A Half Retreat

Not sure how much sense this makes, but there are times when I want to blow everything up. Shut down the blog, quit coding, quit working, delete my Twitter, my Facebook, my Quora, my Dribbble, everything, and retreat. To a cabin, to a shack, maybe. Maybe just to somewhere deep in the recesses of my own mind. Because there I can be safe and know that any responsibility I have is to myself; and there are no requirements, no social contracts, no notifications, or pokes, or bugs, or customers, and everything is easy. I wish things were easy more often. Why can’t they be?

I’ll check my phone less often, email less too. Delete some apps, contemplate life. A half retreat, to the battlements where old world vanguards are now barely finding footing. I’ll tell them tales of this world, where everything’s alive, and present, and there, all the time. Where nothing ever rests, but piles up and shatters you. I’ll tell them to retreat also. And then I’ll go back. This island was better when no one was on it. First planes crashed in aimless search, and then tourists came, and then houses were built, and the volcano erupted. We retreated, to the shore, to the reef, to the ocean, as the tide washed us ashore again.

Connect your social networks. Program them to do what you want. Like Automator for the web. Take control.

"In spite of the opportunity for suggested and implied depth, it seems there’s a constant pressure to reduce others so that we can maintain the precarious balance of managing the minutia of hundreds of people at once."

Susan Orlean - “Problems

It’s not often I hear so much truth packed into one sentence.