This sure was an easy day! As it happens, I already keep three journals. One of them is this very blog. It's not updated daily, but it's at least semi-regular; if ye doubt, take a look at the blog URL up there. I also keep a food diary in a little blue notebook, keeping track of my meals and occasionally my workout schedule, and a regular daily journal in a larger black ring-bound notebook.
I've tried keeping journals before and always failed, because I wound up writing novels: describing my feelings at length, opining on various topics, recapping each happenstance in excruciating detail. Inevitably my creativity would burn out, my hand would cramp up and I'd abandon the exercise.
This time, though, I've been a lot more successful. I started a simpler daily journal about halfway through October, with bullet points denoting the things I did and saw that day, and who I did and saw them with. It was intended to document the useful things I accomplished during the Facebook hiatus, actually. But when mid-December rolled around, I didn't stop. I found that keeping a journal inspired me to accomplish more. (It sure beat writing "loafed around and played Steam games" every day.) I was remembering things more clearly, too. Not to mention that I am, you know, a journalist. I should be keeping a journal, particularly if I live in a foreign country, and a country at war with its neighbor to boot.
So there y'are. It's nice to find out that I've got a leg up over the average man already. Now excuse me, I have to go update my journals.
Watch out for Day 9...
Time to say hello to my little friend.
No, not that one. Let's just call this friend Dirk. He's been a great pal of mine since high school. Unlike a lot of my other friends, he was quite a cerebral fellow, soft-spoken, erudite, calm, moderate and easy to get along with. His very presence was a soothing tonic on some days. You know the type. Anyway, he had a most diverse knowledge of international relations and diplomacy (which he later went on to specialize in at college) and we would speak at length about it together.
So it goes. The years marched on, and the two of us went our separate ways. He attended the University of California at San Diego and I hopped that plane to the Great White North (North Dakota State University, that is). He got steady work in Southern California, and I went overseas to Korea to find my fortune.
Ah-ha. You'll notice I said "steady work." That's because I have no idea what Dirk did during the intervening years, or even precisely what he's doing now, Facebook or no Facebook. I know he's in a relationship, but I can't recall his girlfriend's face. (Before you ask, I've never met her.)
The Art of Manliness has a rather touching story about Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State, William H. Seward, and a friendship he had in his youth with a man called David Berdan. Read it. It makes the rest of this make sense. Needless to say, after reading AoM's article, it didn't take me long to figure out who I was going to reconnect with. I sent out some lines of communication this morning. As per the article's instructions, I did not use Twitter. I don't have Twitter, and never shall, so it was easy. I e-mailed the dude. I asked him about his girlfriend, his life, his work, and so on (not in that order). I'll let you know when I hear back.
Hang in there for Day 8.
We've just reached the peak of it.
I reckon I know when I'll be coming back into the fold: December 18.
I'm sitting here, sucking on a glass of Black Velvet (which I totally forgot I had until I did that post about how I see the world). There's a super-duper thunderstorm going on outside. It's only about 44 degrees and the rain is just pounding. This stuff must have started out as snow. Either way, it's bad news for all the homeless folks in Seoul right now. I hope they got to cover, especially the legless and armless ones. 'Tain't a fit night out for man nor beast.
With the idyllic evening in full swing, I figured, hell: why not give you guys a progress report?
I picked the above date for a couple of reasons which seemed pertinent at the time. Number One, it'll be the two-month mark. Exactly. Dead-on. Sixty days (more or less) without Facebook. Seems like a sound number. More than enough to break a habit, right? I can already tell the difference. There's a big change. I feel like my Internet use is healthier, I spend less time staring at screens, and I do more cool stuff outside the apartment now. I hardly miss my little blue friend anymore. My right hand has quit moving of its own volition. The only symptom that remains is that incessant urge to put my latest pithy platitude or ribald observation up in your news feeds. I might not resist that temptation, though. Folks I know on Facebook seem to enjoy them platitudes. I've actually gone so far as to make a list of witty Facebook statuses to put up retroactively when I get back on in a month.
Hmm...maybe I'm not as cured as I thought.
The second reason is that NaNoWriMo will be well over by mid-December. I want to make sure I finish that up (and have some time to keep going afterward).
Third: the fall semester will be done with. Final exams will be completed. I'll be in the midst of grading them, sure, but the daily madness of regular class will be past.
