Confessions of an Information Junky Pt.1
This essay is the first of five parts. What starts as a personal account turns into something larger: how to live and work inside the attention economy without losing yourself in it. My agenda is to set the record straight, reconnect with my network, and offer a hard-won perspective.
It’s not a mystery. For the past decade I’ve been struggling with professional and personal turmoil. Both happened at the same time, and bootstrapping myself out of it was a long, hard road from hell.
Let’s address the elephant in the room straight off the bat. Yes, I dealt with mental health issues and self-destructive behavior. It’s not why I withdrew.
The reasons are many, but all stem from the same root: I had to STFU for a long time to hear the truth about myself and the world around me.
The change happened in three stages. First I had to escape the noise of the world. Then I stopped volunteering information. Finally, I graduated by becoming content in solitude.
Talk less, do more. Protection before connection. Invest time, energy, and your heart only in genuine bilateral relationships.
My online presence is a reflection of this newly adopted personal philosophy.
Back in 2015, I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Later, I also stopped posting on Twitter and LinkedIn. To this day, I almost never comment and rarely engage in group chats.
My old Twitter bio said "information junkie." Little did I know how accurate my naive bravado was.
It's a funny thing to go from being an early adopter to a boycotting cynic…
When you text into the abyss, the abyss doesn’t text back into you
There's so much happening in the world.
I can't keep track of everyone I ever crossed paths with, every new pop culture personality, all the artists I ever heard a track of, all the names in all the current non-events, let alone every achievement and regression of humanity everywhere in the world.
To consume, process, and integrate all this information is humanly unattainable. It's omnipotence.
Meanwhile, machine time runs ever faster than natural time. And both of them are happening in parallel. Like cogwheels spinning with wildly different speeds in a clockwork that is the universe fractal.
We now spend more of our awake time visually and sonically absorbed into screens than we do being present in natural life.
Our brain has become accustomed to running on machine time and at a machine's pace. By intertwining our mind with the chip, we are able to make many more turn-based moves than we can in the same amount of natural time. We get to do 1000x more in one lifetime than our ancestors. Our body has become augmented with the powers of gods.
But our mind can barely keep up.
When we occasionally clock out to check in with reality, everything seems to be happening sooo slooow, and life seems to be moving towards nowhere in particular. That's cyber-jetlag and Atemporality for you.
Sooner or later, you viscerally realize what you've always known intellectually: that your time is running out.
I found myself overclocked, and I was in my prime years. My brain had too many open browser tabs, and I was living in high RPM, high BPM. I had everything under control, then things around me became unstable, then I became unstable, and then the disaster became inevitable. The manic part was like the thrill of driving 400 km/h while blasting Autobahn techno, mixed with a petrifying realization that even an inch of wrong movement on the steering wheel will flip you onto the opposite side of the highway.
Which must be what happened. Because the next part felt like a downward spiral into the abyss that took forever to play out. An eon of time-relativity nothingness.
The void of a second long-term relationship breakup, estrangement from family and friends I left behind, professional disillusionment, and an identity crisis.
A million miles from home. Alone in crowds of strangers. Trapped in a prison of my own mind.
Beset on all sides by injustice, human atrocities, and big fat lies that we just let them get away with. My techno-optimism had dissolved as the reality had rotted into the cyberpunk dystopia we now seem to be living in.
While the world diminuendo-ed into a slow motion implosion, that was the pandemic.
Life had worn me down. It almost crushed my spirit. I was consumed by negativity. Sliding into an abyss.
But unlike being buried by a monster wave, where you can tell which side is up based on the direction of bubbles rising, knowing which way leads out of depression isn't clear. Also, there's no adrenaline to boost your mortal abilities into survival-instinct overdrive to save your bacon. Precisely the opposite. Depression freezes your flight or fight circuitry.
It took blacking out one random Sunday and three cheekbone fractures to slap me out of my depression sleepwalk.
Finding the intrinsic drive to take on the labor of Sisyphus needed to pull oneself out of misery just to live a painful existence in which you just can't find peace, or happiness, or get a break in, let alone find meaning, is really difficult. If it never happened to you, just you wait, sunshine. And if you're the judgmental type about it, I wish you an extra fun ride.
Therapy did little to fuck all, except drain my bank account. In the end, it's just like the old gypsy woman said: "Help yourself, and God will help you."
Ultimately, any existential neurosis comes down to two choices: kill yourself or fight for a better life. Both need action, and neither is easy.
The only way to long-term sustainability and inner peace was by accepting I have limited energy, time, and fucks to give.
Finally, a lightbulb illuminated the darkness. I could see the light and direction towards an out. Bubbles escaping my metaphysical gravity of rock bottom. I discovered selfishness. The one where you put on your own mask first, before helping others. What everyone else was doing all along while I was busy chasing ideals.
Know thyself. Focus your thoughts, energy, and actions only on aspects of your life that are in your power to affect. Escape the control of those who have leverage over you by paying your rent or knowing which buttons to push. Earn your freedom to act according to the best of your own knowledge and moral compass. Design your everyday life. Measure your progress by comparing yourself only to your past-self, not others. Forge your own destiny by accepting total accountability for it.
Enough of always being available for everyone, open to doing anything, and helping out with everything. My effort wasn’t converting into more friends, lovers, or brand equity of being considered as a good person. On the contrary. It depreciated the value I bring to the table, and sharing it generously only attracted freeloaders, (ab)users, and emotional vampires to feast.
The working-class introvert in me was never trained to handle visibility, let alone the spotlight and dangers that hide in the applause.
I was naive enough to believe that being an open book for people around you is a virtue. Hungry enough to fall into the trap of success staged for me that was never mine to keep. And foolish enough to think that being rewarded with stripes comes with autonomy and the right to be yourself. Dead wrong on all three counts.
By letting people see me without a social mask, I handed them raw material and trusted them to be humane with it. What I let them see came back to haunt me.
The silver lining is that when your life goes into a downturn swing, people's true colors and the nature of their relationship with you become apparent. No more uncertainty and wondering where you stand.
Life doesn’t change back to being simple, but it does unshackle you from having to play the part of the persona that’s projected on you that sucked the life out of you and turned you into a zombie with golden handcuffs.
You become free to be who you are and live the life on your own terms. It’s just that your world is now smaller, and you are starting over not from the ground up, but from the basement with no elevator.
While the ghost of you still lingers around in your old necks of the woods, and there’s very little you can do about that.
“There will come a time in your life when you will ask yourself a series of questions. Am I happy with who I am? Am I happy with the people around me? Am I happy with what I'm doing? Am I happy with the way my life is going? Do I have a life, or am I just living? Do not let these questions restrain or trouble you. Just point yourself in the direction of your dreams. Find your strength in the sound, and make your transition.”
— Underground Resistance
Natan Novum