The year of being offline

I haven’t written anything in almost five years.

Or rather, I haven’t written anything here.

Or rather, I have barely written anything anywhere.

On the eve of 2020, my friend and I were on a video call ringing in the “new 20s” - a new decade, new us. But the decade was like “hold my beer” and of course, the rest is history: pandemic, war, recession, global warming. And now, of course, we are already in 2025. Every new year’s eve since the turn of the new decade, we were on a video call saying - each time, a little bit more cautiously, a little more wearily - this will be the year when things turn around - until eventually this year, we stopped doing the call all together in a sort of resigned silence.

This New Year’s Ever was the first time I felt like writing something here again - even if it was only to say that this year might become my year of “being offline”. I’m no stranger to the pendulum of writing quitpieces (Twitter, Instagram, my non-existent Facebook account) and then slowly, over the course of weeks, returning back to ride the dopamine waves. But after the demise of the Tech Twitter scene and the fragmentation of other online tech folks between Mastodon, BlueSky and a dozen or so Discord’s, I felt the time had come when I’d just prefer to not be terminally online.

As with all things, my resolve didn’t quite last and the desire to share things and learn from other folks in tech eventually had me logging in every now and then to BlueSky, Instagram (ok, not so much for the tech stuff, but for hiking, outdoorsy stuff) and even X. And oh yeah, starting to (shit)post more on LinkedIn.

This time though, there was a distinct flavour of “being on social media allows you to avoid confronting reality” thrown into the mix. Arguably, my terminally online presence has probably always had something or other to do with “avoiding confronting reality”, but in the slow burning enshittification of everything for the past decade, that vibe is now more clear than ever before. The internet post-Gen AI is not really the same, though and now one is perenially left wondering if the account they are interacting with is powered by an LLM (nothing wrong with that if that’s your jam, but I prefer to keep LLM interactions transparent).

For a while, I dove deep into audiobooks, but to get the same experience as reading, I noticed that I had to resign myself to doing absolutely nothing else than being still and focusing on every word the narrator was saying. I tried books. I picked up Sally Rooney’s newest, but after a while I gave up.

I am not really going anywhere with this, just making note of something that has been in my mind’s Drafts-folder for way too long.

Until next time!