, and Friends. Not to mention CNN, our window to the world at that time.

Throwing out the TV was perhaps the most liberating transformation I had experienced by then. Gone were the days of ending up exhausted and bored in front of the telly, zapping away. Enter millinery, meditation circles, galleries. Nightclubbing. And of course I got my first computer, a dream I had nurtured ever since I got to write binary code on paper as a teenage punkette in school. The burst of creativity was profound. My life became so much richer, but there was also a component of vanity. Not having a TV was very rewarding for the ego, being this cool, independent person.

Not having a TV in the soon 2020ies is hardly a hallmark of the cool anymore. Computers and the internet have not only taken over the role of the TV, they are the absolute infrastructure of modern life. Don’t get me wrong, I am anything else than a luddite, and I would never want to go back to a life without computers, the internet (wether for humans or things), or smartphones for that matter. A TV was never a tool for creativity. With a computer, you can change the world. It happens everyday, everywhere, allover.

I miss the sense of freedom I felt when I was that TV-less person, but throwing out my laptop is not an option. Instead I have shopped around for various screen time blockers like an idiot, for years now. As if hiding away the bottles in a cabinet would help an alcoholic.

I don’t mind being addicted to researching the whole internet for some obscure historic fact, investigating my psyche in a blog, or writing that occasional line of code. Exploration and creativity are an amazing thing, and some of the greatest sources of joy in my life. My social life on the internet has been utterly rewarding. So many friends and so much intellectual exchange back then on ICQ, in newsgroups, and on forums. The early blogs. A good friend of mine even wrote a private social community for us to hang out. And a MUSH. Those endless hours spent there were anything but lost. It was fun, genuine fun, for real.

Then came myspace, and then facebook. I guess it took years to understand how different this really was from earlier social media.

I first signed on to facebook in 2007. At that time, status updates were short and crisp. Fredrika Gullfot is at work. Fredrika Gullfot is off to Göteborg for some synthetic biology. Fredrika Gullfot is late for work. Off to bed. Super busy. Completely forgot about the party she was supposed to join. My first proper post was a celebrity lookalike game where I was matched with Geena Davis. Then in 2009, exactly ten years ago, I signed up for Twitter, which soon became my home turf. It was purely text-based. It had character limits. It was perfect.

While I always found facebook useful and fun but also silly, I love twitter deeply and dearly. I have made friends on twitter, true friends. Business. Amazing PR. Twitter empowered me to push agendas, and to get my voice out there. Social media has been a godsend for my brand, and for my business. I think there is not a single startup founder who wouldn’t subscribe to that statement. It lies in our DNA to own our own story, and social media lets us do just that. It is utterly powerful and effective. On the personal side, it is extremely rewarding. I am afraid it is drugs.

I think this all might be what slowly infected me with the FOMO virus, and I signed up for Instagram as well. I should have taken it as a warning sign that my usual nick, gullfot, was already taken, by some random Norwegian soccer aficionado who never posts. On Instagram, I am therealgullfot — whoever that is supposed to be anymore.

Does anyone read the paper first thing in the morning any more? I think today, most of us scroll for social updates instead. The full protocol: Twitter, facebook, linkedIn, Insta, check email, and then again. Have good friends, and you might come across a great article in the Guardian, the New York Times, or on Wired. Less so, and kittens, twerking grannies and freak accidents will set the tone of the day. Old time tabloids would have blushed in shame at your social media feed. And yet, you come back for more. And more. And more.

I the past months, I have been thinking what it actually does to my brain to be subject to this constant stream of meaninglessness. I mean, to the brain, this is still ‘information’, that somehow has to be processed. Just as HFCS, high-fructose corn syrup, technically is treated as food by the body. I guess we all know this isn’t great for us. And still we do it. “I can stop anytime I want.”

But you know what, I am not sure I can stop any more. Like a junkie, I am negotiating for perhaps keeping twitter and abandon facebook, or restrict myself to Instagram. I am having close to anxiety attacks over what a self-inflicted total social media embargo might do to my life and to my business. Fear of losing friends. Of missing out. Of being forgotten, a no-one, an isolated ghost of the past. And I thought throwing out the TV in the nineties was a big thing to do? Muahahaha. How can you throw something out that is so utterly rewarding and so deeply satisfying as an established and lauded social media account? Where your coolness is constantly reassured by the ever so sweet flow of likes and comments?

Then again, I am always up for adventure. I am curious, really curious, what life without social media is like in 2019. And 2020. And beyond. I frankly have no clue any more. But I intend to find out. I just need to figure out how to close those accounts, so give me a couple of days. I see people doing digital detoxes everywhere, just to be back again after a month or two. It’s not the digital detox I am after. I want the full monty. Ten years of brainwashing won’t be rehabilitated by some month away. And I see no point in going off-line. Mail, forums, blogs — that’s all fine with me. I promise I’m not going underground, you’ll know where to find me. Just not where I used to be.

I am scared as hell, and strangely excited.

Related posts:

Datagrip is a great database IDE, just like the other IDEs from Jetbrains: Pycharm, IntelliJ, … In this blog, I describe how to connect an AWS Athena database to Datagrip, for my own reference and…

There are numerous advantages and disadvantages to using various Python frameworks, but choosing the right one for your project is easy. In this article, we will discuss the advantages of Python…

Possibly the one expense we all have in common is our tax bill, and this can be a challenge for many people to deal with and quite confusing simply figuring out how much income tax you need to pay…