Firehead

Hello.

I’m back from Ireland. It was good to get a break.

While I was there, we were in a zone that had no Internet or mobile phone coverage. This made me think a lot about how much we now depend on technology to carry out our daily lives, and just how different life was before all of this came to be.

The people around us, sturdy rural folk who have never had access to these waves, were carrying out their lives happily enough – I was going nuts! Would we be happier without the stress that servers going down and not being in 24h/24h contact by phone and email (the major sources of stress in my life) provide? Could we even go back without turning into radical-anti-establishment weirdos? I don’t know. I do know I couldn’t earn my living or even make a school or doctor’s appointment in Sweden without an Internet connection anymore. How many people live without phones these days?

There’s probably an expert out there who could sum it all in one sentence with something like “It all depends on balance.” Although this is true (for almost everything), I’m pondering how to find that balance because I want the best that both of those worlds have to offer, and it’s not that easy to sum up.

I want my super virtual-world business that provides fantastic flexibility and opportunities, and I want to be able to turn the computer off and ignore it on a weekend or holiday. With all of the potential locked inside this box, a direct gateway to the larger world, it’s a constant temptation to my attention. But (once I relaxed), it was great to be completely cut off and unavailable too. I just couldn’t do it for very long.

Glad to be back to work with you.