Oh I Bite My Tongue/ That You May Be the First/ To Ruin

I know I’m not going to be saying anything new here, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it.

The internet is always on how. Always here. There aren’t any away messages anymore. You cannot walk away from the eternal hang out. People expect me to be constantly available. No communication can be ignored, or avoided anymore. My phone vibrating gives me anxiety, I realized recently. Every single buzz, now. And Mister and I, we’re late <late, late> adopters. I turned in my old blue Samsung slide phone in defeat just two months ago. It still worked. But the software didn’t anymore. It wouldn’t receive text messages from smart phones with punctuation. The texts truncated following every apostrophe, which the phone rendered as a period. Mistranslated apostrophe, six or seven more characters, then the rest of the communication was gone. It was unusable. I was still not ready to give it up.

I’m online all day anyway. At work, at home. I never wanted the internet on my phone, too. But here we are. And this isn’t even musing about smart phones. I am still using the smart phone roughly like my old phone. Better ability to take and send photos around, more mahjong, but that’s about it. I haven’t downloaded social media apps to it, and I don’t want to. I can listen to podcasts in the car, and that’s cool.

But we’re not allowed to ignore our devices anymore. There is no cheesy, garishly done up away message to separate ourselves from being constantly on call to everyone. If someone can’t get me on FB, they text me. And text me. Every attempt I make to back up is met by people reaching out. Now, I understand that everyone else has been immersed in this for years and they seem to be surviving, but I can’t do it. I want to go back. I want to go back to email and sites like this and even hours of browsing still being an experience where one can actually feel alone. We’re never alone anymore. And not in a supportive, comforting way. It’s more like not being able to close your front door and happening to live dead center in what would make a perfect footpath for people. So they follow the best route and just walk through your house constantly.

I’ve developed something that can only be described as the social interaction version of touch aversion. At a certain point of oversaturation, I would rather burn down every single person who demands my attention than spend another goddamn second controlling my tone and dredging up interest or being asked to solve problems that aren’t even mine.