I can’t do anything I want to. There’s too much to distract me. My distractions then start to distract me. And this is all, of course, on the internet. I don’t know where to begin or how to proceed whenever I set out to complete a task. I sometimes contemplate disconnecting the internet altogether. But then I know my fate would be even far worse than schizophrenia–instead utter boredom would set in.
I don’t know why I find it so alluring to take BuzzFeed quizzes or look at people’s lives on Facebook. Why can’t I just go about my business and be done with my objective task in an appropriate amount of time? But no, I must look up someone on Wikipedia and then get sidetracked by Googling the name of someone I went to high school with. It’s positively exhausting to be this interested in so many inanities.
All I want is to use my computer for a maximum of one hour a day–not get sucked into it completely, as though alien abducted by a literal sea of fiber optics. However, this seems to be a feat akin to the Manhattan Project. The internet is, as with many other people of the twenty-first century, an extension of me, an extra appendage I wish desperately to have amputated.
I can only vaguely remember the time before internet was the norm of how we function on an everyday basis. I was of the final generation that had the benefit of both knowing what it was like with and without it. As a child of the 90s, it wasn’t something that ran my life until the early 00s. Now that I’m enslaved by it, I wonder if I could ever return to my non-schizophrenic state. It’s almost like asking someone who leaves New York if they would ever move back. Naturally, they would never consider it, but sometimes, you just find yourself back in a place you never thought you would be again. Only the internet isn’t something that is going to go away unless I move to a Third World country, and even there, it flows more freely than clean drinking water. It would seem schizophrenic internet behavior is something I must learn to live with until the next Dark Age.
