Liberation of the silent Junkie
“Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you
again…”
I’m not saying that having no internet in my apartment has
been the best thing that has happened to me in Ecuador, because my Latina
girlfriend would kill me, but it is most certainly in the top ten. I am part of the generation which can’t remember a time when
the internet wasn’t around. When I was
a little boy, my parents had dial-up internet. Then, as we moved to our new
apartment and I turned eleven, we got proper cable internet. And by the time I
got my first smart phone, we had Wi-Fi installed throughout the house.
When I went to high school, some of my teachers started
using programs like Quizlet, or posted our homework on a blog. As the world of
the internet grew, my generation got more and more attached to it, with
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and all the others slowly consuming all of our
time. We talked without speaking, we heard without listening, and listened to
songs that voices never shared.
It wasn’t until two weeks ago, when my roommate moved out,
taking the landline and the internet with him, that I realized how much time I
spent on the internet. I woke up and checked Vice News on the glaring screen of
my phone, then went to the bathroom and took a shower. While shaving, I watched
the previous night’s monologue by Stephen Colbert on YouTube. Trever Noah, Sam
Bee and Jordan Klepper’s shows accompanied me as I made myself some breakfast.
And I scrolled through Facebook while eating on the couch or in my bed. By the
time I was done with all this, I must have watched at least an hour of videos
and ten to fifteen minutes reading about things that didn’t really affect me or
had any real significance in my life. All in all, I spent about an hour and a half
absentmindedly, first thing in the morning. The sound of
silence echoing in my brain.
However, since I haven’t got internet, this has all changed.
I wake up and text my girlfriend good morning. I read for an hour in bed, then work
on my novel for about the same amount of time (yes, I’m writing a novel). Then
I take a shower, shave and make myself some breakfast (or lunch, depending on
when I wake up), which I eat at the dining table, all in silence or listening
to downloaded albums on Spotify, which gives me plenty of opportunity to think
about the day, my tasks and my novel.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to pretentiously preach
that the internet is bad and everyone should follow my example. All I’m
exclaiming is, giving it up, liberated a lot of my time and brainpower. I still
look at social media pages almost every day, but only at work during breaks
between classes, which is usually not more than five minutes. The internet is a
wonderful place, where one can learn about quantum physics and watch debates on
free speech, and yes, occasionally watch a cat video or two, but we should all
remember that it’s merely a tool; it is something that we should be using, not the other way around, whispering the sound
of silence.
A.D
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