The past few days, I stayed home from work nursing a miserable cold. (I don’t often get sick, so this was a big deal!) I ate clementines, cereal, and ice cream and drank lots of hot tea from my Yogi Tea “Cold Season Sampler” box.
Since I was on sick leave and didn’t feel like doing anything except watch The Tudors and read Bring Up the Bodies, I allowed myself to get lost in the depths of the Internet a time or two.
And I remembered how full of nonsense the Internet is.
The Internet Is Full of Nonsense
For example, I was innocently reading an article on the Huffington post and happened to see the headline “Awkward Russian Wedding Photos Are A Whole New Level Of WTF (NSFW).” (So, since I wasn’t at work, I clicked on it.) What’s sad isn’t that somebody took the time to select these photos and write condescending remarks about them in the spirit of online humor (OK, that’s sad too), but the fact that (at the time of this writing) “164 people are discussing this article with 253 comments.” (Really?!?)
I do appreciate comments such as the following:
However, it blows my mind that so many people found that reading and commenting on this post was the most important thing they could think of doing at that given time (or maybe they were all home sick, like me!).
You Control How You Spend Your Time
I’m not trying to be all self-righteous and say don’t look at funny things on the Internet. All I’m saying is that we should all be aware how we spend our time—especially when it comes to the Internet. By being aware of your Internet usage, you are in control over how you spend your time.
When I do workshops on “how to make time for things that matter,” I remind people that the Internet is a tool. It can be used well or it can be misused. Use it to your advantage: to help you find a restaurant in a new city or to sell stuff on eBay. But don’t let it dictate how you spend your time.
(At least the website I Waste So Much Time gives you a heads-up…)
Staying Smart in a Dumbed-Down World
I often come back to the message in Lisa Bloom’s book Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World. (I think it applies to men as well). We live in a virtual world that feeds us easily-digestible bites of entertainment all day and all night. Just keeping up with pop culture could easily use up all of our free time.
But that is not the best way for us to use our time or our smarts. We deserve to be intellectually engaged, to care about what’s happening with real people in our world, and to use our talents to serve the greater good. That’s why we’re here!
P.S. Thanks for spending time reading my rant. I hope you did it with awareness.
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