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| Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay |
Remember when statuses on Whatsapp used to be things people read, instead of pictures and videos?
When Orkut scraps were something fun to read, and Facebook conversations and pages were something new?
When text messages were lyk dis because we had a limited number of characters?
When group chats were in person on college stairs, and memories were actually experienced and not just a social media highlight reel?
When we used to have to keep our phones super close to each other because infrared was the only way to transfer stuff?
When we actually lived outside our screens and had fun doing random things that had nothing to do with the online world at all?
When the internet was a very small part of our lives and not something that had to be paid attention to every waking minute?
Can you believe it was less than 15 years ago?
Can you even fathom how our lives have irrevocably changed?
Do you miss it? Maybe we should.
It was a simpler, happier, easier time. Without the incessant need to overshare and get all up in everyone else's business.
It was a time when friends were real and you didn't have to put up with people you didn't really care about in the first place.
Less people in our lives, but more real relationships.
Disconnect. Maybe you'll feel better.
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Once again, I am overwhelmed by the consistent readership this blog has. Just like I mentioned last year, I feel the need to acknowledge how bizarre this is. Daily views on a blog that hasn't been updated for a year. Not sure a blog that starts today can expect that kind of long term effect. I don't even know how it happened. This blog started in 2015. Life was pretty different then. Things hadn't escalated on the internet as much as they have now. In fact, I started writing on the internet in 2009, so it's been 10 years of seeing what has been happening in this crazy space.
This space, that encompasses so much, and doesn't even exist anywhere. It isn't tangible. It isn't anything, and yet it's so many things. I mentioned disconnecting and taking a step back. I've actually done it. My personal social media usage has always been erratic, but has drastically reduced. I actually sometimes try to be more active, not least because people message me to ask if I'm okay when I haven't posted in a while. As if my okay-ness is somehow related to how often I decide to post an Instagram story of my face.
My presence on the internet otherwise (not in my personal life, basically) has stayed the same, because I work on the internet. And I enjoy it. I write almost everyday. This blog has seen a lot of changes. I don't know if I've said this before, but the whole point of this blog was for me to just talk about random stuff I liked, whether anyone else even liked it or not. Somehow, I started getting collaboration offers and ended up writing reviews of products and restaurants. It wasn't half bad. But that was never the goal.
Maybe that's why this blog got off track. It turned into something I didn't really try for it to turn into. And maybe if I had loved doing all that, I would have been someone to ride the wave and turn into one of those bloggers, this space would have looked very different today.
I didn't, and I'm not. And hence it looks like this. The internet is good if you use it well. I think we're way past expecting any semblance of privacy on the internet anymore. Whatever laws are passed, and however many protests happen, a Brave New World is pretty much already here. So I've kinda just accepted that. All I can do is not waste my time trying to cater to a general opinion of what a blogger is supposed to be.
Anyone with a blog is a blogger. That's pretty much it. SEO and Yoast scores and pictures and alt text and sentence construction and internal links and everything else is for when I work. Not for here. If I wanted to turn this blog into a business, maybe I'd do that. But I don't even want to do that. I have other things, work things, that I focus those attentions to. Here, I just want to write. That's literally it.
I feel way better than I thought I would when I started writing this here. I did not expect this to turn into a semi-long exposition of how I presently feel. But hey, there you go. That's what this blog was for to begin with.
I feel good writing this. I hope you feel good reading it. Oh, and I don't even know who you are or where you're from. But thank you for being here.
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