Well. This is it...
As of today, I will be fully moved out of my place, jobless, and boarding a plane to go fulfil my ten-year-long dream of walking the Camino Way; specifically, the Camino Frances, from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France aaall the way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, some ~800km later.
I gotta say...that reality still hasn't landed yet. I've been dragging my feet on the to-dos related to this trip for weeks because my dopamine receptors are running on empty – seemingly unaware they are about to be blasted with the force of a fire hose directly to the face, positively dripping with the good stuff.
It feels so-not-real that I'm about to go and do this, that I don't even know what to write about it just now. I plan to journal every day, unlike during my other big trips, and trust the proverbial flood gate or fire hose will open up once I'm on the runway and performing my ritual of trying to perfectly time an uplifting song for takeoff. (I reckon it'll be Wake Up by Arcade Fire this time – from my favourite movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.)
So, this will likely be a rare short post. [Future-Lauren here: Llol, nope.] For now – I know I have some key goals I want to focus on during my time away, and figured why not write them down here.
~ It has come to my attention lately that...I am somewhat addicted to information and learning.
On the surface, this does not seem like a bad thing, and I guess it's not; there are certainly worse things one can be addicted to. However, I have now spent so many waking seconds over so many years effectively carpet-bombing my poor brain with podcasts, books and audiobooks, newsletters, long-form journalism, magazines, social media posts – you name it – that I've confused it, and feel it quiet-quitting on me. My eyes glaze over the 10+ tabs on my browser at any given time, bookmarked for later contemplation (I've cut back, believe it or not), and I constantly hear thoughts and voices in my head that aren't my own (though not in a demonic way).
Having recently made it through, and been greatly inspired by, Johann Hari's Stolen Focus, which details the journalist's three-month escape to Cape Cod without electronics or access to the internet in attempt to reclaim his attention...I realised I now have an opportunity to try something similar. While I don't yet know how to travel the world without at least bare minimum web access, I can limit my virtual and extracurricular activities over the 2.5-month period I will be exploring the Camino region.
Therefore, I am imposing a no podcast or audiobook rule while I am hiking, and refraining from checking messages and emails/newsletters as much as possible. I won't be travelling with my laptop for the sake of keeping weight down in my backpack, so that will make the rule easier to enforce. And, in regards to phone usage...
~ I will be deactivating/deleting my social media accounts.
I have exercised pretty good willpower against scrolling in recent years, especially since my photography/videography business tanked and took 95% of my social media usage out with it. But since Trump got elected? Jesus – like many people around the world, I developed a daily emotional support practise of checking in with platforms like Threads to make sure the big red button hadn't been pressed overnight; to commiserate with folks in the firing line of Tangerine Palpatine; to grapple with what might be coming for us.
As with my information addiction, I tell myself it's because I don't want to spiritually bypass what's going on in the world, and figure I'm doing my due diligence as a worldly citizen by staying up-to-date. And I stand by this, to some extent. However, I also have to keep in mind three things:
- Not to consume before I create. Even though it's not technically the first thing I do upon waking, I still spend too many of my early hours – when creativity is generally at its ripest – scrolling for updates or reading long-form journalism about the unfolding collapse crisis, when I could be using that time to cultivate calmness or hear my own words and deductions coming through;
- The filter bubble. As journalists like Hari and whistleblowers like Tristan Harris (and many more) have discovered: the longer we spend looking at certain kinds of data and posts, the more of that same theme gets fed to us. In other words – the more I linger on posts about the onset of the broligarchy, whatever insane thing Trump has done now, and Tesla's spectacular stock market crash, the more targeted and extreme content of that same ilk will appear next on my feed. Moreover, experiments have been conducted on search engines like Google, where two people enter the same prompt and receive wildly different results based on their previous search history. We all think we're responding rationally, and with responsible personal research, to the same information as everyone else – therefore everyone else must be stupid, crazy, or plain assholes. But it's not the case; we are all reacting differently to completely different information. So the truth of what I'm carpet-bombing my brain with on the daily is not always a given, or consistent with others' experience;
- Missing out...through fear of missing out. I sat with ayahuasca this weekend just gone (finishing literally the day before flying out, yep – post for another day) and had a pretty big revelation about how much of my life I've diminished, or outright missed, by fixating on future outcomes that would save me from missing out; on my "best" life, my true potential, the steps that I've determined in fits of control freakery will absolutely get me there, whatever. I'm humoured and stunned by how the irony hasn't hit me with lasting force until now. Suffice to say, I'm determined to spend this time actually not missing out; by focusing one foot in front of the other, staying in the present as much as possible – even if it's not as I expected or imagined – and with a flow of information my brain is designed to handle. I'm not meant to get 157 newspapers' (or whatever the stat is) worth of updates about people and events around the world every day – just the locals and fellow travellers I will be meeting for the next few months, remembering how information used to be exchanged...and not being "that traveller" who flew all this way only to see it all through a screen and dissociate with other anxious, faraway people.
