On a clear day, when I squint really hard and pay real close attention, I can see the age of 40 looming in the distance.  It’s still quite far away, but one has to make adjustments as soon as one wants to start coping with it.   Some call it “midlife crisis”.  In cliches and stereotypes, it involves fast cars, earrings, tattoos and younger women, but I have no interest in any of those.  I also don’t consider it a crisis, it’s more of a well thought out set of changes and actions that I want to implement in my life, and it’s also not midlife.  I’m not planning to only live until 80.  Eighty’s not enough when you think about what’s coming.

One of the realisations I’ve come to over the last few months, is that I’ve succumbed to the same trap that a lot of people from my generation have succumbed to, which enables you to replace real friendship and real relationship with the digital pretence of, with short, curt exchanges of pleasantries, often amounting to clicking on a preset icon, of flipping quickly through the lives of others, feeling gratitude, shared joy, shared grief, shared anger, in short bursts, and alone.

So I’ve decided to significantly reduce my dependency on social media, in which my footprint is not that large anyway.  I occasionally visit Facebook and Twitter, and have signed on to a few channels in Telegram, and that’s pretty much it.  The changes, then, are not going to be earth shattering.  I am quitting Facebook – shutting down my account after putting whatever affairs I have there in order.  Twitter and Telegram will stay intact for the time being, primarily because I mostly consume updates from more distant people there.  But decisions will be made about who I choose to follow and why – changes have to be made in those platforms as well.

Which brings me here.  Which brings you here.  If you’ve chosen to follow up on whatever it is I’m doing here, this will be my main web presence.  A single place, containing the majority of my thoughts on things, or those that I dim important enough and not too self indulgent, to share with the world.  If and when there will be content that I produce, which feels more at home somewhere else (like music on Bandcamp, for example), it will be linked from here.

I don’t imagine I’ll set foot in the social media realm again, once I fully quit it, unless the whole concept changes (I’ve heard the words “peak social media” thrown around in a podcast.  I’ll wait for that.) – so you should expect to find me here.