Here’s a post from PJ Parrish at Kill Zone Blog that I bet will resonate with a lot of us: Disconnecting from the world so you can create you own.
The world is too much with me. … I need to re-find quietude and solitude. I need my hurly-burly brain to calm down before something creative can start growing there again.
There’s a lot of talk these days about how many of us are trying to find a way to wean ourselves off our phones and social media. Here in my small northern Michigan town, the school board bucked high schoolers and some parents and banned phones from the classrooms. (Guess who didn’t object? Teachers, grade-school kids and middle-schoolers). We know we have to turn off the TV, ignore the cable Babel, stay away from Facebook, Instagram and whatever Musk is calling his enterprise these days.
Well, this is easy for me to identify with: I disconnected years ago and have only just barely reconnected. I actually did spend time messing around with Twitter and Facebook after I got a neat phone that could connect to everything. These days, my phone sometimes says, “Do you want to free up space? Here are some apps you haven’t used for a while!” And there’s Twitter and Facebook, among others. I do answer Quora questions, and what is the difference? I can avoid almost everything having to do with current events on Quora, but not on Twitter.
“The World Is Too Much With Us.” Wordsworth’s words are worth heeding. He wrote the poem during the First Industrial Revolution, when technological innovation was transforming 18th century life. He was saddened by the mad rush from one new thing to the next, and said we had lost our ability to find tranquility in nature.
It’s not just technology as far as I’m concerned. It’s not technology at all, actually. It’s outrage. Twitter exists to fan the flames. Or it used to; these days I don’t know because I’m not looking. I prefer to reserve my emotional energy for writing, and therefore I look away, play with the kittens, take the dogs for a walk, and turn the computer back on.
This sort of post always makes me think of this:
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