Looking back and looking forward
I’ve completed another solar rotation, and as is tradition added a picture to my birthday page. It’s as good a time as any to recall the five reflections of Buddhism:
- I am subject to aging, have not gone beyond aging.
- I am subject to illness, have not gone beyond illness.
- I am subject to death, have not gone beyond death.
- I will grow different, separate from all that is dear & appealing to me.
- I am the owner of actions, heir to actions, born of actions, related through actions, and have actions as my arbitrator. Whatever I do, for good or for evil, to that will I fall heir.
What is unique in this approach is that the first four, if taken on their own, would lead to a sort of nihilism. Nothing matters if this is all going to end, right? But the last point, with actions being translated from kamma/karma, is that in spite of inevitable entropy of life, there is something that still matters, our actions in the here and now have meaning and consequence beyond this life. This is the middle way: avoiding the eternalism of many theistic traditions while also avoiding the nihilism of materialism.
I’ve decided to give myself a huge present for my birthday. I’m going to take a long, long break from the internet. Or at least a big part of the internet. I’m taking a few online courses, am researching some topics, still need to look things up, and generally function in the world. But I’m taking a long break from forums, news, blogs, reddit, twitter, mastodon, and random browsing. If I’m online, it’s going to be for a specific purpose or to talk to specific people.
I still plan to write here, perhaps a bit less frequently. I have about a dozen drafts for long-form posts that I want to clean up and publish. I have a stack of physical books that spark all kinds of fun rabbit holes to write about. And then there’s email. This is what made the old internet fun, and I’ll still be in contact.
This has been a long time in coming. What really pushed me over the edge is realizing that the internet of today isn’t the internet I once found so liberating. There’s a forum that I frequent that’s been around forever in internet time. When I pull up posts from 2010 to about 2016, they are a joy to read: thoughtful, polite, people are genuinely trying to be helpful, and there are even citations. Then something changed. It’s often the same people as before, but everyone become defensive, angry, a know-it-all, arrogant, and belittling.
That was an eye opening revelation for me. The way how search engines work buries this older, often far higher quality, content. Participating in that internet brings out the worst in me. Almost any discussion has snark in it.
It’s easy to forget that there are alternatives. I’m probably going to get a print subscription to a magazine or two, read more books, start treating my computer like people used to back in the day — turned it on when you needed it, turned if off when you were done, instead of having it always one, and having a paired down phone that’s more functional than toy (yes to maps, taxi hailing apps, messaging platforms, banks, government services, etc. and no to games, entertainment, news, social media, etc.).
And so I look forward to another year, both on the calendar on in my life that’s hopefully going to be far less digital and instead surrounded by family, friends, and things in this physical world.