2447: Left Behind

I think one of the biggest sources of my anxiety these days is the growing feeling that I’m being “left behind” by the rest of the world thanks to the fact that everything changes so damn quickly these days… and moreover, if you don’t keep up with it, you may well end up having difficulties.

As I type this, I’m occasionally stealing glances over to my dining room table, upon which sits an Atari 800XL and a CRT TV-monitor for which I’m currently awaiting a cable to allow the two to talk to one another. I’m excited to get the 800XL up and running not just because “woo, wow, retro”, but because it formed such an integral part of my early life that it feels like a small piece of “stablity” in the turbulent waters of the modern age; a rock I can cling on to in order to avoid getting swept away.

This might sound like an odd thing to say with regard to a 30+ year old computer that I’m not entirely sure still works (I’m pretty sure it does), but since tracking it down I’ve become quite interested — excited, even — in the idea of using it for various purposes other than just games. Specifically, I’m perhaps most excited to use it as a “distraction-free” means of word processing; once I get it up and running, I fully intend to fire up the old copy of AtariWriter and actually do some ol’ fashioned plain text composition. (My one nod to it actually being 2016 is the addition of an “SIO2PC” cable, which will allow me to transfer files from the Atari to a PC or Mac for safekeeping rather than relying on 30+ year old floppy disks.)

This probably sounds like a lot of effort to go to, but I’m excited because it allows me to focus on one thing rather than constantly being bombarded by the distractions that life in 2016 — and computing in 2016 — offers. Multitasking is all very well and good, but when you’re trying to get anything done and Google Chrome is right there willing you to go and, I don’t know, hunt for rare Pepes or something, it’s sometimes hard to resist. Boot up a word processor that you have to load from disk and can’t do anything else while it’s running, on the other hand, and you have a situation much more conducive to Getting Shit Done, because once you’ve spent a couple of minutes listening to the soothing (and occasionally terrifying) sound of that disk drive snarking and zurbiting its way to your chosen program, it feels like something of a waste to then just shut it all down without actually doing anything.

I’ve drifted off on a tangent a bit, but my point is fairly simple: I long for the simplicity and the single-mindedness of days gone by, and am feeling increasingly stressed out and anxious by the constant demands for attention we get from all angles these days in 2016. I’ve attempted to minimise my exposure to these distractions as much as possible — primarily through minimising my contact with social media, which is probably the biggest distraction of all for most people these days — but with each passing day, I feel more and more inclined to just want to shut myself in a dark room and have a bit of peace and quiet to myself.