I will close this point out with snippets of an essay I read right before going into my medicine weekend (almost like it was giving me a heads-up):
"The fear of missing out keeps us tethered to technologies that deplete us—ironically making us actually miss out on the things that really matter. Retreating from the digisphere doesn’t mean disengaging from the world; rather, it gives us the space to engage with it in a far deeper and more meaningful way...
Echo-chambers, the proliferation of misinformation, and the instantaneous nature of online discourse mean that social media is pretty much the worst possible way to stay ‘up-to-date’. The digisphere rewards the immediate reaction over the thoughtful response, the hot take over the nuanced discussion. Therefore to be hyper-informed is, in many ways, to be ill-informed."
(Credit to Gideon Heugh for this remarkably thoughtful piece; I highly recommend reading the whole thing: https://gideonheugh.substack.com/p/how-to-unburden-yourself.)
~ Last but not least...I cut all my hair off.
I wrote this post on Instagram about it; of letting go of my presence in the digisphere and all that can no longer come with me. (Seriously, to walk 800km with your things on your back...you gotta keep that shit light.)
I’m going to try and keep this post short and sweet, like my new haircut.
(Since I’m historically incapable of doing that, here’s a preemptive TLDR: Long hair cut and donated, shedding dead weight, symbolically tying that to the segue of “Oh yeah, by the way, I’m deleting Instagram.”)
We’re in a Year of the Snake [and, at the time of writing, a double-eclipse portal that points to the need to metabolise spiritual/psychological insights and clear space for new beginnings]. This reminds us there will always come times where our old scales and skins and bodily vehicles — no matter how lovely they looked to others and beautiful a purpose they once served — begin to feel like dead weight and must be shed.
Like my old curls, which were fun to grow out and served some beautiful cosmetic purpose for a while…my time on this platform — and all Meta/broligarch platforms — is starting to feel like dead weight and calling to be shed (despite how difficult they make it to do so).
For a long time, I loved the connectivity and inspiration that platforms like Instagram infused into my life; they allowed me to gain genuine insight and ideas from people all around the world, and share my creative work as an aspiring writer/photojournalist/filmmaker — seemingly for free. But everything comes at a price; and the price, in the case of Meta and Twitter, is becoming far too great and insidious to ignore.
I am NOT okay with my creative work being used to train destructive and divisive AI models without my consent.
I am NOT okay with the political interference, gross misinformation, and ethical catastrophes that have been wrought with the aid of these platforms.
I am NOT okay with the daylight robbery of my attention and empathy — nor the grotesque amount of $$$ that goes into extracting time and data from users’ confused, depleted brains, and manipulating our primal emotions for profit —
which (while not attributed to social media usage alone) has been made very clear by the creators of Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Google, and others to be not at all top priorities for them to fix. Why would they be? Our depletion, disconnection, and division is their bread and butter.
Now, what can we do about it? Well, after much anxious wrestling back-and-forth between possibilities…I’ve realised my personal line in the sand is to cut the head off the snake. Social media is but an empty vessel without our time, data, and dopamine actively pouring into it — and I’m refusing to keep pouring. I’ve barely been here with my whole heart for years anyway (the only engagement I get these days is from bots), and would rather put my whole heart into truly informative, truly sociable, and less-collectively-destructive avenues.
I want to spend as little of the next few months of walking 800km from France into Spain — possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience — in the virtual world as possible. I want to connect for real, and actively embody a less distracted life…instead of yearning for life through pretty pictures and videos.
So — as lovely as my time on here has been overall, and how much creativity I’ve invested into it — I will soon be deleting my account. Facebook will be deactivated and deleted later in the year; for now, it serves practically for keeping in touch with people I’ve not yet established alternative contact with, and event notification. [I will mostly be here on Ghost, email, sometimes on Substack – though no longer publishing my more significant pieces there, because this – and...honestly, that's mostly it, until such a time better platforms with its users' wellbeing in mind emerge.]
I really hope options reappear in the future for healthier and decentralised virtual connection. Like I said, I’ve enjoyed these apps for a long time, and depart with some sadness.
Aside from sad, I’m nervous and excited for a more intentional life with minimal dead weight; what is dead can become compost for something new and regenerative. In the case of my hair…well, not only do I not have to bother so much with its care while on the road, but finally got to try donating the rest — so that someone with cancer, who was forced into the shedding process, can feel a little more fancy.
Anyway, I'll leave this here for now...I've gotta finish packing before my flight tonight! Stay safe and sane over the coming months, and treat your life and attention is sacred – don't let them steal you away.
Much love xx
