An Essay

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It’s a little off-synch to be born on a cusp. For me this means being neither all Pisces nor Aries, having contradictory traits from both.

This is the same way I feel about being one of those from a generation born on the cusp of the social media age. Unlike children born in the 2000s who use i-Pads as chew toys, I’ve tasted what life was like when you could just hide away and not be found. When an ex-partner really meant someone was crossed out and often never heard from again. When people had to talk to each other to receive news or pass the time during long car rides.

I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if we had remained in this simpler, quieter type of existence.

These days, I’m attached to my smart phone soon after I wake up to the time I close my eyes at night. It greets me in the morning with emails from work colleagues, hellos from far-away friends, and weather forecasts across continents. At night, before I dream, I travel to edges of the world with family members on vacation, bookmark a recipe I will probably find no time to cook, or glimpse the latest motor skill developments of my friends’ children.

It’s certainly a voyeuristic way of life; one that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to disconnect from because everyone around me lives the same way and to escape from it would only mean one hundred questions and an extreme shift in daily routine. It’s pretty clear that since I’m writing this online, I’m a full-fledged member of this social media machine.

But I can’t help wishing, just once in a while, that we could all time travel back to a period when the blinds were shut and the only life we could view daily was our own.