Why I sometimes wish the Mayan’s were right…

Every time I write down somewhere that I’m a writer, I feel like I am making some sort of big cheat. Its not like the days of Charlotte Bronte or Jane Austen, where you scribbled down a masterpiece on parchment paper using one of those torture devices known as a quill… Those were real writers. No, these days anyone can be a writer. With the internet, laptops, smartphones – instant connectivity to the world – its all so easy. Or so it seems.

Maybe it is in fact harder to be a writer. We live in an age of distraction. There is always something we could be doing, procrastination is the watch word and its on every person’s lips. If you’re from my generation, and you’ve spent any time trying to do pretty much anything productive, you will know what I’m talking about. Its insufferable sometimes. We’ve spent all our time perfecting inside, making life more entertaining and easier. What if we’ve just made things worse?

Every now and then when I’m in a real writers rut, I find myself day dreaming about the real world morphing into the world’s that I write about. Not necessarily a post-apocalyptic nightmare – just simpler. No phones, no computers, nothing but the bare minimal. The whole of life would go by with just one objective – to survive. Finding food, staying healthy, caring for the ones you love, running through the rain and staring at the brilliant nights sky… those are the things I want to live for. Hell, most of us can’t even see the night sky from where we are thanks to all the light pollution.

I’d much rather spend my evenings under this than having a technology riddled monkey on my back.

Truth be told, we have restricted our selves with all the technology and the busy, non-stop lives we lead. We’re constantly reaching for the next goal, so that we never cherish the one we’ve just reached. We update our facebook status instead of calling a friend, we read five minute news stories about events going on a thousand miles away and brush it off as an after thought seconds later. But are we ever actually living? What is living?

Don’t get me wrong… I do appreciate how bold my original statement may seem.

Why I sometimes wish the Mayan’s were right…

Do I want the world to end? Of course not. But I sometimes think that if we were all taken down a peg, if we lost all the unnecessary technology that we rely on for every second of every day – we would be better off. Even for a little while. We’d find each other again. We would find our own thoughts again. And most of all we would rediscover the real world again… the world that we all seem so eager to shut out.

Would Charlotte Bronte have written Jane Eyre if she was getting Facebook notifications about the Bronte family picnic every five minutes? And not only that, would she have even thought of the story to begin with? Probably not, because its so goddamn hard to write about life when you don’t seem to be out there much actually living it. I’m betting Charlotte daydreamed a lot… forming stories and characters in her head. When was the last time you day dreamed?

Life is like an airport. Just as one plane takes off, another is coming in. Is it too much to ask for a blizzard once in a while?