As if Sophie (of Malama Life) was reading my mind, she posts the following (she and her husband are living an incredible life of trying to achieve minimalism and simplicity which is truly awesome)…
Part of this sums up why I suddenly had this overwhelming desire to “unplug/disconnect” (again). I wrote “again” because I’ve done it before with most all of my actual personal social media accounts. My actual real name Twitter account no longer exists because I never reactivated it (deactivations there go into automatic deletion after 30 days). My actual Facebook and Instagram accounts, I haven’t reactivated since 2018.
Do I miss some of the connections that I had on Facebook? Of course. But I also found that over time (without seeing some of these folks face-to-face, that this once strong connection ends up fading; you may comment on stuff every now and then, but it’s not the same face-to-face conversations that used to occur). This is just the actual reality with life as well as that in-person human connection. There are only a few friends where we can go years without seeing/talking to each other, but when we do reconnect, it’s like there was no gap (where we pick up where we previously left off).
Only the YouTube account I use now has always remained active (in order to connect with content like the above) while as noted before, I reactivated my Twitch account in January 2024 after close to 6 years of being deactivated.
The whole Twitch IRL stream watching ties into the above. It’s a different form of social connection given the online nature. The irony is that while the category is IRL (In Real Life), that pertains mainly to what the streamer is doing. The rest of the actual interaction is an online text chat which lacks the full in-person human interaction and connection. It’s a great way to travel along with the streamer, vicariously seeing things while keeping them company, but it will never replace visiting and experiencing those places by yourself.
As a hobby, it’s an interesting past-time for sure, but it’s the above topic (in the video) that has been slowly but surely pushing me towards reducing the amount of time I spend being a viewer (which is what prompted the purge of channels I was following/subscribed to). There are probably 4-5 channels that I would like to continue having some form of continued engagement with. However, I realized after watching the above video (at least three times), that what I was really feeling was this desire to just disconnect from it all and go through a reset in order to get back to the basics (which is where I am at right now).
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