I’ve learned all the flags of the world. It took me a week but I’ve learned them. Gabon, Sri-Lanka, Marshall Islands, Uruguay, Hungary. If it’s a country I know it’s flag. Apart from thinking I’m a cool guy you might also be thinking, why? Why would I spend my precious time learning something so seemingly pointless?
I don’t drink anymore, I don’t smoke, I currently don’t have instagram (or any other social media) and I’ve just blocked YouTube from all my devices. I’m living a life void of most modern day stimulants. When I met my friend for coffee and told him about my newest past time he asked me, “Do you have any fun anymore?” He’s watched me shed thing after thing and his question, though only a joke, was valid. _Do_ I have any fun anymore? Well, yes and no. The answer is complicated.
I’m very, _very_ addicted to YouTube. A topic I promise to cover at another time, but for now I’m still coming down. I memorised the flags of the world because, initially, I needed to keep my mind busy while going cold turkey. Knowing all the flags of the world might not help me on my daily quests but that learning process ended up replacing countless hours ingesting mind-numbing YouTube reels and in turn I have inserted ‘good information’ into my brain. Good information being information that is healthy for my brain as opposed to ‘bad’ information. Scrolling all day, everyday is not ‘good’. The genuinely ‘bad’ information we consume, i.e constant news of political unrest, genocide, wars, isn’t meant to be played on repeat. But even seemingly harmless information can still be bad, i.e gymfluencers, instagram foodies, lip-syncing tiktokers. In this world where our eyeballs are being blasted 24/7 with bad information, I wanted to do something ‘good’.
I read in the newspaper that Steve Albini died and I messaged a friend in disbelief. He replied, “That was 6 days ago”. When I tell you I felt disconnected. Without YouTube I’m not plugged into this constant stream of news anymore. Without instagram I’m finding it hard keeping up with my friend’s holidays or house moves or knowing when a new baby is born. I’ve missed out on the ever evolving meme landscape which, ridiculously enough, is almost just as hard. Before freezing my Instagram account a great deal of my time was spent finding the perfect meme for the same 5 friends. The idea of not receiving stupid internet pictures from them made leaving the app difficult. Connecting over our shared sense of humour brought me joy. A funny meme from me showed I was thinking about them and vice versa.
I’d like to tell you that since leaving YouTube and Instagram I’ve connected with my friends more and have magically become a better person. That, unfortunately, isn’t the case. Sometimes the detox we’re sold is just as tantalising as the product we’re trying to get away from. We’re promised life changing results for a fair price for little to no effort. When researching the booze free life, in just a few clicks, I was being sold countless 100 Day sober online free courses with guaranteed results. I was advertised new, expensive gym gear for my ultramarathon that I would be doing because I was now sober. When wanting to get off instagram I watched hundreds of YouTube videos of other people telling my why I should get off instagram. When you finally _do_ get rid of all the noise, you realise that the life off the internet that was promised to you on the internet is not as nice and way harder. When you’re finally faced with a quiet, contemplative existence where all stimulants are turned off, the idea of ‘better’ or ‘fun’ starts to become a little bit more complex. All this to say, it isn’t as easy as it looks being so disconnected.
I’ve had a lot of fun in my life. Fun with a capital F, that is. But the fun I have now, at the point in time of writing this, isn’t as euphoric. I can’t blame that all on being sober, of course. I could go sky diving, or find the thrill in travelling again. But to be honest, I don’t want to. Not right now. I might seek some highs in a bit but for the minute I really like going for a walk with my dog. I’ve been ambling through the same forest trail since October and I’ve seen Winter turn to Spring and Spring turn to Summer. My fun has come from waiting for the bluebells to bloom or smelling mandarin skin from rubbing the needles of a felled Grand Fir between my fingers. To answer the question, “Do I have any fun anymore?” Not exactly, not a lot of the one with a capital F. But yes, I have my fill of the one that’s silent, pretty and sometimes difficult.
My partner and I were recently discussing the meaning of life, which, believe it or not, is my kinda fun. We currently agree on the idea that there doesn’t seem to be any meaning. At least not anything explicit. We don’t discuss this too often with anyone else, as you can imagine, for fear we’ll be branded ‘that morbid couple’. She’s studying art therapy and is faced with lots of questions about emotions. Hers or someone else’s. In a recent lecture she was asked to think of some positive things in life. She’d had a hard few weeks so, inevitably, things didn’t feel super positive for her on the surface. Yes, the fact that she’s getting married, or has a cute dog, or has a new baby nephew are all positives, but she got sad because she still felt negative despite these things. Just like the idea of capital F-Fun, capital P-Positivity exists, too. I may be stating the obvious here but we are not all the same and our emotions can’t be wrapped up neatly with a bow. One person’s, ‘Live Laugh Love’, poster might be someone else’s worst nightmare. For me, I find it excruciating if someone ever asks me what I’m grateful for. I can’t tell you why exactly. In fact, I spent so much time on YouTube trying to figure it out that it got added to the list of reasons for leaving it entirely. So easily my innocent search for an answer became depressingly solipsistic to the point where I couldn’t see the wood for the trees.
In creating a life void of stimulants, I’ve found myself coming back to the idea that life is much more complicated than we make it, not the other way around. Bombarded as we are, there seems no space for nuance anymore. It’s all too black and white. Have fun. If you don’t, you’re boring. Be positive. If you’re not, you’re ungrateful. I’m struggling with the fact that even our hatred is being simplified and, in turn, commodified. You need only to open Instagram to see the virtue signalling about Gaza. Then there’s the post that’s shared explaining why you shouldn’t virtue signal but that gets more likes than the one that was apparently virtue signalling. All of this on top of someone doing a dance and someone else pushing Ozempic became too much for me. I couldn’t watch apocalyptic events play out one after another in real time. I felt debilitating guilt when I didn’t have the capacity to care and fight for the latest tragedy because I was still in disbelief from the last one. I was experiencing this bombardment and all I could think was, “It’s not that simple”.
I’ve been watching the movie/documentary, ‘The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology’ featuring Slavoj Žižek, the eccentric Slovenian Philosopher. Admittedly, I haven’t read any of his books despite following him for a while but I really enjoy watching him because it feels refreshing. No bullshit, just strange allegories that get straight to the meat of it. In the documentary he points out that the ideology we each hold, whether we know it or not, is the lens through which we see the world. Meaning it is the mechanism through which we cope with the horror and uncertainty of existence by simplifying the chaos into something we can share or believe in. See: Religion, political standpoint, preferred musical genre, clothing choice, etc. He explains that no matter what seemingly sound ideology we hold, every ideology can and should be dissected and torn up. Not, necessarily, to be thrown out or exchanged for a different ideology, just investigated thoroughly. He explains, through the metaphor of Travis’s killing spree in the movie Taxi Driver, that we should turn our natural, human instinct for violence inward and focus it on dismantling our ideologies. That, until we can accept the paradoxes of our own beliefs and feel comfortable in their fragility, we are slaves to the status quo, to the banality of perpetual existence.
So, I left Instagram, blocked YouTube and spent last week learning all the flags of the world. Why? Because I wanted to quiet my mind. Because I wanted something simple yet void of pretence in order to experience the true complication of existence. I’ve been living with an ideology tailor made for me on the internet and it’s high time I break it down to see what’s true, to see if I can find the meaning of life. And if it just so happens that I win the next pub quiz because of my flag knowledge then so be it, OK?
Good man. You might like this book 'The Denial of Death' by Ernest Becker if you haven't read or heard of it. Definitely fun!