The Internet and the Jury of the Mind

I hope you'll forgive some loose language and a certain amount of literary flourish here.

I was reflecting today on the psychological differences between my contemporary self and my younger selves. One factor that drew my attention was that, for some time now, I often don't feel entirely in one place. When I was younger my mind was settled inside the room I was in, or the general vicinity. I recall how much easier it was to forget that someone was mad at me, or upset with me, or that I had done something embarrassing, because once I got away from them physically it became much easier to distance myself mentally. Out of sight, out of mind was much more automatic back then.

But for quite some time now, beginning I don't know when, and plausibly shifting in nature and intensity over time, I have had a jury in my head. Sometimes it feels like the whole human species is in there, all who have ever been and ever will be, moment by moment judging my thoughts and behaviors and inclinations.

I suspect that a contributing factor to this, although likely not the only one, is the rise of the internet broadly and social media specifically. I often liken social media sites to cities, with our profiles being the apartments. Or one could liken the whole of the internet to a massive city, some of it glittering and bright and some of it covered in a foot of the most rancid, putrescent slime you can imagine. It baffles me how casual people are about letting children wander aimlessly about this city without an adult accompanying them, but that's a different post. The point is, and I am hardly the first to make this observation, that we sort of all live in these cities. We live here and there. In the real world other people are separated by distance. We can't always see each other or talk to each other. But the internet allows us to, digitally, always be close to each other. I can talk to anyone at any time on social media. My phone is a window into a massive apartment block where none of us ever really leave our apartments and the walls are thin enough that we hear a lot of what's going on with each other.

This lack of distance creates, in me at least, a kind of sense of the immediacy of the presence of other people. The connectedness is wonderful, in some senses, but it always sort of means that I'm spread out. I'm here and there. I'm in Canada watching the wildfires, I'm in Congress watching bills be voted on, I'm at the houses of innumerable people on Twitter (sorry X) all arguing with them, I'm at the Sistine Chapel and Stonehenge and Machu Picchu, I'm at school with John and Hank Green, I'm at a sketch comedy show with the cast of Dropout. I'm in so many places I'm barely in my living room at all. It is an amazing power to be in all these places and witness all these things. However, the consistency of it, day in and day out, makes me feel like Bilbo, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

I'm doing it right now too. I'm imagining talking to all of you. I'm imagine sitting in a room with you saying all these things. But you’re not here.

Obviously “disconnect from internet sometimes” is hardly groundbreaking as an idea, but I'm having more clarity on exactly why that might be a good idea.