Wired and Tired

The last few months I’ve been noticing too many wires and cords scattered all over the floor of my room. Actually, they seem to be everywhere – on my bed, my desk, my cabinets and shelves, my bags. Thinking hard about it I can’t believe how they’ve come to grow in such a large number that it’s just a matter of time before I find myself tripping onto them or getting strangled by them. They’re unrelentingly ubiquitous, and it’s all because I’ve become too reliant of them.

I’m an organized person. In fact I border on obsessive-compulsiveness; I can’t sit still when I’m surrounded with clutter. I draw so much perspective and relaxation from tidying up chaos so I never consider it as a drudgery. But I don’t know what happens to me when it comes to all of these USB cords, chargers of cellphone, music player, camera and netbook, mouse, extension cords, earphones and headphones and hordes of other wires that I get stumped and can’t seem to get motivated to array them in their proper coils.

Well truth be told I know the reason why I’m the laziest of people when retreading the tangles of wires and cords of my gadgets: after using them and rolling them up each time I would have to untrundle them again, which happens countless times in a day, thanks to their chronic need for electricity and battery recharge, and it’s tiring me out big-time. The act of using them for my regular technological fix is such an endless cycle that I no longer see the point of putting them in order after every use.

I’d like to think that I’m lucid and never the whiny type, but every time I see all these wires all over the place, I can’t help but fantasize about giving up technology and just live in the wild.

This is not what life to me years ago. I was resistant of digital technology because I deemed it the foremost representation of the thing I found the most repulsive: narcissism. I particularly balked at the Internet. I was never sold to the idea of it, because I couldn’t accept how all of a sudden it became so convenient for people to sell themselves to the world. It would have been tolerable were those people (not all of them, sure) god-sent talents and did not bloom on attention, stalking and false flattery (Facebook, hello). I was a purist who held on to leads, pens, notebooks and sketchpads whenever I felt the need to chronicle my thoughts. Now look at me –  a sellout, a person who claims to abhor the Internet but actually maintains 2 other blogs about travel and photojournalism, respectively, and a channel in Youtube for my forays in documentary. But no, I’m not ashamed to admit that yes, I’ve become the very person I dreaded to become, a hypocrite, a narcissist: a slave to technology. And I only have my own self to blame.

“A human being: a creature who claims to love trees and hates them getting cut, but writes on the very paper made from trees.”

My priorities in life are 20-20 clear. I know myself and where I’m headed. But sometimes when I look at these wires that have taken a significant part of my life I can’t help but worry about myself. I feel like I have allowed myself to get corrupted. Do I really need technology to be able to express myself? Do I really need an audience for my works? What’s up with the burning need to be known, liked, accepted? I grew up to the school of thought that people have to work hard in order to attain success, and not through a few clicks on a mouse. Sometimes I’m beginning to suspect that deep inside me I’m probably harboring this dirty little secret of wanting to be recognized for whatever creativity I pour out there. I can agree that there’s nothing wrong with that, and I don’t take it against other people if that’s how they operate their lives. Who wouldn’t want to be acknowledged for their hard work, right? But when it comes to me getting “recognized”.. I don’t know. It just feels weird to me. I’d rather that the story gets read and the author be left alone with her pen and paper.

This is not supposed to be me, this girl who goes to school, work and trips with her bag full of gadgets and their wires, the very wires that tie her down and render her immobile. Because if you’re going to ask me if I’ll be able to drop digital technology at this point, I don’t think I’ll be able to do so. At least not yet. Because it has become part of me. The monsters under the bed have come out and made themselves privy to me.

This is one of the reasons why I plan to leave and spend my whole life traveling and backpacking. I want to strip myself of the toxic baggages and be far removed from material possessions. I’m exhausted of things that are nothing but passing trends, of the comfort of routine, and of the cyber people who do nothing but play safe and be on a constant lookout for approval, approval, approval. I can’t wait to just travel because by then I won’t be carrying anything with me other than basic necessities, and that all that I’d be preoccupied with are exposing myself to different cultures and challenges, building genuine friendships, getting to witness breath-taking sceneries without storing their images to any memory card but my mind and heart. I’m looking forward to living a life bursting with simplicity, wisdom and charity, and love and romance and enlightenment on the road less traveled, where I’ll be a nameless individual who will not need to rely on labels, flowery stature and societal permission to know how it is to be truly alive.

Without technology that will tirelessly bug me to document everything so I could update the world what I’m up to.

I heard that Steve Jobs of Apple is currently on a mission to make the world wireless by creating products that, well, don’t have wires and cords. Oh yeah? Fantastic. And now a friend of mine is asking me why I always say that I live in a cave, and that I’ll always live in one.