I'm currently in my second week exam of this school year, which is a higher-pressure-than-usual environment. Today, I also had to finish a python project, which is supposed to be done over many weekly 2 hours each classes, in about 10 hours (less than that, since I have to study).
Many hours in, I finished the project, submitted it, and felt extremely drained. My brain felt like mush, and all I wanted was to escape ; escape responsibilites, escape those oh so boring exams, escape reality, escape everything.
So I went online.
When you read online blogs, when you scour and explore every aspect of a webring, if you're really lucky, you get a raw, pure, direct stream of conscience. You get the thoughts and feelings and experiences of someone else beamed straight into your head. A beautiful, pure, bright stream, a sharing of conscience that is so perfect and fast that the coming back to reality feels slow and absurd. It feels like the best of drugs.
And I realised, that's the same feeling I've looked for all of my life. All my life, or at least for as long as I can remember, I've always felt attracted to people who I felt I could just freely overshare with, those people who I feel like I could say anything to, even if I don't.
It's this sort of ethereal connection with someone else that is so intoxicating. Getting to feel it in real life is amazing, because what better feeling than that of feeling connected with others ?
Online, every blog, every one of those pseudo-social interaction we have is "ethereal", because you can, and will, share anything, everything, to someone else, and maybe they'll overshare with you too, or maybe you're the silent recipient who doesn't overshare back.
It's easy to have ethereal connections online, because you're not talking to people. You're talking to reflections, a simpler version of themselves. You see what they show you. It doesn't feel like a real person, who could judge you or with whom you could fuck things up by saying the wrong thing. It's just some text. A very human-sounding text, one with whom you can connect deeply, but still a simpler, more ethereal form of life.
Side note
This is kind of a rough draft, or maybe it's the polished and final_v2_final_for_real.mp4 version and will never change again. Who knows !
I just wanted to write this down, so that I could stop thinking about the exams for a bit. I wanted to do something useful, something that made sense to me, not some meaningless python project. Also I'm procastinating.
It's not exactly well thought out, or well written, and I didn't do any extra work beyond writing it. But I thought it was interesting, and wanted to share it.