There’s a section on this website that I have desperately been
wanting to put into words. I was going to call the webpage
“sentiment”. I never ended up publishing it because the subject
matter I was writing about had me changing my opinion on it too
many times for me to concisely write down something coherent which
reflected my beliefs.
It wasn't really a controversial and daunting topic to write
about. It was more of a means of venting about my current opinion
on everything around me, about the ever-changing world in the 21st
century, the media I consume, the media I don't consume, the
technology around me, and what it means to connect with people. It
wasn't really just about sentiment, it was about everything on my
mind I wanted to get out into the world.
By the time I was halfway through writing it, I extensively
rewrote the first paragraph, because I thought I was sounding too
different to what I was initially conveying. But, upon rewriting
that, the entire entry ended up sounding like some drawn-out
incomprehensible rant with no flow. When I read it, and really
reflect on what was written, I always mentally ask myself, "What
exactly do you want?" I've got a lot of weird frustrations. Not
really any kinds of serious ones, but just specific ones. It's
awfully common to be fed up with things and the way how they are,
but when it's out of control, the frustrations kind-of evolve into
these ever-changing amalgamations of hyper-fixated beliefs on
minute things.
Let's take a retrospective of this website and what exactly it
means to me.
Before moving to Neocities, I was a pretty semi-typical
Generation Z internet-child that spent half of their childhood in
front of bright colors and content on-demand. I was in internet
communities, actively participated in internet meme "culture",
and played some video games. I was on all kinds of social media. I
was active. Constantly active. The internet could give me instant
gratification from my actions. I cannot tell if I was really happy
in this era, but I was for certain content, but not in the
peaceful sense. More-so just positively accepting of what was
around me and what I was doing.
When I moved my website to Neocities, my mindset had begun to
slowly change. I was beginning to see the internet in a more
apathetic mindset. Internet memes weren't funny, content was
reproduced, and music was shit. I still stuck around my "beloved"
internet communities and my general activity online, since they
gave me a means of talking to people through a screen. I was
beginning to gradually just get really unsatisfied with the
internet and how it was dictating society
Six months later or so, I was now giving up on my activity
online. I ghosted myself to the public internet community I was so
very active in. It was a Discord server, so people either
immediately notice my drop in activity, or carried on not knowing
about my presence. I stuck around the private chats, but the
public chats were becoming this screeching chalk board of kids
likely younger than the required age to join Discord that
constantly spammed the most mind-numbing stuff you'd ever witness.
I felt a little happy going quiet there, and still being able to
stick around the private chats with my friends. Along with this, I
slowly began to decrease my activity on social media, and began
deleting and privatizing older posts that I made. Activity was
going down in general, and it turn, I began to focus on this
website a lot more.
Summer of '22 comes, and my social media was now looking like
they've been abandoned. I change my usernames, delete all my
posts, and start manually unfollowing a lot of people I once knew.
I leave many internet communities as a whole, even the ones that
were tied to my interests. I was really beginning to get somewhat
annoyed with some people I knew on the internet and had an urge to
get rid of them from my life.
One of those internet communities was the aforementioned Discord
server. Between '19 to '21, I had an incessant attachment to the
community. I had given three years of my life to that rather
moderately sized community. I made connections, yes, but I was
never fulfilling myself anything worthwhile. To be fair, this was
an era of my life where I had a limited social life and was
ever-so thirsty for any kind of interaction, so my mind was
susceptible to this need. Particular moments between those years
had me quite literally spending eight hours a day with my back
hunched over like an old man sitting at my computer screen
speedily typing some stupid one-liner phrases that would get
thrown into a sea of fifty users sending their own stupid
messages. I think I had gotten to realize that none of this was
worthwhile. I never got anything beneficial from being so active
that I became a rather recognizable name in the community, because
as soon as you leave that desk and walk out into the real world,
you were still the same dork that you were before you joined that
community.
I was pretty fed up.
Out of a pure need to get something more out of my life, that's
when I left all of those online communities and abandoned and
deleted all of those social media profiles. I thought that maybe
by doing this, I would feel a lot happier about being myself. I
would focus on my endeavors without an audience. I'd keep to
myself, and try to make connections with real people, not through
a screen. I looked back at my childhood and feel a bit fed up
that that was how I spent it, and I still am. When parents
say that you won't make memories from your childhood in front of a
screen, take that for granted. There are certain parts of me
growing up, in particular my later years, where I cannot remember
a single thing worthwhile that I did.
Heading into Fall '22, I stopped looking at my phone. I stopped
browsing the web mindlessly. I tried to focus on my interests a
lot more. Because I know that whenever I had an urge to peek
around the corner, I would feel an immediate sense of dread.
Nothing on the front page of Reddit would make me happy, anything
that anyone sent me in a chat, or any piece of internet content
that was publicly posted. Only some thing I cared about, but as a
whole, it was a generally depressing landscape, and it got more-so
like that the more I didn't look. I thought that by refraining
from this kind of behavior, I would initially feel a greater sense
of happiness in the world around me when I factor in my newfound
ignorance.
