Escape from the internet

Inertia — Nº200

A lot has happened lately.

The world is a strange place. Things feel stuck. Bad people seem to win, often. And we ourselves ask again how much worse it will get before people admit they were being tricked the whole time.

Dark clouds seem to own the most space. But it leads me to this quote I found from Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny:

“Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.”

We get stuck, but life keeps on rushing. Nervous and cross-legged, we scroll and move our thumbs mechanically while our minds grow heavier. I remember when we used the internet to escape from our world and find new ones to learn, dream, and experience vivre. I remember when our thoughts belonged to us and no one else. But sometime around the 2010s, some people learned how to take advantage.

They thought, ‘if I could control what enters your space, just a tiny bit, then those small drops will ripple.’ Fast forward to now, where the 24-hour news cycle shouts everything is urgent and everything demands your immediate attention. The big platforms want you to dwindle in visceral fear and sombre while latched onto the needless weight of what they want you to see. They vie for your attention span because, when that happens, control comes along and takes the hand of the helpless.

Deactivating Instagram recently was a wise reminder of how I stopped giving my mind a break. We’re not supposed to be constantly stimulated, but now we crave it. We don’t need to see everything because that rarely solves any problems. I’d catch my hand reaching for my phone like a phantom limb, and all it left me with was brain fog or frustration from the constant rage bait. Vast amounts of people now act as a vessel for the half-formed thoughts of others—letting them wash through until people forget what their own voice sounds like.

Life gets loud, and you look around, spotting everyone nodding into exhaustion. I started noticing my lack of energy to read, write, or talk because of how fast my attention could whittle sometimes. It became a challenge to intentionally disconnect from technology, and I didn’t like how it felt. But it is—and always will be—up to me to do something about it.

I deactivated Instagram not to give some pretentious answer, but because I just wanted to go back to enjoying the weight of a book in my hands, watching the story of nature unfold in my garden from time to time, and feeling that the world wasn’t speeding up or slowing down—I just started moving at its natural rhythm again.

You’re not ignoring the world’s problems; you’re understanding that wisdom comes from the space between events rather than nearly drowning in a constant stream. Learn to hear yourself think and distinguish the truly important from the merely urgent. Humans have faced moments when everything seemed to be falling apart before. So look up more often and sit with what’s in front of you: community, craft, small daily acts, and creation.

The first thing that comes running back won’t be productivity or achievement—it will be time. Moving at the same pace as your shadow across the kitchen floor. Slowly returning to count in seasons, not seconds.

We forget what being alive feels like. So it turns out that the stream flowing out of social media was a numbing agent; you feel like you’re playing a part in the world, but you’re merely watching it through a dirty window. But here’s what I’m learning: the trees don’t grow faster because we check their progress every minute. We leave them to it. Children laugh easily because they don’t force themselves. And the human experience of love, friendship, growth, and change should move rightly at a speed no algorithm can accelerate.

This storm will also pass. Not because we’ve obsessively watched every second but because we dared to look away sometimes. To find hope not in the feeds and threads, but in the belief in planting gardens, teaching others, making art, and believing in tomorrow.