'Offline'...The forgotten planet

I stared hard at the ‘Settings’ page of my blog for one last time. I inspected the summary of of entries made over the past few years for one more time and took a deep breath, unsuccessfully trying to cancel the cacophony of conversation threads with faceless readers that had been occupying my mind space over years , the non-stop chatter of praise, criticism, instigation, condemnation & occasional jeering ( it wasn’t called ‘trolling’ then), that had, over a period of time, led to a burnout of sorts, which I had finally confronted with a lot of discomfort . I wanted out.

Then I quietly pushed the delete button, a decision consciously arrived at after weeks of deliberation, but which nevertheless left me with a knot in my chest. I had just managed to kill my first blog-site, and throw my documented life bytes ( it wasn’t called ‘ content’ then), into an irretrievable black hole.

It was the first of June 2008. Suddenly I felt a little lonely, and a little cold. Like most early citizens of Blogosphere, I had reached the last page of my first tryst with the web. And was encountering my first pang of anxiety like that of a child who had strayed away from home and was unable to locate known faces around him anymore. Going forward, this phenomenon would get to be named as FOMO ( Fear of missing out), a word that eventually found place in the Oxford dictionary in 2013, describing a social disorder that had arrived to gobble up a generation over the course of a quick, shallow decade.

Getting back to 2008 - A month later, I discovered Facebook. And enlisted. And I was back to square one. Minus one, actually.

Facebook was a club that soon outgrew the campus it originated from , the state, the country and also the continent, to become the biggest phenomenon to hit the world in the 21st century which would go ahead and redefine the way we would live, lead, follow, eat, act, react, hate, love, applaud, buy, sell, hail, ridicule, smile, sob and be bored or entertained. And all of it being instantaneous, simultaneous and in real time. If you had a problem coping with pace and multitudes, you had become a dinosaur in this new world. Here was a place where you were able to follow your favorite celebrity with the click of the same button with which you could post your grandma’s childhood pictures. The trajectory and destiny of social networking was pretty accidental and was never anticipated to reach these notorious proportions that it did. So was the audience, which soon adapted to the new norms of human relationships - those of unfriending, unloving, untagging and unfollowing. What started out as a plaything for the youth, soon transcended boundaries of age and started connecting with the not-so-young ones too ( especially the not-so-young, as it turned out) , thanks to the convenience of easy technology. And then, Twitter came along – the bandwagon of microthoughts, giving wings to the opinionated and the not-so-opinionated, the celebrated, the sagely and the shallows. And then, Instagram. Tinder. So on. Soon, it was physically painful to stay away – so strong was the threat of being left alone. Or left behind.

And in the midst of this unending trot on the treadmill unto death, just when the world thought that things couldn’t get any worse – Smartphones made their way into our lives. And we went from being slaves who were plugged to a point, to maniacs who carried this mayhem with them, wherever we would go, never daring to take our eyes off, lest we miss out on the latest update, wiring ourselves into a wireless planet like zombies who were having silent orgasms, being lonely together.

If Blogosphere was an occasional dopamine shower, social media was the ocean. If the web was the periodic weed, the smartphone was cocaine.

Between the years 2008 and 2014, my reading plummeted. From twenty books a year ( my re-calibrated average during all my adult life), I was barely able to read two books on a good year. My depleted attention span would not allow me to read more than 3-4 pages at a stretch ( I , who used to be a cover-to-cover book addict in my teens) before I would reach out to my phone to check my social media feed, & get my easy dopamine fix from ‘likes’ on my posts by some random strangers. Oh yes, I forgot to mention - during these years, I again hopped into blogging platforms to upload ‘content’, as it came to be known now, in the form of heterogeneous ( and increasingly shallow) material that ranged from poetry to short stories, to opinion columns around ‘trending’ issues ( yet another fallout of the fad-fed universe I had dug myself into), to movie reviews and the very occasional book review. I would then immediately proceed to share them on diverse online forums with anyone who would ask for them, and also post them on my personal FB page which, by now, had a steady string of ‘Followers’ , segregated into Friends / Family : Acquaintances : Random strangers in a ratio of 10 :20 :70. The constant engagement on so many fronts kept me happily occupied in ceaseless activity during my free hours, and gradually eroded my sensibility to grasp whether it was actually worthwhile activity in the first place, and which stealthily carved out an ego born out of qualities I had unearthed in quest of this superficial applause, venturing farther and farther away from life’s true meaning. Of course, like most people, I was sensible enough to understand that social media was not real life, but a cherry picked version of it. But like most people, I had somehow embraced a very fragile self-image by now and was perpetually insecure of stepping out of it.

It did not stop at free hours only. For me, or for the world around me. Somehow, over the years, the rules of the workplace too were re-written to keep pace with the changing social order. Suddenly, every tool coming out of Silicon Valley was welcomed and administered as a must-have by organizations, with no diligence around the real utility of such tools. Suddenly, deep work was a virtue becoming fast extinct ( Btw - do read Cal Newport's brilliant book by this same name - 'Deep Work'.) . Suddenly, offices started to resemble colorful and noisy kindergarten classrooms where you could not focus enough to do any meaningful work. Suddenly emails & instant messages became the new work, and your speed of responding to emails and impersonal unidirectional text messages (useless as they might be) , became the new measure of efficiency. Suddenly the professional world had plunged into a crisis called ‘technopoly’ (a term coined by Neil Postman) where knowledge workers were encouraged to develop herd instincts, to engage in never-ending and meandering exchange of rhetoric over conference calls, Skype meetings and Telepresence sessions, actively disengaged from decision making or making progress towards finite results, and instead – disguising mindless activity as profound work. And as the professional world slowly moved from a deep character-cult to a shallow personality-cult, nominating new age superstars who effortless swam to the top of this noisy heap, and who, thanks to their void in understanding focus and meaning, traded fads for fads - iconic organizations started licking dust and economies around the world started to bomb.

