Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I miss her dearly. How our lives and lifestyles are becoming aggressively in service of technology, and how it's getting increasingly difficult to hold onto this joy. How heavy it feels to be bound by the absence of boundaries, and how going "offline" has become what going "online" was 20 years ago. The uncommon state of being a lot of us look forward to.

My take on this remains unchanged. Me no like it. And because me no like it, me make the moves to dance the dance me want to dance. The one that makes me remember what creativity feels like, and the one that keeps my mind capable. Mighty and muscular convolutions. Feeding myself information, slapping hands that try to spoonfeed. Swapping tablet for paper. Spending less time with screens. Drawing drawings. For approval of no one.

Because drawing drawings for approval of everyone is the worst thing that happened to the design industry. After social media ironed it flat, generative AI heat-pressed it. Sidestepping consent altogether.

For good? Not sure, but I'm not sticking around to find out.

Meanwhile, Enya's "Orinoco Flow" has been the soundtrack of my movements after swapping San Francisco for Orange County. Not for the sake of becoming a hermit (even though the idea of living in an Irish castle sounds refreshingly welcome, minus the cats). But mainly to insert some significant distance between myself and technology to calibrate my sensitivity.

To myself and the kind of life I want to be living. To the world outside devices, big and enchanting. To my family and my child, who will never know a time when "online" was not on the menu.

This is precisely what I have been doing after posting and scrolling made space for discovering new ways of being.

Waking up and reading a book instead of getting yelled at by journalism, good or bad. Leaving my smartphone at home to walk my son to school and go to a park after dinner. Taking off my smartwatch for good. Getting rid of editing software as there're no more reels to record. Not taking photos and enjoying the sunsets, the food, the fun through my slightly myopic eyes instead.

Simple actions that make a big difference and feel so luxurious in the world dependent on tech.

On the creative side of things, my craft has gotten more hands-on. And messier. I've been working on my first mural at a farm. Connecting with and learning from the local muralists. Finding my way around ribbed stainless steel, primers, house paint, sketch transfer, and ants.

I've been mixing tempera and gouache in my sketchbooks. Drawing many lemons. Non-lemons. And landscapes. And also rough portraits, some still life, and dudes. Deliberately rejecting what I've known about my skills to this day, and taking a chance on getting looser and braver with my art.

Ethics behind generative AI have made posting online unsexy to the extent that I stopped trying. But also, not posting means not performing. Being free to create as I please. Or not create and wait till the time feels right. And not get punished for not keeping up. Truly enjoying the not keeping up. Fucking loving it so very much.

Because the time is right. For me to embrace the kind of intention that's often mistaken for social awkwardness or ignorance. Which is bizarre because my intent to stop doing something comes precisely from my knowledge and experience of doing it enough and too much.

And maybe it's the natural flow of things, the rule of balance. Once we find ourselves tiptoeing along an edge, we are drawn to the opposite end. When tired of running, we slow down and stand still. When unsure what makes sense, we reconnect with our roots. When sinking under too much pressure, we stand up and shake it all off.

But also, aging. Entering the generational layer that's sandwiched between parenting our children and parenting our parents. That place where the thought of living life plugged into the internet starts feeling uneasy and honestly silly.

I often imagine looking at myself from afar, as if I were having an out-of-body experience. Sitting on a couch with my smartphone in hand, scrolling on Threads, reading a lot of something about nothing. And I feel devastated thinking how much time I've already lost doing just that.

That's why when a year ago I deleted my last social media account, I didn't have a relapse.

That's why occasionally writing on my own domain feels better than any likes and comments I could possibly get.

That's why "Sail away, sail away, sail away" is the tune I choose to dance to.

Because my body, my mind, and my soul are not meant to fuel someone else's ambition to degrade our humanity. Because at some point, enough is enough. Because what feels like a cage is just a mirage.

And it's not too late to change course.