Fourth: I kind of need to be back on Facebook before I finish grading and go off to Australia and Hokkaido. Then I can put up all my lovely photos and make you saps jealous. There are some people I'm planning to rendezvous with while out on the road, too, and Facebook would greatly facilitate that process. I hate to admit it, but my little blue friend is good for something.
So there you go. Get set for my triumphant return, Facebook. I'm comin'. I hope to see you all at the reunion party.
Civilization is what makes you sick.
— Paul Gauguin
It's been three weeks to the day since I went dark. "Dark" is something of a misnomer; I haven't quit the Internet entirely. Facebook accounted for, at best, 10-15% of my total time surfing the web. It's fair to say, however, that it was the main reason for my being on the web in the first place, if you know what I mean.
Some of my friends have only just discovered that I'm gone. I've received text messages and e-mails asking me what's up and when I might be coming back. I have no definite answer to give, because honestly, I'm not sure myself.
The answer is "When I'm ready."
But why did I quit in the first place? I've been wrestling with this question for nigh on a week. As of this morning, I was still at a loss.
Then, this afternoon, I went down to the Han River to read. I took a folding chair, my new Stanwell pipe, a plentiful supply of tobacco and matches, a bottle of Jim Beam and a copy of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The air was crisp. The sun was sinking behind feathery clouds. The trees were dripping with reds and yellows. The river was iron-grey and lay at rest like a freshly-tempered sword. I unfolded the chair, lit up my pipe, filled a glass with bourbon, opened the book, and read the final four chapters in one go.
Upon finishing, I felt that I'd reached new levels of clarity in my search for answers.
Civilization.
That's the problem.
Civilization.
I've been staring the matter in the face this whole time and never recognized it. The problem of civilization is a central theme in Brave New World, just as it is in my own novel series (the third installment of which I'm writing for NaNoWriMo).
What do I mean by "the problem of civilization"? Bread and circuses. Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe (and the closest thing to a villain that Brave New World has) explains it thus: you can't have a civilization full of intelligent, independent people, or it will dissolve into chaos. There'll be differences of opinion, boredom, ennui, insanity, or outright war. Hence the system of control which is so thoroughly explained in the beginning of the novel: the intelligence, physical beauty, and usefulness (or lack thereof) of any particular human being is determined at the embryonic stage, and a series of clinical processes are enacted to ensure that the resultant human being is molded and shaped to be a cog in the machinery of civilization. Menial tasks are performed by big, dumb, ugly people who've been chemically and genetically altered in their test tubes and then conditioned in childhood to accept their lot and perform their tasks with joy. Administrative duties are performed by handsomer, prettier, smarter, and wiser human beings, whose development and conditioning were likewise controlled from the get-go. To counter any malaise or dissatisfaction, humans are encouraged to imbibe soma, an ecstasy-inducing drug; have as many dalliances as they like, with no strings attached; watch "feelies," tactile versions of movies; and play ridiculous sports like Obstacle Golf. With their minds mired in pointless pursuits and carnal pleasures, and their days filled with the drudgery they've been preconditioned to enjoy, human beings have no need to ever worry about things like war or civil strife. Anyone who shows "subversive" or "devious" preferences for solitude, monogamy, or sobriety is sent to an island, severed from the main population to preserve the public's general state of contentment. Only in remote places such as Western America, on the so-called "Savage Reservations" (vast tracts of land surrounded by electrified fences) is humanity's inherent barbarity allowed to continue: religion, viviparous birth, marriage, love, and natural aging.
Fascinating book. You should read it. Mightily depressing, though.
Why? Because it's coming true. I look around now and I see the same thing that John the Savage sees when he leaves his Reservation and comes to London: thanks to drugs like the Internet, amusing diversions like video games and smartphones, and Facebook—that saccharine filter of friendship and raw experience—we have a civilization more blinded to the ebb and flow of reality than ever before. I see people more concerned with emoticons, abbreviations, Bubble Crush, Angry Birds, KakaoTalk, YouTube, Twitter, news feeds, discussion forums, and torrent downloads than they are with a lavender autumn sky.
That's the way I saw myself heading. And I didn't like it.
When I originally quit Facebook, I told myself I was doing it because my right hand was moving of its own accord—creeping, crawling toward that Facebook tab, clicking on the bookmark unbidden. I also felt that my brain's natural tendency towards autodidactism had been superseded by a base craving for input: information of any stamp, no matter how sordid or simplistic. I perceived that I was logging onto Facebook every morning for two vile reasons, and those reasons alone:
(1) to peer at the winnowed grains of my friends' (and coworkers', and distant acquaintances', and too-distant relatives') lives and assess them subjectively; and
(2) to make myself angry. I'd foolishly become involved with ("liked") a slew of conservative political Facebook groups, and my news feed teemed with their inflammatory rhetoric on a daily basis.
