Happy Disconnection
2025-10-21
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The US government has entered its fourth week of shutdown. A peace deal is being brokered in Gaza. Trends are flying across TikTok and Instagram at breakneck speed. And lately, I've felt rather disconnected from it all.
I used to be glued to news and social media sites. I keep an RSS reader on my smartphone, and I would fill it with dozens of news feeds from all over the world. I scrolled Facebook and Twitter constantly, inundating my mind with nonstop information. Switching contexts from one post to another forced my mind to work twice as hard--and made it difficult for me to slow down my thoughts.
In those days, while I did read some fascinating items of curio, much of what I was seeing made me very stressed. Wars, disasters, political upheaval, climate concerns, social issues, economic warnings, and horrendous crimes filled my feeds. The world seemed to be going to Hell in a handbasket, so to speak. All of that information weighed on me in ways I didn't expect: I slowly became a jaded, cynical person, desensitized to the stimuli that poured through my visual cortex.
All of that changed with the onset of COVID-19. I went into 2020 knowing that what I fed myself, both physically and mentally, was unhealthy, and I had resolved to change it. The pandemic hampered my ability to disconnect, but it didn't hamper my desire to improve myself. I deactivated my Facebook account in May of that year; my Twitter and Reddit accounts soon followed. I got rid of Instagram and Snapchat, and I even closed my Microsoft account after switching from Windows 7 to Fedora Linux. I wanted to shrink my life--not because the rest of the world isn't important, but because I needed to focus on the smaller things in life that I had the ability to control.
Five years later, I still get news about the world with some regularity, but I'm beginning to realize how far out of touch I am with modern pop culture. I don't listen to the radio or watch TV. I do consume a lot of YouTube, but the majority of that content is related to my hobbies, like planespotting and cycling. I don't listen to Spotify or Apple Music, and I aggressively block ads on every one of my devices. A large chunk of my browsing time happens in Geminispace, where ads or tracking don't exist to begin with.
Most of my real-life friends hang out on Discord and X all the time. They understand current memes and online jokes, and they quote them constantly. Even my wife, who is not active on social media either, is familiar with them through the children she works with, I have no idea what they're talking about most of the time. In a way, it does make me feel a little left out. But most of these jokes seem so pointless to me that I don't care to learn more about them. Many are nothing more than a form of verbal stimming, and most of the others have no depth or meaning beyond simply sounding strange. There's nothing wrong with that kind of humor, but I find that I'm just not interested in it.
More importantly, I'm okay with not knowing all of my friends' online lingo because I know what mental stress I'd have to go through to stay up to date with them. The mad rush of the Internet is not healthy, and I remember how unhealthy I felt both mentally and emotionally when I was immersed in it. My psyche is much more robust without all that extra stimulus. And I'm a lot happier limiting my world to that which immediately surrounds me, my family, and my community.
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[Last updated: 2025-10-21]