At first, I did feel like a lot of weights were lifted off of my
chest. I could focus on things that mattered to me. By using
Neocities a lot more, I could at least make my single mark on the
internet something sentimental that could connect with
people. It'd be a way to creatively convey myself as an internet
user. No bounds, no restrictions. Just me and no one else.
With a newfound urge to now connect with people through a means
that mattered to me, I joined my campus's radio station. To be
fair, I had wanted to join it for a long time by that point, but
now I could with a great drive striving me. Upon joining, I met so
many people that I can now safely and highly regard as friends. A
whole new sea of people, that despite having a lot of different
tastes, all connected by a means that we loved music in our own
way, shape, and form. Through that, I could broadcast myself
through a means of analog signals, bouncing waves across an
atmosphere where it could finally reach someone's car or home
radio. I could introduce people to music that I loved, whether
it'd be some post-hardcore band that existed a decade before I
did, or a alt-rock band that were the talk of their scene in '99.
I really dug older music, but nothing classical. Lets put it as...
music that existed five years before I was born. I had a weirdly
deep personal connection to this kind of music.
I had began to amass collections of physical media and things.
CDs were adorning my shelves, and blank CD-Rs were sitting on my
desk ready to be burnt. Being a DJ, I preferred using CDs over
some streaming service. I also had a car that had a CD player, and
my crappy aux couldn't take my iPod in well. I also did give up a
lot of streaming in favor of buying music outright and owning it,
hence where my iPod comes in. I started taking more photographs,
and getting prints of them. I bought more clothes. Cheap thrift
store stuff, nothing incredibly daunting in price. I wasn't a part
of the wave of people popularizing thrift stores, I kind of went
to get specific kinds of jeans and button-up shirts.
I really began to focus on art as a whole. I took up an interest
in specific photographers. I never really liked a set-style or
genre of photography, I mostly just focused on photos that I
liked. With this, I began to look outward to other forms of art in
general and took it more seriously. Not even just art, but
reading. Journaling. Expressing oneself. A lot of consideration
into the mind.
With all of this in mind, you may think that I fulfilled myself
in changing my lifestyle to what I wanted, out of my own haste and
distaste.
Nevertheless, I still ask myself, "What do I want?"
I still end my days with an ever-present grudge. I still feel
unhappy. I still feel a sense of unfulfillment. I'm not living up
to my mindset. It's not a sense of feeling hate for myself. I just
don't understand it. I think I do? I'll explain further.
I have a strong sense of fondness and admiration for the days
before me. The quiet internet, the screaming electron tubes, the
cars with radios, the lack of social media. I love those days. I
wanted to live them. I think I was unconsciously trying to be
living those days in '22. I tried to quiet my life down in a loud,
loud world. It's impossible when it feels like it's screaming in
the back of your head. I don't even have "FOMO", rather the
opposite of it, and yet I still never end up missing out, because
the world is so loud that someone's going to tell you what you've
missed out on, no matter how much you want to miss out.
I never lived in the days before me, and sometimes I feel the need
to shut down my admiration. I look at the past through a
rose-tinted telescope. Like the phrase, "rose-tinted
shades", you look at something with a ignorantly positive
perspective, despite an ever-present negative side to it.
Combining that with the object of a telescope, and you get the
best way I can describe how I feel like I am looking at the past.
When you look at something through a telescope, be it a far-away
planet, you can see the minimal details of it, as if you're there
(almost), but you're really not. I'm looking at the past from a
far away perspective, through a rose-tinted outlook that wants to
put things in a way that you prefer and admire about it. You never
experienced it. I do say past specifically. I'm not going
to say a specific decade or small set of years, because I feel
like this notion can apply to everyone with every era from the
past. We're all susceptible to the rose-tinted telescope, because
we're all human. We like things. We want things to be seen in way
we like them to. We like eras, and want to live every bit of our
lives in them, despite adversity, and general inexperience. Just
look at the '50s as a whole! That was certainly a shitshow of
oppression from every minority in America, but we see it the
singing and dancing Hollywood-ized black-and-white tiled diner,
drinking soda pop with your highschool crew. I don't think I
really need to explain this point in detail.
I feel like I need to realize I live in the year 2022. I just
need to be content again, and stop trying to seek out a preferred
life I cannot and can never acquire. I don't, however, need to put
myself back in the internet limelight like how I once used to. I
can change the things I can control, but not try to seek out
something more from my lifestyle change. It's not like the world
changes when I do. To answer my question: what I do want is a
preferred way of life that I can try to imagine. A weird
pseudo-utopia that can only exist in dreams. One where life is
much quieter and more focused on the individual. I need to subside
this want, because I know damn well that I can never achieve it.
The one thing I can exempt from this grand
emotion I feel is my participation in radio station. That's the
one thing in my life right now I feel truly happy about, the one
thing I feel like I fulfilled so much with. I'm very glad I
connected with people through that place.
I wrote this up in an hour and a half at
midnight. Ignore any mistakes, I didn't bother proofreading this
and just uploaded it onto the website.