Net silence.... Painful bliss

Cellular phones, for those born in the late nineties you call them smart phones now, why do they mess with our lives so much? Well if you ever lived through the stone age then you remember a few things.

1. You couldn't arrange a spur of the moment meet and if so you had to call each other through pay phones.
2. Someone who didn't want to be found couldn't be found but you could also not be warned of rapid unfolding events.
3. No texting. See that moment you are in an event or get bored and you just want to talk to someone miles away, well you couldnt back then and had to do something useful like read a book.

There are loads of other stuff that you could do with cell phones but I realized that you have just given away your freedom. Opening up your wn little world to the outside world is basically letting hourly get controlled by other people's whims. I dont think i have ever told you guys what my day job is, I am in sales which means i am literally tethered to my phone. I consume atleast two full charges of my phone every single day and use hundreds of talk time minutes making calls and even more receiving calls. With that kind of use comes the side effects. Taking a moment to read a book is now a thing of the past with every moment your hands are free being used to type away a text or scrolling through your instagram feed. 

So what did I do as an experiment? Well after one of those long days out and about I got home and downloaded an app on my phone that essentially gave every call a "Line Busy" message then quietly posts a notification on my phone to call the person back if need be. With that I experienced two hours of absolute peace, I found 26 missed calls from 9 different people but pure bliss. It was a state of mind I had experienced years ago but did not know of its importance until I lost it. 

I wrote the first part of this blog post some time ago but this next part is more recent.

I have now lived almost exactly 60 hours without an Internet connection, access to phone calls or even text messages. This Is what I think caged animals feel like and just before you ask ,I only published this post after I found some connection much later. During the last 60 hours, I have listened to music, watched movies from a tiny CRT tv that has a color problem. I have walked streets, met new family members, worked out, taken pictures and everything else that you could ever think of doing in a foreign country. Took a few time lapses and google street views as well so all in all I am bouncing off the walls. What have I learned so far? The addiction is real and it's pretty bad, so bad so that I feel withdrawal symptoms. When a drug addict is weaned off the drugs it's a painful process, so much so that you are better off having a medical professional supervising the whole process. I however do not have someone to watch me during my descent into madness. What have I learned during this process? I can't function as I did during the dark times of our childhood when the Internet wasn't readily accessible. Knowledge is power and access to the knowledge the Internet holds is the power that I enjoy. The hundreds of people you could communicate with at the touch of a button will go on without you. The simplest of all, the basic functions of life that I used net connectivity to accomplish I had to accomplish myself. The constant barrage of data that I had to plow through on a daily basis is non existent, no checking my phone and finding hundreds of notification that are basically useles to my daily functions. All that I tell you may seem like a nightmare but I have come to understand its benefits. I will be landing back in Nairobi in the next 37 hours and I know not if I want to go back to "being connected" all I know is that this is painful bliss.