Your life without a computer: what does it look like?

…I couldn’t have typed this.

Maybe there’s more vivacity, or maybe there’s less. I haven’t seen my life without computers since elementary school. Such continuity does not rise to the level of addiction – surely not! Reflecting back on my life with computers doesn’t really do anything for me. Those thoughts do not profit me. Meaning, I am no closer to understanding eternal truths of conduct, collegiality, or canines when I unearth the opaque speculations of my life in the presence of zero computers. It doesn’t make me laugh. It doesn’t make me cry. Nor am I thrust into a fit of jonesing for something holding a semiconductor.

Coldly, I do realize how wealthy I have been. Or how long I have been in the presence of wealth. I cannot say a certain sorrow does not tinge the backdrop of the gray matter against which my synapses fire. I cannot make that claim at all. Sorrow distills within my thoughts for two reasons. One, I know I could’ve been content with much less wealth than what I was raised around. Two, the wealth and the tendrils of its manifestations – in humans, in general, in presentation – bore the lofty stench of an idol. Everyday I felt its immaterial, telepathic broadcast: “I am it. There is no other way to life. This is it – this is where I am and the everything I have bought and created by my own power. There is nothing else. To please me you must beat them all. Then you can have me forever. You will live forever.” A seductress with a vile tongue is what I found. And when I became an adult I discovered I was lied to every day. And then the product of my socialization, which my parents were so proud of, disgusted me. Parts of me to this day long for the simpler, poorer life I never had as a youth. Because I know – I know there was envious wealth within those impoverished households. Though I knew it, I could never taste it.

My life without a computer would be poorer in meaningless ways, yet richer in what is more substantial.