Whether your internet efforts are driven by passion or greed, if you’re anything like me they can become all-consuming.
Hi, my name is Michael, and I’m an obsessive-compulsive.
I go too far with everything. I mean everything. If I’m into a game I can play it to the exclusion of everything but eating and sleeping until I’ve beaten it. If I am particularly fond of Korean food this month, my family can count on at least three Korean dinners a week. If there is a particular point of interest that has captured my attention I can research it for days, or months depending on what the subject is. If I like a certain band or composer, everyone else in the family will soon hate them. I’ve been sober 14 years for this reason.
This is a double edged sword. On the positive side, when I am driven, I work like a man with a fever. I am adept at collecting information and coming to an educated conclusion. I am painstakingly concerned with all the details.
On the flipside, obsession doesn’t endear you to those around you. I am distant, aloof. My mind never stops running down tangents. Those around me rightly come to believe that I don’t hear much of what they say to me.
Another problem with my flavor of hyper-focus is that I have no say in what the subject is. I can’t direct that fervor into useful endeavors, rather, I am a slave to the whims of my subconscious mind. I can just as easily waste a month of my life focused on say, Amiga emulation, as I can on something that is of benefit to myself and my family.
The point of all this:
Exactly a year ago I was sitting at the computer one day. My youngest child, two years old at the time, came to me and asked me to play with him. I shooed him away, saying that daddy had to finish his work. This was about an hour before dinner time. As I sat thinking that once I finished what I was doing we would eat, spend 30 minutes together, then go take a bath and go to sleep, I realized that I had shooed him away like that the entire day.
Then it dawned on me that the day before followed much the same pattern. And the day before. When I thought about it, I realized to my horror that the previous six months had found me so preoccupied with my internet endeavors that every day had followed that pattern.
I love my son, more than anything in the world. He’s not an abstract idea, not a puppet frozen in time, but a living, breathing miracle of creation. Every day I spend with him I learn more than by doing anything else that I would choose to distract myself with. He teaches me to be a better person every day we’re together, because spending time with your child allows you to drop all of your pretenses and defenses and remember that people and love, real, unconditional, unselfish love, are the only things that really matter in this life.
So I made the decision that instant that all this, everything that I thought was so important, wasn’t. Not in comparison to him. I scaled way back on my internet endeavors, and I have no regrets. I’m just glad that I woke up in time.
The point of this article is not to preach to all of you reading that the internet is a waste of time, false, and distracting from the things that really matter. Not at all. Just never let your peripheral pursuits destroy the things in life that are real. Make time for your internet endeavors. Never “make” time for the people that depend on you. They should always come first. This is probably obvious to most of you, but for those of you who are anything like me, wake up.
