South of the South

While sorting through a virtual pile of everything I ever ‘owned’ in my adult life to this point, I came across a 1994 article about a new & rising band called “Weezer.” After reading through the stripped-down, plain text file (because that’s how content was presented on the World Wide Web fifteen years ago), I instinctively clicked my Gizmodo bookmark as I so often do throughout the day, to learn about the latest advancements in gadgetry as soon as the details are made available to the general public.

But when the first image of the latest story loaded - something that normally would have piqued my interest and stimulated curiosity on any other day - nothing happened to trigger my interest. Scrollscrollscroll. Nothing. Scroll. Nothing. Page Down, nothing, Page Down, nothing, Page Down, Page Down Page Down, nothing. End. Nothing. I felt entirely numb and indifferent to every attention-grabbing headline, every shiny, minimalist, sleek new gadget, every exclamation point. Not my headlines. Not my gadgets. Not my incredulity.  Did the feeling of nostalgia from reading that 1994 article just give my proverbial hard drive a proverbial drop to the floor, resulting in a proverbial click of death? I think it did…all of a sudden I remembered what it’s like to connect to music, entertainment, comedy, design…content, rather than the modern-day devices used to merely carry and keep these stimuli with and close to us.

These gadgets are just non-essential luxuries; tools that will end up in a landfill in eleven years or less. They are not content or media or entertainment; rather they are an invisible part of the sensory equation that I have somehow found a way to focus on, losing sight of anything beyond their immediate presence. They are the replaceable hermit shells to the meaningful content inside that will be copied and pasted forever. I feel disgusted, cheated, tricked, and shallow. This would be a moral offense of suicidal proportions if I owned Apple products.

Discovering, listening, and experiencing music and comedy used to be one of my true pleasures in life. For the new year, and the beginning of a new decade, I resolve to return to a less cluttered, less distracted digital lifestyle to focus on figuring out how I can make my knowledge of these substantial interests my livelihood. I’m moving forward into this next decade by taking some giant leaps backward. It’s time I got back to the good life.

All this really means for now is that I’m about to delete everything I don’t have a specific reason for keeping. And no, Anthony, you can’t have copies.