Living my life instead of documenting it
I don’t buy everything Kimberly wrote about on this list of how social media is ruining your life, but there is some truth to some of it, like any good piece of link bait.
I’m not really interested in fisking it, I just want to focus on one part. For a while I was becoming one of those obnoxious people she mentions who constantly texts/reads and takes photos during times when I should have just been enjoying other people’s company. I’ve been working on not doing that as much, with varying degrees of success.
I think it was around the first Sex 2.0 that I realized I was spending too much time documenting my life and not enough time living it. I guess it was ironic to learn I was abusing social media at a social media conference. The event was a lot more fun than other events I’d been to because people didn’t sit around and live blog and post their photos to Flickr in real time much. They, and I, were too engaged in conversation to bother with any of that, and the experience was richer for it.
A lot has happened in my life I haven’t been writing about here. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to come back and read this years from now and wish I’d written more about one thing or another. And I very well might.
I didn’t write much about our house-hunting process. I didn’t write about our house warming party at all. I didn’t write about going to Six Flags last Saturday with some friends, other than a brief Twitter message or two.
At one point in high school when I was going to a lot of concerts I realized I was fixated on getting concert t-shirts so people would know, by golly, that I was at Nine Inch Nails or Aerosmith or whatever other band I was seeing that week that seems a little lame now. Then I realized I would have more money to go to more concerts if I didn’t spend money on souvenir t-shirts. So I left subsequent concerts with nothing but my memories to show for it, and the funny thing is I think I enjoyed the concerts more knowing ahead of time that’s all I would leave with.
Blogging about all the positive things in my life feels like that sometimes; like I’m fixated on taking a souvenir away from my good memories instead of just enjoying them as they happen and then leaving them in the past when I’m done.
I also am realizing my life probably won’t take the sweeping arch that a lot of people’s lives take, and I am at peace with this. That knowledge has caused me to focus on simple pleasures like hearing the birds chirp on my back deck, the smells of food cooked on my grill, or mowing the grass with a slight beer buzz on a Saturday afternoon. I spent four hours the other night making five tablespoons of tomato paste from scratch. None of this would make for exciting blog fodder, but it’s what I’ve come to enjoy lately.
My complaints feel trivial compared to other people’s and to my own from a few years ago, so I don’t want to weigh myself down focusing on those either.
If you’re not hearing as much from me about my life on here, that’s probably why. And I may need to point my future self back to this post if I find myself wondering why I didn’t write more.
