Spazzing Out: How the Internet is Making Me Crazy

There was a very well-written piece in the Montreal Gazette this morning called "Off-Line, I Reconnected" by Juan Rodriguez. It was about his year of being "unplugged" from the internet (er..mostly unplugged).

This is an idea I've been thinking about for a while. I'm suffering from an increasingly disturbing inability to focus on anything for extended periods of time. In moments of silence, instead of being in the silence, with the silence, OF the silence, I reach for a new distraction.

I send and receive over 1000 text messages a month, which is now leading me to compulsively check my phone every few minutes (and become enraged if someone does not respond immediately to my messages). During the day (when I have access to a computer for 10 hours), I frantically rotate among my five separate email accounts and respond immediately to anything that is there, keep up on the 25 blogs that I'm "following," then realize that I have 27 windows open and I cannot remember exactly what it was that I was trying to work on before I became so hopelessly baffled by my own thought patterns.

I first noticed the frazzled phenomenon in my co-workers and would make jokes about corralling the Alzheimer's patients. But steadily, over time, I'm BECOMING one of the Alzheimer's patients. I'm losing the ability to focus on a single task through to completion. I start looking for information on one topic and find myself irrevocably lost in a great quagmire of information, clicking from link to link to link to link. I don't actually ABSORB any of the information I find. Ask me in 10 minutes and I will have NO IDEA what I was originally looking for.

"Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." ~Nicholas Carr, The Shallows.

I find the whole thing disturbing. I'm losing the ability to absorb great thoughts. I read philosophical treatises and I have no idea what it is that I just read. My short attention span was even making the comprehension of a Dr. Suess book a bit....iffy.

I am getting dumber.

And the sad part is, I don't even have the internet at home anymore! *gasp* I KNOW, right??!

It wasn't even by choice. I was spending 10 hours a day on a computer at work, getting myself more and more frazzled, then coming home and spending an additional 4 hours on my netbook, feeding my Facebook addiction. It had to stop. First, I deleted my Facebook account. Then, my neighbor (and more importantly, his unsecured wi-fi) moved. And suddenly I have hours of time on my hands.

I've read more books in the last 3 months than I have in the previous 3 years. It's amazing what you can do with an extra 4 hours a day.

But I'm still feeling frazzled! Reactive! Illogical!!

I'm going to have to quit my job.

Or maybe just get the multi-tasking under control.

Most days, my brain feels about to explode. I literally feel motion sickness in response to the speed at which I change gears. My brain is rewiring itself, and I don't like it. Not one bit! It feels....well, quite frankly it makes me feel like a complete and total stark raving lunatic.

I frequently begin my work day by thinking to myself, "Today, I am NOT going to check my 5 email accounts every 10 minutes. Today, I am going to focus on this one thing until it's completed!"

Ahhh, good intentions....