My uniquely typical Millennial problems

Well fuck,

One month left and I feel drained. The energy dribbling out of my body like the contents of a cracked icecream tub laying in the sun. 

COVID made it hard enough to focus but the whole BLM thing resurfaced a lot of painful shit. It’s hard to feel creative if you’re not feeling respected as a human being. 

It’s not just world events though, it’s me. 

I honestly thought my book would be several levels higher than it is by now. I feel like doing SCA again was probably a mistake. This is an arduous journey and I feel like I’m about to stumble rather than fly across the finish line. 

I generally want to do so much but comparatively feel like I have done so little. It probably doesn’t help that I’m addicted to the internet, just like everyone else. Apparently we spend half our waking day on the net. Which is crazy because that’s more than enough time to do all the things I want to do. 

Videogames and youtube are my particular vices. I love gaming, in fact I would like to take up making games. But who has time for that right? I’m so busy that by the time I’m done watching someone else play games I have no time left to play myself, let alone make them. 

I guess this gets to my next point about the paradox of doing things that take effort but actually make you happier overall. The pain and suffering of creating something new, it makes you… I actually have no words for how it makes me feel. Maybe content feels closest. 

Even though I know this, it still takes so much will to act. It’s bizarre how hard it is to let ourselves be happy. It feels like a design flaw. 

But of course, it isnt. People have just become masters of hacking my psychology for profit. The addiction to scrolling, to likes, to checking my group chats, to relaxing by watching. The addiction to comfort. The conditioned fear of boredom. Pretty sure I wasn’t born with all of that.  

In a way, we’ve all subtly had our attention stolen. And I don’t use the word stolen carelessly. If our attention and focus applied will create our dreams and our views are worth advertising cash, then make no mistake, we are being robbed. 

Compare the rise of social media to the towers and towers and towers of human batteries plugged into the matrix. In both cases the edge of life being dulled by a constructed reality designed to meet our needs. And so agent Smith says to Morpheus: 

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.

Reminds me of how social media sites will hold our attention with negative news.

These days when I’ve had enough I’ll turn off my phone. And it works, but it’s only a minimal improvement. It gets me off of social media, but there are plenty more online distractions. 

Today I considered a digital detox. I’ve experimented with this in the past, an evening here, a day there. And it was consistently amazing, even being bored I found myself being present and in the moment. The funny thing is though, considering it now is terrifying. Perhaps because I desire a more fundamental shift in how I spend my life energy, my relationship to technology and time/comfort. 

Something like that intentional living movement I’ve vaguely heard about. 

Yet I’m cautious of fast, radical and unsustainable changes. Had too many of those fail. And yet with a month to go there may be no choice but radical change. 

Whether it sticks and I’m to be thankful though, only time will tell.