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I remember when Mr. Freeman series was just coming out, 14 years ago. I remember my feelings when I first saw the episode in which Mr. Freeman dares the viewer to erase own hard drive or gift away own mobile phone, claiming that doing so would be like suicide. I felt my supremacy. I knew that Mr. Freeman was mostly right, but I was different.
https://youtu.be/o1k8hJ1d8G4?t=121
Year 2010. I was a student. I had my Nokia feature phone and a laptop that saw most GNU/Linux distributions in existence. Neither of them were really defining me. You see, around that time, most of my life was real. Offline lectures and seminars in the university, meetings with friends and family, courting the girls, failing miserably at dance classes, working out with LARP club -- it all was physical, real. There were couple things I cared about, like latex sources of my thesis, but even that could have been easily recovered from paper print-outs.
As time went on, my digital backpack became slightly heavier. Interacting with the Free Software community made my email important and becoming a private lesson tutor made availability of my phone number important, but that wasn't much.
But today, as I am writing these lines, nothing in my life is physical. My friends and family are scattered across time zones and countries, and exist at best as 2D moving pictures, but usually as merely text chats. Same goes for everything else. Learning? Videos. Dating? Text chats.
Today my password manager has around 80 entries. It is really heavy. Without it -- yep, I do not exist. For years, I was stupid and ungrateful, taking luxury of my offline life for granted. It is not.
Having almost exclusively online life takes its toll. I remember myself reading Emacs Lisp reference from cover to cover around 10 years ago. I barely can focus long enough to read a manpage. Tragedy is that my $dayjob favors this low-focus mode of operation. Because remember, no time to design worthy stuff, make haste to fulfil human's whims.
I have "Digital Minimalism" and "Stolen Focus" books on my desk, and I actually read them. Some ideas were helpful, but I still feel a mere shadow of past myself. I do remember what level of focus is possible, I know what is right, but I am not capable of it anymore.
"Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport
Age? Job? Laziness? Jail? Death of Debian? Online life? I don't know, so many variables changed, but I am afraid of what is going on.