So this is how it feels to end a blog.
I'm at LiveJournal equilibrium: I've now had my LiveJournal for as long as I'd been alive when I started the thang ding dang thing.
Which seems like as good a time as any to end it.
I've been taking time away from the Internet lately; over winter break I barely touched my computer. You know what? It was awesome. I've been taking up old hobbies again: bicycling, Japanese, all those musical instruments I've been accumulating. I've been reading, too; fell in love with Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain and just started The High King yesterday. (How in the world did I miss those books as a kid?)
It was about half my life ago that my problems with the Internet really started. My family had only switched to DSL from dial-up about a year previously, and suddenly I had nearly unlimited access to all the Internet had to offer. And while I never stumbled into the Internet's usual pitfalls (porn, cyberbullying, scams, creepy people trying to meet you in person), I wasn't aware of what the Internet was doing to my adolescent brain. Like any fourteen-year-old, I was a mess of insecurities (manifested as arrogance), so I posted stupid stuff, and joined stupid sites, and read far too much, more than I was ready to handle. (It was a mercy that this was before social media and YouTube; most of the stupid stuff I said has been lost to the ages.) This continued on through high school, and college, and early adulthood. I had an unmoderated platform (this LiveJournal, mostly), as well as an endless variety of people to which to compare myself and constant reminders of everything I wasn't doing, didn't have, and couldn't understand. It was a veritable echo chamber for my self-doubt.
It wasn't all bad, of course, but in the past few years it's become abundantly clear to me that the Internet and I needed to have a Define The Relationship conversation. I'm inching closer to 30, that age where it seems everyone has that moment of oh my gosh, I've done nothing with my life crisis, and the explosion of Internet content creation is just amplifying that anxiety. I need to go out and live life among real people in a real community, rather than reinforce to myself the unconscious notion that these Internet writers and musicians and bloggers are representative of the world as a whole (or at least an Inner Ring of which I am not a part).
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. . .
And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.
- C. S. Lewis, "The Inner Ring" (lecture at King’s College, University of London, 1944)
So maybe no more blogging for now, not even at my other blog. For now. I'm trying to figure out what my vocation is in this life, and shouting into a void seems counterproductive, even if the shouting can be construed as a writing exercise.
If I'm going to have an Internet presence, it will have to fit in with the other things I am doing with my life, not be a driving force behind them. And I need to be mindful of what I choose to consume. Is it true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, praiseworthy?
In the two weeks I had off for winter break in December and January, I found myself more able to see such things in my own life, in my hobbies, in my work, in my friends and family. Internet overconsumption unmoors my brain from the groundings of true and beautiful things in the real world, and grates on my soul a bit, I think.
To life now.
Which seems like as good a time as any to end it.
I've been taking time away from the Internet lately; over winter break I barely touched my computer. You know what? It was awesome. I've been taking up old hobbies again: bicycling, Japanese, all those musical instruments I've been accumulating. I've been reading, too; fell in love with Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain and just started The High King yesterday. (How in the world did I miss those books as a kid?)
It was about half my life ago that my problems with the Internet really started. My family had only switched to DSL from dial-up about a year previously, and suddenly I had nearly unlimited access to all the Internet had to offer. And while I never stumbled into the Internet's usual pitfalls (porn, cyberbullying, scams, creepy people trying to meet you in person), I wasn't aware of what the Internet was doing to my adolescent brain. Like any fourteen-year-old, I was a mess of insecurities (manifested as arrogance), so I posted stupid stuff, and joined stupid sites, and read far too much, more than I was ready to handle. (It was a mercy that this was before social media and YouTube; most of the stupid stuff I said has been lost to the ages.) This continued on through high school, and college, and early adulthood. I had an unmoderated platform (this LiveJournal, mostly), as well as an endless variety of people to which to compare myself and constant reminders of everything I wasn't doing, didn't have, and couldn't understand. It was a veritable echo chamber for my self-doubt.
It wasn't all bad, of course, but in the past few years it's become abundantly clear to me that the Internet and I needed to have a Define The Relationship conversation. I'm inching closer to 30, that age where it seems everyone has that moment of oh my gosh, I've done nothing with my life crisis, and the explosion of Internet content creation is just amplifying that anxiety. I need to go out and live life among real people in a real community, rather than reinforce to myself the unconscious notion that these Internet writers and musicians and bloggers are representative of the world as a whole (or at least an Inner Ring of which I am not a part).
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. . .
And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.
- C. S. Lewis, "The Inner Ring" (lecture at King’s College, University of London, 1944)
So maybe no more blogging for now, not even at my other blog. For now. I'm trying to figure out what my vocation is in this life, and shouting into a void seems counterproductive, even if the shouting can be construed as a writing exercise.
If I'm going to have an Internet presence, it will have to fit in with the other things I am doing with my life, not be a driving force behind them. And I need to be mindful of what I choose to consume. Is it true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, praiseworthy?
In the two weeks I had off for winter break in December and January, I found myself more able to see such things in my own life, in my hobbies, in my work, in my friends and family. Internet overconsumption unmoors my brain from the groundings of true and beautiful things in the real world, and grates on my soul a bit, I think.
To life now.