Now, I guess I should point out that the medium (a blog) for conveying this message is rather ironic. Regardless I will forage on. Recently I have found myself feeling rather unproductive and short tempered off and on throughout the day for no apparent reason. Well the reason recently became apparent. This past Saturday I decided to be low key and spend the day hanging out with my son at home. We didn’t leave the house once, not even to go the mailbox. I also didn’t turn my computer or ipod on during this time. I spent the day reading, making lunch, eating ice cream, playing trains, planes and automobiles and generally relaxing. We ended the day with a 40 minute soak in the hot tub. I was feeling pretty good as I ushered the kidlet into the shower and shortly after, to bed around 8pm. Then it happened. I turned on my laptop and opened the usual distractions, email, twitter, facebook, cnn, google reader, etc., etc., etc. I immediately felt my sense of peace and accomplishment of a day well spent start to slip away.
Now, being one who subscribes to the tenant that the unexamined life isn’t worth living, I spent some time pondering this. I hadn’t been wasting most of the day, I don’t even spend a majority of my days engaging in those aforementioned computer-based activities. What was it about those things that made me anxious and discontent? Initially I theorized that it was the pressure of keeping up with all of those things, being current, that left me feeling anxious and spent. There is some truth to that but I think there’s more. My hypothesis is that those mediums prevent me not only from living in the moment, but more importantly they prevent me from living in MY moment. With most of those things the initial premise for interacting with them is about me (connecting with my friends, educating myself on current evetents, etc.) but, the end result isn’t. Even when I’m sharing my personal activities through facebook updates and tweets it’s really about someone else reading them rather than about my experience of them.
Basically what I’m saying is that I think a little selfishness and self-focus goes a long way towards being happy. Notice I did say a little. We can’t be all that way and happy can we?
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I'll suggest a slightly different hypothesis. I think the electronic social forums may generate the expectation of a for-real social experience that it simply cannot consistenly provide. It would be interesting to know if you have the same rection to IM communications where you have direct and immediate interaction with a person via texting. Individuals may vary from each other and at different times in the social experience they expect or need from social forums. Another issue may be the unpredicatablity of the experience. Sometimes you recieve meaingful and gratifying messages or bits of news and other times you may feel impotent because there is no way to force a human interaction. Imagine you regularly entered a room full of busy occupied people that would sometimes stop and interact in a meaningful way, but frequently they would simply ignore you altogether no matter what you did. I suspect your anxiety about entering the room would increase in proportion to your need for a meaningful interaction.
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