This post retroactivly became part of February’s Indie web carnival hosted by Manu on digital relationships.
I have a confession to make that’s long overdue. Something that’s been building up inside of me and is slowly tearing my soul apart. It’s time for me to come out. I am a chronic internet lurker.
But it wasn’t always like this. I used to have online friends back in the day when I played Minecraft every waking hour. We used to talk on Teamspeak, play together and we were actually a part of the server community as a whole. At that time I also had a (very) active YouTube channel where I… did um😅… daily Minecraft videos. Me and my friend even made memes about and kik:ed other bigger YouTubers (yes, in a creepy stalky way). I engaged in the forums and there are many old embarrassing tweets on my account from 2015 and before. Safe to say I was not a lurker but rather an active member of my little online community.
Maybe it was the onset of teenage angst, the changing nature of the internet or I just drifted away from the community, but my level of online engagement has drastically dropped. These days I only leave fragments, the occasional Instagram picture, an update to my website that no one notices, or a weird POV cooking video with Have a Nice Life music. My being is no longer present in cyberspace but my ghost still lingers, drifting through obscure internet niches without ever stopping long enough to materialize. I am desperately craving a missing community but am never satisfied.
What I am slowly coming to realize is that there is a mismatch in pace between my conceptions of real life vs. internet. Everything online seems to be moving at incredible speeds, everyone eerily productive with aesthetics that ensnare and overload my mind’s processor around every corner. But that is only the top of humanity’s iceberg and the poison that mainstream apps like Instagram uses to numb their victims.
Truth is all of this elusive aetherly content comes from a reeal slow cooking pot. People are only doing their own thing, at their own pace. After joining a couple discords of online creators I like, it is apparent that their creations do not come out of nowhere. A third place, breeding ground for ideas and experiments, where not only the shiniest trinkets are presented, but the mud and grit of regular human life, is probably the ingredient my online body is missing.
So I will try this, starting here, to put myself out there. Express myself and endure the cringe of it, speaking my mind even if I am not sure about what it will say. Maybe if I cry out into the nothingness, the fog will disappear.
Sincerely thank you for reading. I really appreciate it and I would also love to hear what you have to say!
To message me, use the message command (type help message) in my terminal page, or simply:
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