When the internet stopped being the place where you could just have fun, blogs stopped being online diaries and became side-jobs, you started seeing useful listicles popping up with tips, advice and promises of self-improvement. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by people who were constantly striving to be productive, improve their lives, build new skills.
This kind of online content got even more popular in 2020 and suddenly everyone was learning a new language, new skills, new morning routines. And for some time I tried to keep up with it, paying a fortune for a year of Babbel to learn German (the gamification style of Duolingo is not for me). After realizing that I was basically making no progress because my “old school brain” couldn’t associate my smartphone with something as heavy-duty as studying, I started feeling a bit of a failure. Not to mention the constant guilt for not living by a morning routine, not having a fitness plan, not reading enough self-improvement books and so on.
It turns out that, after working 40-45 hours a week at my (mentally draining) day job, I’m so exhausted that I just want to relax with a fantasy book, do some yoga, walk in the park and that’s it. I still enjoy visiting museums and exhibitions during the weekend and always manage to forget about work when I do it, which is good.
Sometimes I make the mistake of looking around online and when I see people writing books in their free time, mastering a new language, reading 150 books a year, learning how to draw in a couple of months and selling their art on Esty, gaining thousands of followers, I tend to think that this is what the rest of the world is doing and I feel bad because I simply don’t have the energy. For the longest time, I tried to keep a nature journal because I was encouraged by the amazing content that I was consuming online but then I realized that I didn’t want to spend my free time like that and I finally stopped attempting to nature sketch and copy encyclopedia facts around the pages.
At first, I was worried this could be a severe case of "hobby-hopping", as they say, but upon a closer look, I have realized that's rather me figuring out that I'm consuming things in an unvoluntarily curated bubble. When I talk with my colleagues, both here and abroad, they would tell me about their weekends spent lazying around with family and friends, museum visits, concerts, dinners at the restaurant or breakfasts at particular bakeries and so on. None of them would tell me about their 15-step morning routines or the new language learnt in a month on an app and it's comforting, to be honest. Sure, some of them would tell me about their run/bike competitions and other sport passions but not in the same way we are used to perceive online.
The content consumed online is never a deliberate choice of us, there will always be an algorithm lurking in the background and influencing what would come next, whether we like it or not. The internet is still a bubble somehow. Or at least it's what I perceive when I confront it with the "real life". But while it used to be a fun bubble where I could hide and pursue my nerdy interests, now it's more of an exasperated mirror of our society away from screens that makes me feel like I'm simply failing at life in general.
Anyone else is feeling like that? Do you miss the "anon internet of old" too? :)
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