Since the year 2012, the only thing that has not moved an inch, is this blog of mine. Within my life, nearly every milestone one aspires for in their youth came and went. Starting from where I left off, I invested into Apple products, used a case study on Bitcoin to interview people for jobs and eagerly represented my company as we gathered awards on digital transformation. Progressively, I started using Netflix for recreation and finally conquered the projector connection I need to beam my Sunday morning presentations for the weekly management meet. A proud adaptor, ok fine follower, of technology... all for fear of my siblings disowning me one day.
In the last 5 years, I also married the love of my life - Neelay - we had a baby - our angel Suri - we bought our own home and we generally put our life before our careers, a nearly taboo thing to do in the pre-2012 and 25-year-old-somethings era of our lives. Most of these choices were actually not within my control, in fact they even lacked a real purpose. I was going with the flow, adapting to the milestones one desires of youth, checking the boxes... I became a wife, various-person-in-law, a mother, a swimmer, a home-owner, but looking back at the ambitions I set out with when I started this blog, I could not have grown further away from the person I thought I would become. But to hell with that.. The last 24 months truly define my existence, and you cannot just swipe through them on a social media cover page to know what happened.
I got off Facebook on 01 January 2015 and since then my life has been completely offline, much like this blog over 5 years ago. One of the main reasons I did it back then, long before the controversies on data privacy awakened us all, was because I felt I was sensationalizing a rather average life, spending time in parallel posting pictures of moments that I had to painstakingly filter for file upload size limits, from the hundreds I had clicked, rather than just simply enjoying the moments I was meant to enjoy in totality. There was something hypnotic about swiping down and seeing something new pop up on my newsfeed. No doubt, this brought its share of jubilations but when a perfect stranger poked me on my daughter’s birthday and sent a flying kiss for what was clearly the ugliest cake I had ever baked, I panicked. Besides the intrusions, all the fake praises and admiration mounted and I had to shatter the notion that I was balancing all my newly earned “roles” with elan. I was actually struggling, as mum, daughter, wife, everything - and the world was obviously oblivious to it.
2 years into this Facebook detox... The bare thread of relationships now nests around a few people who undeservedly got the least attention, the millenial parents and parents-in-law who don’t give two hoots about Facebook (yes the world has forgotten to give generation Rock and Roll their due and may shudder that I call them millennials in any form), the toddler who has not yet learned to ignore me with a phone in hand (here’s my chance to prevent it) and the forgotten practice of attempting to make memories and friends in flesh and blood. Wonderfully, the abstinence has also translated itself into fewer selfies, fewer philosophical quotes instead of just a status update and fewer proclamations on who and what I stand for and what I don’t. The paradox is, the less we shout out to the world where and why we exist, the more likely we are to enjoy the ride. To make mistakes. To allow ourselves to be hurt. To fall down and get up and go in another direction, without having to reboot an entire universe we have created online.
In the end, the silver lining is that the only validation that comes lies within and the only truth that remains is how happy we choose to be knowing what we know. Everything and literally everything that was said and written becomes history. And just like that, one saves a thousand precious hours of life.
2 years into this Facebook detox... The bare thread of relationships now nests around a few people who undeservedly got the least attention, the millenial parents and parents-in-law who don’t give two hoots about Facebook (yes the world has forgotten to give generation Rock and Roll their due and may shudder that I call them millennials in any form), the toddler who has not yet learned to ignore me with a phone in hand (here’s my chance to prevent it) and the forgotten practice of attempting to make memories and friends in flesh and blood. Wonderfully, the abstinence has also translated itself into fewer selfies, fewer philosophical quotes instead of just a status update and fewer proclamations on who and what I stand for and what I don’t. The paradox is, the less we shout out to the world where and why we exist, the more likely we are to enjoy the ride. To make mistakes. To allow ourselves to be hurt. To fall down and get up and go in another direction, without having to reboot an entire universe we have created online.
In the end, the silver lining is that the only validation that comes lies within and the only truth that remains is how happy we choose to be knowing what we know. Everything and literally everything that was said and written becomes history. And just like that, one saves a thousand precious hours of life.
