This post is about feeling scattered and fragmented in the digital world. Whether it’s the array of identities I’ve try to maintain across the online world, the unlimited digital storage capacity that has me keeping things I don’t need, or just my perverse desires to use the digital world to distract myself from painful feelings, I’ve taken steps to be more careful. Many, especially those with vested interests, may say there are no or minimal mental health consequences, but I know it is damaging mine. And so, I scaled back, big time, but isn’t it time to get some societal checks and balances in place?

Familiar feelings

It was somewhere in my mid-twenties that I began to accept how much my possessions were weighing me down. Some sense of their weight had been creeping up on me for years. At first, in neither wanting to follow through on the implications of what I was feeling, nor knowing any other way to live my life, I let my feelings about it be squashed under that weight and I carried on possessing.

What I possessed had become part of my identity and I believed that what I owned communicated something important about me to others.

Yet, by identifying myself with my mounting possessions, I was running into limits on what I could be. How I looked, how I behaved, how I spent my time, and even what I thought about, all became bound up with the things I owned or would like to own. I wanted to feel accepted, and back then I thought possessions were a key part of receiving that acceptance. That’s understandable given the daily messages I received from the world, yet I had long been losing perspective on who I really was behind those things. And the more I possessed, rather than leave me feeling complete, the more scattered and less whole I felt.

Responding to my rising materialism

My response to this mounting struggle was a simple one — downscaling. I began to shed myself of a lot of those things. Tentatively at first, because it was scary to let go of things that had once been important to who I thought I was. What would I discover (or re-discover) beneath? What felt clear at that point was that aspiring for more stuff would never lead to a fully satisfied life. The downscaling helped confirm that.

(These were personal reflections at the time, yet my early academic research, which I was undertaking as much for my own understanding as for others, would confirm my newfound minimalist path.)

And the more items I ditched, the freer I began to feel. I can’t fully grasp how and why, only with less stuff I just felt lighter – more fluid, more real, like almost anything was possible. I could move about more easily in a physical sense because I needed to bring less with me. But it was more than that – I had more space to breathe, to feel, and to think. I was not possessed with all the possessing – I was a human finding flow and that’s a good way to go if happiness is what we’re after (a curious academic paper here – not my paper – on the link between materialism and the flow state).

Crept up on and caught out again – but perhaps it’s worse this time

Though, let’s fast forward some 15 years, and I found myself feeling similarly weighed down. Not by my physical possessions, no. Now by the online and digital world. It’d been creeping up on me for some time.

When I was a boy, I would go to the shops to get photos developed, and I’d wonder how many of my photos would be worth keeping. And then, as the years went by, some got damaged, or lost, leaving me with only one or two. When I come across them again maybe I’ll find a smile or even a tear.

Nowadays all photos get kept – there are no physical storage issues to prevent me doing so. They are not precious, simply countless reminders of a person I no longer am (and probably never really was) and in a place I am not in. I lose connection, I am not present.

Nowadays I could (in theory) beam a photo into homes all over the world in an instant. To paint a picture of my life to people I do not know in the hope of a few likes…it’s to get caught up in all that liking, all that following, all that trying to project ideas of myself into the world. How I look, how I behave, how I spend my time, and even what I think about is bound up with wanting to be perceived a certain way and ‘liked’. And I lose connection with who I am at my core and what is really happening in the world around me.

Cost of (not) being liked

Sometimes I’ve felt inadequate at my lack of ‘likes’. I’ve sometimes felt resentful too. This is in much the same way I might have felt in the past from not having some latest thing that others had. Yet, on those rare times when what I share is liked, I’m hardly left feeling fulfilled at a deeper level (just like when I acquired the new thing), and those likes (or things) are not supposed to have me feeling fulfilled. It’s just little hits of dopamine and serotonin to feed an addiction. The ‘promise’ of something deeper, some wholeness, is all part of the lure. This is the design.

Of course, a person can pay to have their stuff (and themselves) liked. And when there is a business involved, they probably do, and to some extent they must for their survival.

But most of us want to be liked (accepted) for free. And we deserve to be. But consider this…it doesn’t matter how amazing and insightful the words or a picture that is posted onto an online world, if the algorithms don’t pick up that it’s the sort of words or picture that will keep other people scrolling/using, then it will not find its way into many people’s feeds. To be ‘liked’ we must feed the machine and keep other people playing …or indeed pay, which is what the machine wants at the end of the day…

Breaking the hold

In autumn last year I experimented by taking myself off social media altogether. Every single one of them. I wanted to see how it made me feel. And it made me feel great. Less anxious and less angry. No longer drawn in to reading comments from the latest big post (unsurprisingly from someone saying something controversial that people got angry about). I had more time to sit and be – on the train, in a café, in my home – watching and listening to things in the present.

In this period of abstinence, I would watch each time a curious thought arose in my mind, and how instead of wondering how I could convey what was an elaborate thought process into 140 characters to share with the world, I would just let that thought go…often other thoughts would take its place, but sometimes I got moments of pure being.

I found myself feeling lighter – more fluid, more real, like almost anything was possible…

Addiction of the modern age

I tried to figure out how I would re-enter that online world in a healthier and more functional way. And indeed, whether it was even possible to have such a functional relationship with the online world. And as ever, when it comes to having functional relationships, whether it be people, things, the universe, it always comes back to boundaries. In having clarity about limits of who I am and how I relate to a person, thing, the universe, without losing myself. And I’ll impose them draconically if that’s what it takes to bring me back to deeper connection…

I went back on Twitter, but that’s the only one. None of the others. And even my use of Twitter is limited now. There might be the odd sarcastic tweet that I know no one will like, a book-mention here or there, and the odd bit of scrolling to fill some time I’ll never get back, but I’m okay so long as I never read any comments to provocative statements, and stick to 10 minutes maximum…

I’m still committed to writing on my blog – it motivates me to flesh out thoughts and it is always on my own terms. I don’t have many readers, but my relationship with blogging is healthier – I write when I can, when I need to take myself deeper, it helps rather than hinders.

Some days I’ll come home from work and the internet doesn’t even get turned on. I want my home to be a safe space…I’d love it if we had an internet that wasn’t fuelled by addiction and profit seeking. I wish that more broadly across society…where technology was harnessed for the quality of life of all rather than the profit of a few. We might get there some day.

****** Below are links to some related blog posts

Addictive by Design

Vegas and the desperate hunt for an improbable happiness!

Your happiness! Whose responsibility?

****** And if you’re interested in finding happiness in a system not designed to make you happy then consider journeying to Bhutan with me on a bicycle…