Where did you run to in Lockdown

so i quit all my normal clubs

For me, the digital world has often inhabited a subliminal space around the real world. That's because it's a construct of what is essentially our physical world but with vastly different constraints. Constraints that are easy to ignore and are often ignored and grotesquely twisted by users of our digital worlds. So when lockdown pretty much jailed everyone who did not open the door into the digital, I could always see the "construct" of the digital space for what it is, a lie. But everyone was online now, to communicate, to share, and to work and to socialise, you have to open that door into the slightly twisted, but the only world that remains.

It started with the uncanny valley of zoom meetings. People compose books on the shelves behind them on camera and aim the camera just so. People use backgrounds and then the camera portrays the other party up close, really close, just 50 cm away from you. That inside your comfort zone visually, and the mind boggles. So we all try different online meeting solutions and mix up the online meeting screen with backgrounds and so on, to try and make it feel less personal-space invasion-like, less home privacy invasion-like and try get on with it. But apart from the way the camera lens lies and the fact that only 2 people in the meeting can speak at a time, (which is a really dumb problem.) There is the drift into doing everything digitally, which is of course meaningless. You cannot feed someone digitally, or even less check that they really have taken their daily meds. You cannot help them get to the bathroom (there is a famous discussion on how the simple stranger entering a place asking for directions to the bathroom is in fact a bigger introduction to deeper communication, but that's part of the pain.) Yes, lacking physical touch, but for me, digital has always been fake.

Digital will always be fake, it conveys very low trust, and is unable to transport any goods or provide really useful services, and still cannot make tea. And for those who could not work remotely the "imposter" and fake of my cushy life made me trip out on guilt early on. I had a security of my little personal zone, a luxury, which very few had, many were jobless. For someone who abhors luxury, this was very hard to process.

So I ran away.

Why?

Well because it's a complete waste of time and effort. Mental effort which has now been frustrated for some people who don't normally hold it together anyway. There was no point in going to online club meetings; meetings where you cannot give someone a lift back home afterwards; meetings where you cannot have a side conversation and meet for coffee afterwards (some exceptions exist). Meetings devoid of cookies, and meeting with no beer involved. Nobody seemed to care that this was a problem, which for me further eroded trust in the people meeting because everyone else was happy to forego one of the things I really felt was key to me. I have always felt I trusted the smart people I admire who built the communities and ran meetings. Lockdown undermined that trust. All the clever people had no answers. I quit a number of clubs, some clubs I quit frivolously, others more out of general overload. Generally nobody cares about the "person" in a digital club.

Overload

An Olympic athlete pulled out of one of her events this last week, she was not confident she could focus and complete the slightly dangerous techniques. Too much at once, in fact some clubs I abandoned were abandoned just because my bandwidth dried up. Not only do I not pay attention to postal paper mail anymore, I don't pay attention to spammers like YouTube who spam me with totally pointless content, making me feel even more isolated by the "actor" on a soap box with a fake smile that their "algorithm" forces into the foreground. Just let me be quiet, let me go back to basics, and let me do physical things, things that really do matter. This lockdown reset has prompted a lot of us to take up hobbies in cooking, crafting, gardening and more. It has even forced a lot of us to start cycling more, walking more, and make some better life choices. some of these good habits which I hope people decide to keep after this all blows over, and blow over it will. Lockdown has cut down air travel, which might be good for the re-calibration of our waste culture too.

I read this week about a few people recalling vivid dreams they have which are like the Truman Show, being in a fake world where everyone else is really a robot, and you are the only human left alive. A feeling of being continuously observed, but not in a move star kind of way observed. Guinea pig kind of observed. I used to have these thoughts once, and lockdown has triggered them again, but making me feel liked a trapped or jailed mouse. I often wonder if pets feel like they are jailed. I'm a cat lover myself, so sometimes I just wish I was a cat. Okay, forget that cat reincarnation idea, it's not that appealing unless you are a cat in a good home anyway.

Casualty

The casualties are many, and I'm not yet ready to take responsibility for ones I've created, sorry, just, sorry if this is you, find someone who is responsible to blame please.

Blame

As someone who struggles to follow even a basic math formula, I was never going to be the one who solves this blame thing. However my faith in smart people to make good choice dissolved in early 2019. A lack of honesty and even a desire to have prevented this are my foremost reasons for miss-trust of the system and of my betters. I can see how some anti-vaxers use this same line of argument against the establishment of medical professionals. It's however blindingly clear, just how weak willed politicians are, to address the real causes by minimising encroachment on wildlife and minimising climate change which is the leading cause of the encroachment problem. I'm sure that's not the only thing we would do if we could wind back time to November 2019, but now that it seems a lifetime away, it's too late. The fact that clever people give up too easily worries me. That weakness underlies a lot of anti-vax argument, which sadly is illogical.

Return

So, sadly I'll not be coming back soon. I'll come back when I'm allowed to sing and dance indoors without a mask, when I'm allowed to grab cookies from the same jar as everyone else, and without individual wrappers on foods. I'll be back when I can do physical things that make a difference, like buying you a beer, or giving you a lift. I'll be back when the people have dispensed with the bullshit and have stopped playing. Playing is fine, but just not when it's at someone else expense.

I know that nobody will ever read this, but that's fine, it's digital, so it's fake anyway.