From Curious to Compulsive: Searching, the Internet, and Me

Let’s be serious: the Internet is AWESOME.

BASK IN IT.

I love the Internet! It has everything I could ever want or need. I can go to Amazon.com right now, purchase this disturbing-yet-adorable Hello Kitty Pillowcase (not to mention a pillow to go inside), and and find myself snoring and drooling all over it in a matter of days. Or maybe I’ve had a riff stuck in my head for days, and I can’t place it, but I know the earworm will never leave unless I find this one specific song and just listen to it, so I Google the only words I can clearly remember, and behold – the first search result gives both the title and artist of the song that’s been pestering me since last Thursday. Then I can just hop over to YouTube and watch the video, or I can use Pandora or Spotify to find similar music. Suddenly, I’m awash in nostalgia, listening to the songs that remind me of sticky summer days spent riding my bike and eating Popsicles on my stoop – and the entire journey took less than 10 minutes. If this isn’t living in the future, then I don’t know what is.

Great Scott!

The future itself has always been a bit of a nebulous concept for me. Whereas my friends seem to have career/marriage/family goals, I’ve sort of ambled around post-college, half-heartedly trying one thing, then another, then something else. Maybe that makes me a slacker, or a free spirit, or a shiftless degenerate, but the question “Where do you see yourself in five years?” usually catches me with a deer-in-the-headlights look before I finally choke out a hesitant answer somewhere along the eloquent lines of “Uh…alive?” I mean, first things first, right?

So far, so good.

I’ve never had an answer to that question, or its even more existentially sinister cousin, “What do you want to do with your life?” You know what I want to do with my life? I want to live well, love hard, die old, and be remembered as the kind of person who would never ask other people such douchey fucking questions about their life goals.

GOSH!

If anything comes even close to being a “life goal” for me, it is my nigh-insatiable desire to know. I want to know everything about everything, so the Internet has been both awesome and terrible for me. On the awesome side, I can indulge my inner pop culture nerd with the trivia sections on the Internet Movie Database and read informative and insightful critiques of movies, TV shows, and music at sites like the A.V. Club. As of yesterday, I have a Codeacademy account and have thus far managed to cobble together this animation of Kanye West’s head orbiting Nicolas Cage’s head using HTML and CSS. I met my boyfriend on Reddit, and we were able to plan our three-day long cross-country move from Dayton, Ohio to Seattle, Washington using Google Maps – and never once got lost or made a wrong turn thanks to the GPS function on our mobile phones.

This left more time for important things, like sing-a-longs.

On the terrible side, the Internet is a bottomless pit, one whose limitless depths I find far too easy to fall into. Smartphones have compounded this problem by literally putting the Internet at my fingertips. Reading articles on my phone while in bed at night is the new book-and-a-flashlight-under-the-blanket, except this new “book” never ends. Wikipedia alone has over 30 million articles on everything from the color red to string theory to – of course – Wikipedia itself. Each article contains countless links to other related articles, inspiring the creation of such games as the Wiki Game, where players win by using the fewest clicks possible to navigate from one randomly chosen Wikipedia article to another seemingly unrelated randomly chosen Wikipedia article. Wikipedia is legion. It is a leviathan. It is a time vampire. I enter Wikipedia as a normal 30 year-old woman, and leave as Robin Williams at the beginning of Jumanji.

“WHAT YEAR IS IT?!”

Also terrible: WebMD, which should just drop all pretenses and rename itself Cancer Diagnoses R’ Us. Fuck you, WebMD. Fuck. You.

This guy is an asshole.

Even the awesome parts of Internet have become somewhat terrible for me. We spent last week catching up on season 6 of Mad Men, but I couldn’t stop myself from reading Todd VanDerWerff’s episode recaps while watching the very same episode I was reading about. I caught myself doing the same thing during Downton Abbey last night, and during Supernatural this afternoon. I’m guilty of sitting on the couch and scrolling through Reddit on my phone – while my boyfriend is sitting next to me, doing the exact same thing on his phone. I’m permanently tethered to the Internet because I’m terrified I might miss some tidbit, some morsel of information that will complete my life.

My curiosity has become a compulsion.

I need space.

We can still be friends, Internet.

I miss the simple pleasure of wondering, and the joy of discovering. I want to spend 2014 seeking more and searching less.

And I want to spend 2015 cruising around on one of these.