A Meditation exercise on using the web

The purpose of this exercise is to understand how the web affects our sense of well being as well as our connection to others.

The web is a tool and a fabulous one at that. 

But like all tools we can use it in ways that make our lives easier and more pleasant or we can overuse it to the point where it causes us pain.

Taking care of administrative matters, booking travel, buying things we need, keeping up with friends, directory service are all ways in which the web is extraordinarily useful. It saves us time, headache and hassle.

But things like blogs, video sharing websites, social networks have limited value. 

More importantly it is easy to use the web to enhance our sense of disposability which in the long run will prevent us from establishing that deeper sense of being and deeper sense of connection with others that is necessary for us to feel whole and complete. We human beings are social creatures and without this connection we will be miserable. 

Firstly set one day aside to measure your web use. If possible keep a counter handy. Give it a click every time you hit a web page.  Just how high is this number?

How much information did you process and how much of it was in any way useful to your life?

Do you have your own site? Do you post videos or comments on websites? If you do, now keep a count of how many times you return to a particular site to see how many people have responded to what you posted. Do you read and re-read the comments? 

As human beings we know we exist by our interactions with other people. Every time someone responds to what we wrote its like getting a validation that we exist, like being slipped a mood enhancer.    But we can only handle so much validation in a day, our body has the capacity to receive only so much.

When we get our validations from interactions with random people on the web we waste our store of allowed validation.  These kinds of validations are of low value.   They have no history associated with them and no social contract that goes with that.  They are disposable,  easy come easy go.  The social contract - including our responsibilities and commitments to others (including our work) -  is from where we get our sense of fulfillment.   This is who we are and nothing else can work in the same way.

At first this disposability can feel great. After all we can write and post what we want and if we don’t like what someone says we can just block them or tune them out.  

But after a while we feel something is missing.  We have a limited store of validations we can accept in any given day and we have accepted these disposable  validations in lieu of the validations that come bound to a social contract.  At the same time we have gotten used to the constant stream of little mood enhancers and feel uncomfortable when they don’t come.

As convenient as it is to flake out on things, block out that what we don’t like, this is a double edged sword.  It is awkward and hurtful when it happens to us.  We loose our sense of commitment, our bond between people we care about and eventually end up treating ourselves as disposable.  

As a meditation exercise do this simple task for a couple of weeks.  Avoid posting or responding to things on the web unless they are of absolute necessity.   If you post a comment/new content post it and then forget about it.  If the urge comes to check up on responses to your comments or other peoples comments simply draw your attention to your breath. Watch the impulse come and go.  It will go eventually.  At first it might sting as your body gets used to not having a constant stream of mood enhancers being piped into its system.  After a while you will start to feel lighter and more focussed.  At the end of the day take a half hour to speak to someone you care about, with whom your history matters. Let the conversation be what it is. If it is difficult let it be difficult and keep going.

See how you will feel after just a couple of weeks.