Paradox of being Chronically Online

I have been sneaking around Lana Del Rey’s crawlspace all through last spring and by the time Autumn came onto scene, I rewrote the screenplay to Icarus’s adventures amidst a hailstorm that stripped my imagination down to an inch of a Roman Empire. A minute later, I had a new story and a brand new hero.

If you reach out to the bottom drawer of my writing shelf, you will find an unpublished manuscript of a comedic memoir, Uneasy Portrait. The draft would account for 148 pages of a reverb novella that ended up on a negative film by an art galleria. It could be a clipboard effect that transports most of our ideas to a threshold of realism — an uncertain coming-of-age apparition stuck to our bedroom ceiling. And, don’t even counter me about the frequency of my narcissism when these apparitions come alive in the form of a morning skincare routine.

Selfcare.

Rather Self-flare.

ARE YOU A STAGED WRITER?

Altruism has been a long-term client meeting me at every authorship crossroad just before I hit lights on another writer’s block. One of these incidents that happened as recent as my freshly overcooked broccoli soup of last evening, is my tour to “Hardyverse”. Unlike the metaverse that has desensitized the “chronic” of everything, Thomas Hardy innovated the phonetics of greatness within the chronic couture itself since 1867. A hero that originates from stoicism and existentialism, instead of tragedy, introduces you to an even greater catharsis than tragedy could. You see, Hardy was a Victorian novelist and the idea of relinquishing worldly desires to get the utmost of oneself must have been exactly what these people needed to experience. Compare it to the ultra modern society that we live in today, a mere pinch of stoic salt can cause enough stir across the board for a species that is progressively evolving itself into an embedded existential crisis.

Unapologetically, chronically.

Last year, the concept of chronically online transformed itself from being an abnormality to fully immersed YouTube channels that make use of the internet gossip and celebrity feuds to churn out cleanly organized video essays. Not to highlight any offensive traits, but this new generation and the next-in-line ones would have to boil the ocean in order to restore the mockingbirds. Chronically-online fandom has me believed that a Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion iceberg is a significant parameter to determine whether a pop icon with a career spanning over 20 years should retain her reputation over a speculative feud. In other words, for a human whose concentration clock has been ticking in negative integers due to ‘gram-worming’, it is sinful to provide them with the wicked power of judgement based on online speculation. (And, before, you roll your eyes, yes, I get it; Bigfoot just wasn’t IT.)

With all the strings rather plucked out and spread in a disheveled manner, I am almost lost as to where I should lead you to. I have an asymmetrical arch nemesis of being the archer with the overpouring information that I have gained with incessant scrolling on social media. And yet, I fail again and again to make a point.

BUT, TRUTHFULLY, WHY DO I NEED TO MAKE A POINT?

An anonymous overthinker sitting across the blue screen decides to write something — something that could stop her from fidgeting on her phone. Every once in a while, as the screen sleeps, she watches her reflection on the scratched surface. She recalls what Atticus Finch said to Scout, “Remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” There she goes, typing her heart away to justify the incessant loss of innocence by the cyber nuances. According to an article Wired in 2022, The High Cost of Living Your Life Online, Professor Lembke from Psychiatric and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University calls it the adapted hyper-vigilance-

AS SOON AS YOU SEND SOMETHING OUT INTO THE VIRTUAL WORLD, YOU’RE SORT OF SITTING ON PINS AND NEEDLES WAITING FOR A RESPONSE.

This adrenaline rush is a precipice of every incumbently written draft, veiled as a procrastinating foster and lost within the cyberspace. Perhaps, this piece of writing is the one, too. There is a phenomenon in the theatrical world that forbids anyone to say “Macbeth” inside a theatre. A series of unfortunate death revolving around the performance of Shakespeare’s shortest masterpiece deems it to be cursed. On the face of writers’ specimen, “chronically-online” is the version of theatrically cursed Macbeth that inadvertently puts an ecliptic shadow on the authentic draft that could come alive, easily, under a dimly lit lantern and yet, it finds its vernacular through chromatic display and finger-dipping in the coaxing pool of deductible intelligence.

THE VERY STONE ONE KICKS WITH ONE’S BOOT WILL OUTLAST SHAKESPEARE.

Take this quote from Woolf’s To The Lighthouse with a pinch of salt; for the way it is threaded across my writing potential as a clumped up mascara on eyelashes.

WRITERS ARE OUGHT TO BEQUEATH THE EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND LIVE UP TO THEIR INTERNAL ODDITIES. WRITERS — THE KIND WHOSE PRESENCE DOES NOT NEED TO BE ALTERED FOR THE MERE TRENDING CHARTS OF ONLINE FRENZY CLUBS.

That’s probably what Atticus Finch would do, I guess. Or a diffracted hero of social media (disguised as a writer) would say. Often, hiding behind the abundance of infomercials and expertise billboards is a creative genre fazed by the marketed stats. A common example is modern-day content writers. To define a content writer, we need to sharpen the line between a writer evolving into an author and a writer providing content services across online platforms. These two point of reference placed on the line of distraction culture seems to simplify why we have the shortest comparative distance between a writer and a content writer now-a-days. On the same note, I recall having a conversation with a colleague, few weeks ago, about how fast-fed articles are causing a creative depression among writers who intend to pour out their existence without word limits, SEO or deadline notifications. For a creative writer, this conjecture is another becoming moment to escape the matrix. Longevity of a writer belongs to the number of sandcastles he could build in his imagination, have the courage to test them against the reality and watch each of the sandcastles fall to pieces until it reaches to the chosen one that could house their fertility the best. It is a cold-blooded philosophy that we, as writers, tend to feed into the dissociative identity complex only for our work to be interpreted as a universal phenomenon. Yet, the irony is that all a literary work ends up creating is a paradox — a paradox of interpretations, imagination and realism. In the digital epoch, this paradoxical trio is boiled in a hotpot of volatile marketing trends and served in a hollow glass bowl. More often than not, we tend to break the bowl before it could reach our intellectual tendons, justifying its lack of profundity.