I was fed up. I felt like Facebook wasn't much good for communicating with or keeping track of loved ones anymore; now it was just a place for my friends to post insufferable political views, hackneyed jokes, fatuous memes, mushy musings on pets or spouses or babies, and pictures of cats. I felt like I wasn't really contributing anything to Facebook anymore; I realized that I was reposting quotations and news stories basically in order to annoy my liberal friends. I had degraded. I was no longer an intellectual, upstanding member of the online community. I was little more than a troll. Enough was enough. When I woke up and saw that Facebook was making me miserable, that my hand would relentlessly click on the link and prevent me from accomplishing anything worthwhile, and that I was spending nearly six hours of my day—all of my free time—just staring at screens, it became clear that I was a full-blown Facebook addict.
I didn't feel like I was really living.
You'll notice that "living" is one of the tags I use for posts. You'll find it in the tag cloud over on the right side of this blog's webpage. (Even using the term "tag cloud" makes me want to puke.) I did that intentionally. I want to highlight the posts that are actually about Life, life with a capital L, not life through a fiber-optic cable. I want to keep track of how much living I'm doing. I want to feel like the two hundred hours Steam so thoughtfully tells me I've spent playing RAGE have been counterbalanced by at least a thousand hours of pure-D experience.
Facebook wasn't letting me do that, and I knew it. I've known it from the beginning. I mentioned something in my original post about wanting to accomplish more during the hiatus, such as touring Gyeonggi-do, riding trains, visiting Hwaseong Fortress, exploring Ganghwa Island and so forth.
I don't know why I got so wrapped up in Facebook and the Internet at large. I can't explain why it's so easy for the human brain to fall prey to instant communication, electronic entertainment, and easy access to moving and static images. But that's what happened to me. Maybe it's a byproduct of civilization. We're social animals, and we've been conditioned to be even more social by our millennia-long habit of living in cities. We want to feel connected. Perhaps it also has something to do with the way our brains our wired. After an eternity of playing with things like marbles and Jacob's ladders, video games and streaming video are a quantum leap forward. (Whatever the reason, the effects are insidious.)
I just want to feel alive. I believe that civilization, and with it technology and all its insidious tendrils, is sapping the genuineness and joie de vivre from the existential equation. I was on Facebook for the sake of keeping my brain entertained during its downtime, like a kid with a Game Boy in a waiting room. And I wasn't even using my time on Facebook in a constructive way (as far as it's possible to use one's time on Facebook in a constructive way, anyway): I was just trolling. If it wasn't Facebook, it was something else: editing pages on TV Tropes, looking up trivia on the Internet Movie Database, watching Grand Theft Auto V videos on YouTube, researching firearms on Wikipedia, even browsing news sites with the same ulcerating anger with which I once patrolled my Facebook feed. Technology, man. The Internet. It's eating my life. I'm 13,000 words into my NaNoWriMo project, and I can ill afford to be wasting time wholesale—now or ever.
So I quit Facebook. And I might just quit the Internet, too, at least until November's over. We'll have to see. Something's gotta give. Civilization's making me sick, especially now that I've finished Brave New World. I read about soma, and feelies, and sex-hormone chewing gum, and Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy and Assistant Predestinators and bottles and television and I thought, Man.
No way. Not for me.
As the Savage defiantly tells Mustapha Mond, "I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want goodness. I want sin."
Living, in other words. Not virtual reality.
If you agree with me, then get off my blog and go eat an apple in the autumn air. You'll thank me later.
Well, it's officially been a week since I quit Facebook. More than that, in fact: since I live in the future, it's Saturday here, and I quit late last Friday.
The first couple of days went well. I was out and about, getting fresh air, exercising, watching sunsets, scribbling, and generally being productive.
Now, however, I've noticed that things are starting to slow down. Instead of clicking on the Facebook link all the time (which I've since removed from my list of bookmarks), the junkie in me has fallen back on other tactics. I'm beginning to fill the void which Facebook left with other sites: YouTube, TV Tropes, and other vacuous time-wasters. I blew one-and-a-half days of my four-day weekend, Thursday and Friday, doing nothing but staring at screens. As usual. (The remainder of Friday was spent bottling our second batch of home-brewed beer. Then we went to Taco Bell. Sweet!)
