Saturday, February 02, 2008

Giving up the Internet

No, I'm not going to, at least not yet.

But I've been tempted to give it a shot for awhile just to see what happens.

I find that about half the stuff I read every day is useless. There's nothing, for example, on Ain't It Cool News that I need to know. I mean, nothing.

I read macsurfer.com, which is an aggregator of Apple-related news items from around the web, and that's not much help.

The Huffington Post is also an aggregator, with a lot of good national, international and political news, but also a lot of celebrity and lifestyle crap.

The one thing that's climbing my favorites list with a bullet is the Clear Mind Zen blog, permanently linked at the right, which is a wonderful mix of Zen and everyday life by someone who knows what he's talking about. (Although not right now, apparently: a spammer seems to have hacked the writer's account and posted a bunch of gibberish with some links buried in it.)

I don't like being entertained very much. I feel like my brain is already cluttered with so much useless debris that I don't need to add more.

But when I'm sitting with nothing to do, or when I'm sitting with things I ought to be doing but don't want to do, such as housecleaning, I find myself using the internet the way other people use television - which is to say, something to just take my mind off reality.

I'm thinking that maybe I would have more internal calm and peace if I distanced myself from the net for awhile.

1 comment:

Nina said...

I was without internet recently for 10 days. Even at work the internet wasn't continually working properly.

The first 3 days, I felt such a calm. The same calm I felt when I gave up my Blackberry. It is quite refreshing to not be constantly bombarded with information. The internet can become similar to the chatter of the TV.
,
However by day 8-10 I was irritated and wanted to choke someone at Cox.

Those few days of being away was good and something I will do from time to time.





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