Here I sit on another Sunday. Another day wasted away at the computer. Working. And working. And some procrastinating. But, mostly, working.
Years and years ago I thought the internet was the Best Thing Ever. I loved working as a web designer. I loved going home to my very first apartment to sit on the internet more and chat with all my friends. I loved sitting there for hours on end listening to music and playing with different blog designs. It was the internet and it was full of possibilities and I couldn’t get enough of it.
But holy shit am I tired of it now. 8 hours a day, 4 days a week I spend at a job attached to a computer. If I’m not working on paying bills, or auditing something, I’m scanning and trolling the internet trying to make the hours go by faster. Going home isn’t the break you’d think, because home is really just the beginning of job #2, the design business, and that work needs done, too. And honestly, most nights I put it off. I come home, make dinner, play with my kid, and then sit on the couch with a beer and knitting, or I hide upstairs with my sewing machine. Which means weekends have to become work days. Might as well not even call it a weekend when you consider that the Mr is also working constantly on his laptop.
The internet used to be fun. Now I dread it. I dread the clickbait. The comments. The insane nutjob social media posts by people who clearly don’t understand how the world works or, at the very least, lack any kind of empathy to understand anyone outside of their own head. The hipsters who post photos up of their lives expecting us to believe they’re not meticulously crafting their image and that, yes, they really do hike to the top of Mt Whatever on a whim to have the most precious of picnics ever. Everything feels so fake, and it’s hard to determine anything that’s actually real anymore. Or at least it feels like that because there’s so much fake that gets more attention than the real – pretty much like the entire Republican party here in the US. There’s some real, reasonable ones I’m sure but they’re being drowned out by the idiots who are talking the loudest.
Anyway, I’m starting to ramble too much.
My point is… I don’t even know. That I’m tired of how much the Internet consumes my life, I guess?
I want a different life. I want the time and energy to focus on my garden. I don’t need a whole farm, though that would be lots of fun. I just want something else. Something more than hours and hours sitting at the computer. I want more baking, more crafting, more time traveling to meet internet friends in real life. More of a job that actually means something to me instead of just trying to get through my 8 hours and go home. I know, I know – there’s plenty of people out there who have done that. They’ve quit their jobs, bought their dream, etc. I don’t even begin to pretend to believe it’s all as shiny happy as they make it. You can voluntarily cut back on a lot of living expenses, and you can sell off a lot of your stuff, but that doesn’t mean you’ve magically found happiness or that what you tell the internet is actually real. For all we know, you could be eating out of a dumpster and begging friends to borrow their shower. I don’t want the drastic announcement that shocks the world around me and makes everyone what kind of drugs I’m on. I just want something more simple. To cut back on the bullshit, I guess, and get back to the dreams I had a few years ago. Before this baby came along, and with it the depression and the loneliness and the stress and lack of time. Back to my garden, my canning, my farm(ish) dreams.
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