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When I was a kid in the 90's I really enjoyed the internet. I would surf the web, get into long conversations on napster's chat rooms, and generally wiled away my time playing console emulators and old DOS shareware games because it's all my PC was capable of running. My brother, friends, and other family would gather to play family feud on the C64 or watch pro wrestling every week, and life was good. Even my burgeoning tech nerd interests had a very social component. When I wasn't learning how to build websites or looking up obscure internet trivia (or feeding my Neopets) I'd imagine my future - all the books I'd read, games I'd play, and fun I'd have. It was a hopeful vision, and although I knew in an abstract sense there'd be more to growing into a full adult life (finding a job, starting a family, etc) that was how I saw at least my leisure time, and best of all I'd have the resources and independence to make it happen.
For a time in my post-college days this sort of worked, although by then myspace and later facebook siphoned off much of my appetite for what I wanted from the internet. Gone was the chatroom and forums posting, researching any interesting topic I came across, and being exposed to new ideas + media to engage with, and in retrospect I can confidently say what replaced it was seeking engagement and validation from my list of 'friends'. The pretense of sharing my life online opened up but did not satisfy a desire to know and be known by people on the internet. I have since, in stages, accepted that not only was this a false promise, but also a disordered desire on my part. Swapping out the peer to peer conversational medium of pre-social-media online gathering spaces for a 'look at me' gallery where the object of engagement is one person's content and only the reactions of others was never going to work out.
To put it another way, facebook would have been a mistake even if it was 'perfect'. Even without the endless scroll feed and proliferation of sponsored content it was still a pit I fell into that supplanted the mutual exchange of the web I enjoyed with a slow-drip cycle of waiting for someone to respond to my content. Of course, facebook degenerated further and I recently decided to finally give up on it. Even as a feed for memes and semi-interesting (in a time wasting way) videos it was problematic and eventually I got tired of trying to escape the barrage of overly sexual advertisements. Just because I'm a man in the US between 18 and 55 doesn't mean I'm interested in AI sex chat bots and lewd anime.
Getting off the platform was easy enough, but now I'm faced with the real issue. I've decided to pivot hard away from this type of content, to include youtube and basically every way I've interacted with the internet for the past 20 years, but have also come to realize that the problem runs deeper than social media. I have this hope that somewhere out there is the one-time dream future of my youth, but I'm beginning to identify a fundamental problem that keeps me from finding something I can enjoy. It's not enough to re-watch Dragonball Z, what I was really looking for was the simple enjoyment of that time in the afternoon after school but before dinner and homework. Catching more Pokemon on my gameboy isn't going to reconnect me with that love of video games, it was the battling and trading and showing off to friends that I was missing. Everything I might do again, I've done before, and the time + place of my life that I hold that fondness for has passed. Without my only friend in our teenage friend group with a car to drive me to the store to pick up a new album, the music is just noise.
I'm 36 now, and in the essentials my life is a blessed one. I have my faith and family, 4 young children, a stable career, and the basic necessities of life. But why can't I find that simple enjoyment of the things I used to? Or instead, of anything new? The kids go to bed, my work in my career and personal life is finished for the day, and there's money left over after the bills. The time and the means are available, it's only me that's not. It seems like a silly problem, I have the big things figured out well enough, but my leisure time is a mystery. Whether as cause or effect, I don't feel like I can let go of that nagging voice that says X isn't worth my time, my freely given and properly prioritized time to do just anything fun and find peace in something that doesn't take work from me. I need restful activity and have found that nothing gives me that anymore.