And it did not stop at your social and professional space alone. In no time, our politicians had got a whiff of this easy dope. Suddenly, time-tested old orders started tumbling across the globe, and a frenzy-born new order stepped in, promising an ambiguous change, which understandably never came, and most revolutions ended up causing more damage than good to the world. Yet that didn’t deter new entrants from jumping into the fray, armed with new age tackles like Fake News, ferried through the convenient handles of social media, consumed by the ever distracted man on the street waiting for his next 10-second ‘high’, and which goes ahead to build a wobbly consensus in electoral battles, making him momentarily raise his hands in alarm ( in retrospect) when he realizes his folly. However, the moment soon passes. And the man on the street finds his next fix. And he discovers his next revolution . And he soon has his next hyperlink to forward to his two thousand smartphone contacts.

I know you get the drift. We all do. But we humans often need a jolt to shake ourselves out of a slumber. For me, this jolt came in 2014. I encountered two deaths within a span of three months. Standing at my father’s cremation, I was talking to my best friend on the phone, both of us marveling at the huge social network my father had built through his life in his inimitable way, without the aid of a computer or a smartphone. Three months on, the same best friend died in a road accident. Curiously, as I bid him good bye at his cremation, I realized that he and I had never been connected on any virtual platform. Yet, over the years as we grew older, with summers short and winters colder, we knew we were around each other in some strange inexplicable way. Something permanently got altered in me that December. I knew I had to reclaim my life from this clutter. Yet I didn’t want to adopt a quick-fix solution that would soon fall apart.

In the years that followed, I have built in certain rituals into my life that help me withdraw into the person I truly am, or want to remain. At other times, I wear my mask and play the game.

If you too feel the occasional tug of an impostor syndrome in your chest, you might consider trying some of the following. While they cannot cure the world we live in, they can help you find your Zen and stay with it to survive this FOMO world we have created.

1. Once a week, go for a long walk by yourself. And do not carry your phone on you. Soak in the nature around you with all your senses , resisting the temptation to click a picture of everything you see.
2. Do not look into your emails for the first four hours of the day. Research says that the human brain is at its peak between 60-180 mins after waking up. Use these hours for deep work. Emails are not work. They are chores that can be batched into and dealt with in other non-productive hours. If anyone needs anything urgently from you, he / she will call you anyway ( that damned smartphone again !)
3. Like Tom Watson said – each one of us has our brilliance in spots. Stay around your own spots. Chunk out a few strong spots. And nail them. Do not try to be good at everything. Life is too short to play second hand.
4. Rediscover libraries. And second hand bookstores. Hunt for books beyond trending bestseller lists . In his 2010 book , ‘Shallows’, Nicholas Carr writes - “We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.” He then quotes from a 2008 study that reviewed 34 million academic articles published between 1945 and 2005. While the digitization of journals made it far easier to find this information, it also showed a narrowing of citations, with scholars quoting from fewer previous articles and focusing more on recent ones. Makes sense to pause and ask ourselves – Are we all reading the same stuff that is most easily accessible, and missing out on something important ?
5. One evening, plug an oldie into your car stereo and go on a long drive by yourself. There will be moments when you shall have this mad urge to collect the overflowing nostalgia into a text message and reach out to friends, telling them how awesome it feels. Don’t do that. Let the music permeate into you. Only you. If you feel too overwhelmed for some reason and feel a tear down your cheeks, don’t be embarrassed. No one is watching. Let the tear roll. Thanks Andrew Sullivan for this wonderful insight, and your amazing 2016 article, reading which, has been somewhat of an inspiration for me to pen my own experience here.
6. Attend funerals. In person. Don’t just tweet out a RIP message when you hear of someone departing. Sit quietly in a corner and reconnect with the impermanence of life.
7. Try to set aside an hour a day when you do nothing. Just sit and BE. Life miraculously declutters when we stop doing and start being.
8. If you cannot do without a newspaper, then read it in the reverse order. As someone said – the last or sports page of a newspaper documents the triumphs of mankind. The first page reports it’s failures.
9. Set aside a block of time every year when you vanish from social media. I have clocked between 100-150 days during the past few years. As the chatter dies down after the first few days, you discover your first silence. Then the next. There is something magical in these silences. They are always telling you something. Try it.

Eventually the endless lure of virtual living will forever keep you enlisted in a frightening race which you can never win. There will always be unanswered email in your inbox. There always will be someone sharper than you who will overtake you somewhere. Someone will manage more Facebook likes , someone else will garner more Twitter followers. Each minute you invest running this mad race, is a minute you take away from real life that is slowly slipping away. Your partner is graying. Your kids are growing up and becoming strangers. Your parents are wrapping up their journeys. Your real friends are drifting away. There is a life ticking away out there. There is real work waiting for you out there. There are books to read, experiences to savor, legacies to leave and goodbyes to say.

----------------------------------------------