Tuesday, June 17, 2014

I wondered aloud to the Professor, a few weeks ago, whether my perceived increase in sociability may have been delusional, all along. Perhaps, I said, I had merely honed a suite of social skills and thereby donned the trappings of normality, when in fact my core remained unchanged since the mid-aughts. He assured me this wasn’t the case, but I’m not so certain.

I think the truth lies somewhere in between: I have changed, just not nearly to the degree I’d like. I retook the Myers-Briggs test a few months back, horseshit as it may be, and I’ve switched from an “I” to an “E.” I feel different, too–a heightened capacity for interaction, for instance, and general ease with people. A lot of this recent crisis of confidence, I realized, may be a result of online burnout. There’s been too much interaction–overstimulation from every outlet.

There’s the lurking presence of my still-new smartphone, with its chirping text strings and constant conduits to everything. Invitations from strangers await in my LinkedIn account–preludes to sales pitches for services I neither want nor need at the moment. There’s the crush of feeds and questions from not one, not two, but three online dating sites. What I need–and what I’ve started–is a kind of electronic cleanse.

It began, ironically, because one electronic outlet was cannibalizing another. I found myself annoyed when a new message would hit my Gmail and, rather than being an anticipated notice from Match or OkCupid, turned out to be spam instead. This was spam I had requested, too, but suddenly, strangely, I was unsubscribing from lists left and right. No more Kickstarter notices. No more eBay updates. I bought CD-Rs from a vendor once and only once, maybe over a decade go, and faithfully stayed on their mailing list–until now. Haven’t logged into LinkedIn much, either, and it’s felt great. Next week, I’ll be meeting Charlotte friends every day of the week, completely offline and face-to-face–the break I need, perhaps, and a truer test of sociability.