It’s been many moons since my last post and a lot had to do with my continued interest in podcasting again. Well as of October 7th, 2020, I decided to call it quits on podcasting, at least for now. I did a lot of hemming and hawing before coming to that conclusion but finally decided to pull the plug on my audio diary. I decided to focus on other things in my life that didn’t allow for much time for podcasting. I also decided that if I want to podcast again sometime later, it will be a different show altogether and the audio diary route, like all of my past attempts at journals and diaries, lost its appeal to me.
Also, sadly, as I looked over my last post where I stated that I was going to be all about the iPad life, hasn’t quite come to full fruition. If anyone has been listening to my podcast, they will know of the purchase of a 2019 MacBook Pro 16-inch laptop and my plans of using it for my film major that got cut short abruptly. Consequently I just went back to using a computer for my podcasting needs and my iPad Pro became a media consumption device.
Maybe, with podcasting back on the back burner, I’ll start to blog more and try other creative things on my iPad. I’ve sadly have not done any drawing like I had initially thought I would. And now that I’m using a wireless mouse I only use the Pencil whenever the mouse isn’t able to interact with the screen the way my finger or the pencil will.
Anyways, enough of the recap, lets get to the subject of this blog post, social networks. I’ve had Facebook out of my life for 2-3 years now and I couldn’t be happier. But I was still doing the doom scrolling on Twitter and on Reddit. I also used WhatsApp b/c of others in my life that just have to use that messenger app for some reason or other. Well for almost a year, I had Twitter deleted from my device and almost never went to the website to keep up with my feed and, surprisingly, I didn’t miss it like I thought I might.
And then COVID-19 happened. I’ve become more isolated from the real world as I began to work from home. The first month I was living the sedentary life and just consuming media whenever I could. But then I finally started to exercise more regularly than I’ve had most of my life, and started doing meditation to improve my state of mind and calm any of the anxieties I was starting to feel from this forced social isolation.
I’m a social hermit and homebody by nature so being home away from the masses is nothing new to me. But I also had to interact with people at work and when I was in school and I did enjoy those moments of human interaction. I was starting to really missing those moments and tried to connect more on Reddit and Twitter but those interactions were making me feel more empty and a bit despondent. I removed the Reddit apps from my devices again and, along with meditation and exercising, I was feeling better again and noticed, like with FaceBook, I wasn’t missing those networks.
This revelation, led me to delete my Twitter account, of many many years, and my Reddit account and I haven’t felt any regret about my decision. It has been quite liberating and I’m further enjoying my completed isolated life from the world. I still have those close to me that I keep in contact with via messaging and video/audio calls. And that has sufficed.
JULIO FROM NY 