recently i took a walk in a place two streets away from my house, which i'd probably last visited more than a decade ago, given there is no particular point of interest there. though, i used to walk there a lot with my parents when i was 3. there's a nursery school; i remember crawling over the fence and dropping into the sand pit. that is, from the outside, i wasn't even enrolled there. the world seemed bigger back then, with more things to do than stare at a screen. as i walked down the street, everything was practically the same as 20 years ago, which was kind of shocking, though in a pleasant way.
looking back, my most mentally healthy period in adult life was when all i had was a mediocre desktop pc and a hand-me-down, 5-years-outdated, personally rom-hacked chinese phone, which i'd rendered into a glorified music player. said pc had cold turkey blocker installed, with every social media, clickbait, and even news site permanently blocked. the blocked sites count was somewhere in the high hundreds; every time i felt a site was rotting my brain, block. at first i was slightly concerned about missing out on something, but it seems important news will find its way to you anyway.
with my fateful descent into the apple ecosystem (don't underestimate "ipads have procreate" as a gateway drug), aggressively blocking things became considerably difficult, leading to the gradual creep of unavoidable garbage media back into my life. makes me wonder if screwing myself over to create a certain art project i won't talk about yet was worth it or not.
i guess i don't have to explain ragebait to anyone, but the amount of content that one would never care about without social media, yet still occupies copious mental space, is astounding. sometimes i wonder what people would be interested in if mass media didn't exist. it's like the world shrank, even though it's all the more connected. i genuinely don't care about whoever's scandal is trending 4389 kilometers away from me, but i wonder daily where all those people talking about mundane stuff and random hobbies went. turns out, a lot of things that we're missing from the pre-social media era still actually exist. irl hasn't ceased operation yet, and "chronically online" is still something that probably should be in a diagnostic manual. certain problems seem to exist purely in the online sphere, though some politicians are eager to latch onto whatever riles up the most people the most intensely, even if it's dragged up from the deepest depths of tiktok. i've seen politicians talk about being chronically ill as a "woke thing". as someone in contact with more steroids than the average alpha male dudebro, now excuse me while i kindly defenestrate.
however, i'm starting to sense an inevitable return of "that phase" where i nuke myself back into using .txt files for everything and retreat into making handmade buttons in the backyard. it's only inevitable that every seasoned tech industry veteran will eventually regress/progress into a professional duck herder.