I’ve been sick these days. One of those unnecessary summer viruses that are trying to keep you from taking part in some probably unnecessary summer parties. On the first day of lying around in bed, I got utterly bored. My head was aching so that I couldn’t work properly on my laptop, I couldn’t binge-watch any new series, nor read about the latest catastrophes in our tortured world. By the end of the day I realised that I hadn’t been alone with my thoughts for a very long time, which was the main reason why I was feeling unsettled. I don’t mean that I am never alone: au contraire; but I’m always busy with something. When I’m not doing the stuff necessary for my survival, like a slice of private life, work, or a short walk in the park, I am constantly doing something. 

I call it something because I still don’t know, if it has a name yet. Right now, while I’m writing this piece, all my communication channels are exploding with notifications. (Yes, I’m that popular.) Have you noticed that nobody writes text messages anymore? When I send a text message to a group of people to announce an event, every person in that group writes back through a different channel, be it Facebook, WhatsApp, an email re-directed as iMessage and so on. I’m glad to receive word from my friends, but this continuous flow of tiny pieces of information feels sometimes like those night mosquitoes, which come to bite you every second hour only to wake you up from a good sleep. It has become uncontrollable.  

The problem, in my opinion, is not that I couldn’t shut down everything and still live in peace with my friends; rather that these seem to be the best ways for most people to communicate in groups and as, for example, nowadays most of us have two or more jobs and projects, you will eventually find out that the only way to communicate effectively with others is to create a group through some online tool or social media channel. Thus, it is not only friends and family messages, event reminders, the daily Facebook checking and commenting and Twittering, and I don’t know what else is on the market today, but also good free online software that is used more and more by trendy companies to set up projects and communicate in groups. Damocles, pull down the sword, please. 

It has become a vicious circle. I have been observing the people around me for some time now regarding this topic. The economic situation and the on-going fear of losing the mere means of existence are forcing us to work the whole day and find it even great. I live in a beautiful city and yet a few people see the sunlight during the week. Stupidly enough, it rains often here on the weekends. If you have another job, or are finishing a master’s degree (I think, you need around three nowadays), the free time is spent with sleep and heavy drinking to forget the week. I don’t know how working parents survive. Meanwhile, the prices of everything are going up and we are expected to keep a certain life standard. Then there is the pressure that some of our peers are always doing more, so the ‘normal’ ones might feel useless, although they are already working a lot. The drug market (legal and illegal) is flourishing and so are the burnout rates. 

I’m maybe painting a dark world here, but Austria used to be the ‘Mediterranean’ part of Western Europe, meaning that people had a good work-life balance, but were maybe a bit too relaxed for their neighbours. These days, my friends have only a moment to send me half a message on WhatsApp. Yeah, not even a whole sentence, but something like ‘ho(w) are?’. Life has definitely moved into the internet cables. Only a few people make phone calls. Does anyone use Skype anymore? Not to forget that through our so-called globalised world, this has become the only way to stay in touch with friends, business partners, clients etc. in other parts of the world. It has its good sides, of course, but also the weird taste of a superficial relationship, like the taste of this onion syrup I have to take for my cough. 

Still, our generation does find some time for family, friends and other breathing creatures, but for digital natives it has become the norm to live their life online. I was at a friend’s place lately and his teenage nieces were there, too. We were watching a big event on TV and they were typing furiously on their phones all the time. I asked one of them, as it made me curious, what was so important that she barely had a moment to look up at the TV. She said that she was commenting on the TV show with her friends on WhatsApp. Fascinating. 

When I see old people, I wonder how they do it. How they walk slowly through the streets without Google Maps; how they take their time to choose apples in a supermarket, weighing them one after the other without looking at a phone. How they ask me to tell them the price because they don’t see very well. We will grow pretty old and I hope to still be curious. When the parks and the forests are substituted through concrete and glass buildings, where machines work perpetually and supervisors control them through tiny contact lenses, and we won’t be able to see or hear well, what are we going to do?