Enjoy 3 min read March 31, 2025 at 3:32pm
When I woke up a few days ago, I heard birds chirping outside my window. It was the first thing I heard in my day and made me so happy - a nature greeting me like that, wonderful! I had never really noticed that sound much before - it's not as if I wasn't living in areas without birds - it's just that I didn't pay them much attention.
I used to walk to work listening to music or podcasts, spend most of my time there with a video playing on the second screen, and eat lunch while looking at my phone again. Even when I was taking my daily walks in the forest, I always had my headphones on me.
Everything I loved was on the Web. I couldn't understand why some (especially) older people settle for living without the Internet or even a smartphone - all the knowledge! Like-minded people! Entertainment! Everything, always within reach. In my understanding, living without it was very limiting, like doing laundry by hand instead of using a washing machine. Hell, more like doing laundry by the riverside.
"I will never be like that."
I can't really pinpoint the time when my mindset shifted.
Maybe it was around 1-2 years ago, when everything slowly became more and more unbearable. My favorite platform (Twitter) was taken over by a billionaire fascist, Instagram started forcing short videos when I was only interested in static content, YouTube showing weird, "personalized" videos which were not to my liking at all, and Google becoming unusable with AI images and completely irrelevant sites obscuring the very top searches.
Or maybe it was when I heard my coworker complaining about a 10-minute-long meeting being "too long" to hold their attention, while looking at their phone every 5 seconds when any notification came up, and a sense of dread came upon me.
Or maybe it was after yet another email in which I had to click the "unsubscribe" link, not even remembering when or why I had signed for it, wondering just how many of the similar buttons I will have to click in the future. Never-ending story.
I really don't know. Sometimes along the way, things changed. I deleted my social media, introduced meditation to my life, started caring about screen time, which is slowly dropping to the point I'd like it to be.
Of course, I'd never want to leave technology for good. But I do have a better understanding now of the same people I did not understand a few years back. For example, I've never used ChatGPT and I do not have a plan to start either, but it has become a standard tool for so many people - I have met ones that "cannot live without it"... And yet I can. Happily!
Hearing those birds that morning made me so happy... a Tweet rarely did.