I Went Mostly Offline and Then All This Happened⁠↗

i went mostly offline and then all this happened

Carse wrote the book in 1978, long before the social web. I wonder which category the internet would fall into? A game you can’t stop playing where no one can win. That’s no game at all, and yet it feels like one?

We laugh because somehow he has learned that doing prayer hands is patience and it’s so cute and is, in a way, actually patience but also not really since he does it for about half a second before demanding whatever it is that he wanted.

My friend Nate, who inspired this project, said he’ll sometimes just sit on a couch and think for a half hour or more. Thirty minutes? Of nothing? I did not know we were allowed to do that.

We cannot do both, the universe says, and so we simply don’t film this magic which perhaps makes it only more so? Or is it a loss? We could have had a record of this, but we don’t. There could have been more, but there’s less. Which is better, I no longer know.

The online world inside my phone is full of possibility or, as the bizwhiz kids say, optionality. Is this what I’ve been running from? This…reality of my life? This consequence of my decisions up to this point? Online, I am all possibility with no reality, not really.

How can one ever feel like enough when the entire connected world sits waiting, one swipe away. How can even this bliss of an afternoon with me and my son compare to the unknown magic of literally everything else? It can’t, and yet it’s better than all of it combined for no other reason than it’s what is actually happening right now.

There is no way to win this game. We don’t even know the rules. The point is to keep playing. The rules change accordingly and with zero effort. Without any sense that someone even could win at this game, we let go of competition and begin to truly play.  You can’t win because we’ve already won. This is it. The infinite.

Maybe it isn’t FOMO we’re afraid of but it’s opposite - fear of hanging in (fohi™) - the seemingly unbearable weight of sitting in the mundane truth of the present moment, full of so much nothing that we can’t help but experience the truths of a life: our knees hurt, someone we love is gone, and everyone in the AMC Americana bathroom is being updated in real time on the status of our bowels.

Say at the end of my life, I was shown two super fast forward movies of my life. In one, I’m scrolling through the internet on my computer and phone for 60% of it, and in the other, I’m…not doing that, spending that time instead with Lauren and Wilder and my friends and the painful realities of a life well lived - and you asked me which one I’d preferred to have lived, it’d be a no brainer.  And yet in the moment, today, it feels impossible to choose that path. Because we’re stuck, here in the maze of the web, digging ourselves deeper into a debt that can never be repaid. If only we could find our way out and unlock the door and free ourselves from this.

This is the promise of a game that cannot be won. There is no door to unlock because no one is keeping us here. The door is wide open. All we gotta do is take a breath, say “Watch this” and walk on through.