Housekeeping 2017

Here are things that I usually only share with the email tribe, but:

Hard Lesson in the Land of Credit Cards

Credit card companies are amazing at legally winning.

I’m not about to rescind my months of preaching about the amazingness of free flights. Oh hell naw.

I’m just want to reinforce what I’ve said many times:

Why Bouncing Back Is A Myth

(This post is a follow up to How Bossy People Ruin Lives, and will make best sense if read sequentially.)

When I finally crushed my own soul by pulling the plug on a relationship in which I’d literally invested everything — emotionally, financially, geographically, socially — I thought, “Holy shit that was hard. But it was that or live the rest of my life a depressed zombie. Probably just a few weeks”¦ okay, maybe a month or two until I’m ”˜over it’ and finally back to my normal self.”

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Why Hitting Bottom Might Have Been Karma

My slow fall from being The Woman I Always Wanted to Be to Depressed Internet Zombie all started when I followed (hopefully for the last time!) my abhorrent romantic habit that Meg Jay advocates against — just choosing whoever is choosing you.

In all other arenas of life, for better or worse, I’d always been a steamroller on a path of my carefully calculated preference. In matters of the heart, however, my lack of interest in romance and my unhealthy Catholic-girl-people-pleasing made for an unfortunate combination.

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How the Internet Tricks You Into Wasting Your Life

Before zooming in to figure out how yours truly fell victim to internet addiction after years of avoidance, I thought it best to read up on how others succumbed.

What are the causes of internet addiction? Why are so many people so regularly clicking and scrolling more-or-less against their will? What are the known patterns? How does internet addiction function — mentally, chemically, and physically? Within those variables, where is the variation? Where are the opportunities to flout the mechanisms?

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What Quitting the Internet Was Like – Part II

This is the second half of a two-part series.

Part I includes:

The Addict Just Before Rehab
Day One: Withdrawal
Day Two: Joke is On Me

Nightmare + the Itch

Proof of the internet’s power? On Day 3 of no-internet, after a 5 a.m. stroll with my walking buddies, my eyelids begged me for another hour of sleep. Despite my delirium, my urge to hop on the computer for a quick dopamine hit still ranked highest. On my pillow, disgust for the internet’s influence carried me off to Sleepville.

An hour later, I woke in a panic.

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What Quitting the Internet Was Like – Part I

In late September, disgust overwhelmed me as I tried to run this website the way you’re “supposed” to.

To avoid my unethical to-do list, I defaulted to a Pavlovian interaction with all things internet, which left me in an exhausting cycle of internet addiction.

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How to Quit the Internet

I decided on pretty short notice that I was going to quit the internet. (Here’s why.)

I’m basically doing a techno-version of ‘sober October.’ No email, no Facebook, no Messenger, no Twitter, no blogging, no research, no Amazon orders, no TED talks, no binge reading interesting articles and clickbait listicles.

I’ll definitely come back to email. Come November, I’ll need to pay my October credit card balance online.

The rest?

We’ll see.

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Why I’m Quitting the Internet

You know that “How would you live your life differently if you had 10 million dollars” question?
My answer hasn’t wavered for six years.
Until yesterday.