This indicates to me that Facebook—as well as the other stuff I do online, even Wikipedia—was never about keeping in contact with my friends. It was about my brain satisfying a craving for input. I'm no autodidact. All the hours I spent on Wikipedia educating myself about the Taiping Rebellion, Mondragón rifles or the Registan were just the fulfillment of an unworthy part of my brain, the information addict. Now that Facebook is gone and I can't satisfy myself with the doings and thrashings of my friends and acquaintances, my mind has begun to toke on my other Internet drugs of choice.
Apparently, I need to meditate more. More walks, more workouts, more bike rides, more contemplative smokes down by the Han River (if my friggin' Coleman matches would ever arrive from Gmarket). Studies have shown that meditation can be as beneficial to your health as sleeping, and even more so. It helps clear your mind of white noise and file everything away, categorizing and sorting, a sort of mental disc defragmentation, if you will.
Oh, and there's also the O-Train this weekend.
What's the O-Train, you ask?
This.
It's a train line that runs in a big circle through three provinces in northeastern Korea. Just got started in April. There's actually two trains. The O-Train (above) does the complete circle (about four hours); the "O" represents the round shape of the route. The V-Train (below) is a little diesel engine that only runs through a particular slice of the route, but that slice is one of the prettiest, rockiest, most mountain- and stream-filled valleys in Gangwon Province. The V-Train (the "V" stands for "valley") moves slowly but scenically, and on board you'll find nostalgia like hot stoves, wood detailing, and baked sweet potatoes. It's all about atmosphere, you see? If you want the feel of a quaint old narrow-gauge steam railway (without a quaint old narrow-gauge steam locomotive) then you take the V-Train. If you want to sit in comfort and take in all the scenery that Gangwon, North Gyeongsang and North Chungcheong Provinces have to offer, then you take the O-Train.
You know how much I love trains. I've been agog to ride on one of these babies ever since I first heard about 'em. A good long train ride through gorges and over rivers, past trees clad in autumn colors, would do wonders for stress, mental clutter, and ennui.
Now, someday I'd like to ride both, but for the nonce, Miss H and I will content ourselves with the O-Train. (I can always come back and ride that zebra-striped beast later.) Tomorrow (Sunday) morning, my lady and I shall waltz into Seoul Station, grab a mugunghwa train for Jecheon, Gangwon-do, and then hitch a ride on the Big O. That ought to put paid to my inner Internet addict.
Let's get straight to the rat-killer: I have deactivated my Facebook account.
I did this for several reasons. First of all, National Novel Writing Month is coming up again, and though I'm not sure if I'm going to do it again this year, it'd be nice to have Facebook out of the picture for the duration.
Second, I must detoxify. Facebook is by no means the only way I get my kicks out online—there's TV Tropes, YouTube, Wikipedia, IMDB, and a half-dozen other sites I visit regularly (perhaps too regularly). Shutting off Facebook for a spell will, however, reduce the amount of time I spend staring at screens every day. Seriously, I've got a disease. My right hand automatically clicks on Facebook even when I've just closed that window out a few seconds earlier. If Facebook is part of my muscle memory, then I need to take a step back and reevaluate my life. And that creates a nice segue into Reason No. 3.
Third, and most important, there's better stuff I could be doing. I've resolved not to venture back onto Facebook until I've made some serious lifestyle changes, and taken concrete steps toward advancing my life goals. Exercise, fresh air, literature (I'm way behind on those 30 books I need to read this year), writing, home improvement projects, beer-brewing (I haven't told you about that yet, have I?), and taking better advantage of my weekends. By "take better advantage of my weekends" I mean "take advantage of the fact that I live in freakin' South Korea and I need to get out and see some stuff during my last 18 months here." I still haven't seen Hwaseong Fortress, down in Suwon; I haven't set foot in Gangwon Province, nor sunbathed on Sokcho Beach on the Sea of Japan (or the East Sea, as the Koreans insist it be called); I still haven't visited Seoraksan National Park or explored Ganghwa Island or spent a day on the Incheon seafront. Oh, and Korail has a new sightseeing line up and running now, too: the V-Train. Now that I have a kick-ass camera (that Canon EOS Rebel T3i I keep going on about), I really have no excuse not to see any of this stuff, especially as it's all draped in autumn colors.
So that's it! I'm off Facebook. I'll still blog, of course (lots to blog about!) but I shan't show my face around the rest of the Internet until I get some stuff done. Not sure when I'll be back. Hold my calls.
