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Late 2017 into 2018

This piece gathers a cluster of posts and fragments from late 2017 into 2018. They circled the same questions: money, work, health, social media, family, and the strange pull towards a quieter life. Rather than preserving each one separately, I have gathered them here as a single record of that period. Be warned, this is a long one!

December 2017: close to the event horizon

By December 2017, it was time to face facts.

At what point do you throw in the towel and admit defeat? When do you stop trying to breathe life into a lost cause and hit the ejector button?

For months, I had been trying to make money in different ways. I designed things. I photographed people and places. I wrote articles and blog posts. I hunted for full-time work. I filled in application after application and waited for something to fall into place.

Nothing did.

There was no easy way to say it. I needed money. I needed to contribute to the well-being of my family and myself.

Rhona was working hard in a decent job with low pay and few prospects. She was the breadwinner. She was keeping us afloat. The cost of living was rising, while our income seemed to be falling. Tax credits were being reduced. Bills were becoming harder to juggle.

The constant movement of money from one place to another had become a job in itself.

Food and fuel were the two obvious pressure points. Both were rising. We could not use the car any less than we already did, although I knew that when spring arrived, Karta and I could walk home from school more often. Even that would save a little petrol each week.

It all added up.

Food would have to change, too. More meals cooked from scratch. Bread made at home. A proper menu plan. Fewer wants. More needs. Less drift.

It felt as if we were close to the black hole. Close to the event horizon. That point where something grabs hold of you and starts pulling you towards a place you might not escape from.

The good thing was that I still had a plan.

I just had to stick to it.

December 2017: the European question

Around the same time, Brexit kept pressing in from the background.

The Prime Minister had announced that talks could move to the next phase. One key part of the agreement was that there would be no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. That also meant that UK citizens born in Northern Ireland could retain EU citizenship.

I wanted to retain mine too.

That was the emotional part of it. Not procedure. Not party politics. Identity.

I still felt European. I did not want that taken away because of a vote I had not supported and a process I did not trust.

That uncertainty sat alongside everything else. Money. Work. Family. Health. The future felt unstable in almost every direction.

December 2017: going nonline

Christmas that year was good.

I enjoyed being with friends and family. I overate. I paid attention to the people in front of me. Spencer, Karta and I went to see The Last Jedi. Afterwards, there was the usual sitting around, talking, watching television, and letting the day take its shape.

For a few days, that was enough.

But I knew that from midnight on 1 January 2018, things had to change.

2018 felt significant. I would turn fifty. Karta would become a teenager. I needed to make changes that would give me some peace for the rest of my life.

The internet had to shrink.

This time, I would only post to social media through my own site, or for work-related reasons. I would limit time spent in front of a computer, surfing, scrolling, answering emails, and feeding machines that gave little back.

The blog would become my main outlet again. Other projects would either close, pause, or be folded back into one place.

I called it going nonline.

Not offline. Not vanished. Just less available. Less scattered. Less is owned by big tech's platforms.

I could still be contacted through the blog, by phone, or by WhatsApp. That was enough.

Reducing internet use was only one part of the plan, but it felt like the right place to start.

January 2018: the anti-resolution paradigm

New Year arrived.

These were not resolutions.

I had spent the previous New Year unable to relax. I was in bed by nine, trying to sleep before getting up for work in the early hours. The job had seemed like a good idea at the time. It was not. It wrecked Christmas and the New Year, and I was still carrying the disappointment. A failure.

This time was different.

I had no luck finding full-time work. Freelance work had not appeared as I had hoped. I was broke.

But I also felt lighter.

Some of the secrets and pressures that had weighed me down since the start of 2016 had begun to resolve themselves. I felt as if I could start the year with my eyes open, free from some of the burden, able to see a path again.

There were four things I wanted to do.

Start writing the novel. 

Beat my health goals before turning fifty.

Let go of physical clutter and psychological baggage.

Reduce social media to the bare minimum.

Beyond that, I wanted to spend my time better. Read more. Go to the cinema. Use the car less. Make calmer decisions about money. Ask whether something was a need or a want before buying it.

Nothing dramatic.

Just a quieter life with fewer leaks.

January 2018: analogue bubblegum

I still loved writing on a computer, but pen and paper had started calling me back.

Sometimes the computer was perfect. If I needed to vomit out words quickly, I could sit at the keyboard and bash away. If I had owned a typewriter, I probably would have used that. There is something satisfying about the physical act of pressing keys and putting ink on paper.

But without a typewriter, I had the laptop.

When I wanted to slow down, I reached for a notebook and a pencil. A Moleskine. A sharp 5B pencil. Block capitals. Not much concern for spelling, punctuation, or neatness.

Writing by hand changed the way I wrote. It gave me permission to be messy. I could start near the front, then fill a gap near the back. A few lines here. Half a page there. No spell checker. No delete button. No false sense that everything had to be clean before it could exist.

I still used a paper diary to back up the digital calendar. The phone was always with me, but the paper diary felt more human. I liked adding dates and notes by hand. It made the days feel less disposable.

That was the point, really.

Less friction where speed helped. More friction where attention mattered.

March 2018: sitting still

By March, my meditation practice had become one of the few things that seemed to work.

I had managed 800 minutes of meditation in 2018. That may not sound like much, but for me it was a sign of consistency.

The previous month had put dents in my positivity armour. I knew I needed a change in approach. Life kept throwing curveballs, and I could either try to catch them all or become less vulnerable to every impact.

So I sat down each day and tried to quiet my mind.

Nothing mystical. Just breathing.

Sit somewhere quiet. Close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths. Let the breathing return to normal. Focus on the sensation of breathing in and out. When thoughts appear, notice them and return to the breath.

Start again.

That was the lesson hiding inside it.

Start again.

The more I practised, the more I noticed how much time I spent worrying about the past or becoming anxious about the future. Meditation did not solve everything, but it helped me return to the present. What needed doing today? What could I actually affect?

Yesterday had gone. Tomorrow was still imaginary.

The space between those two things was where I had to live.

April 2018: Facebook goes

The 1st of April 2018 had been in my sights for weeks.

That was the day I finally quit Facebook.

For years, I had talked about leaving social media, or at least curbing my use of it. Too often, I had deactivated accounts rather than deleting them. A temporary escape. A soft exit. A way to pretend I had acted decisively while leaving the door wide open.

This time, I deleted it.

There was not much romance to the decision. I had spent too much time sitting at the computer, scrolling through the same old shit, watching hours disappear into a feed that left me irritated and anxious, no better informed.

I had already removed most social media apps from my phone. Not just because they killed the battery, although they did. The bigger problem was how easy they made distraction. Even with notifications off, I could still open an app just to see what was happening.

That was the trap.

On the first day without Facebook, I had no real reason to take my smartphone out with me. I set up call divert and took my Punkt dumbphone instead. I did not need to look at it once.

That felt like progress.

Twitter and Instagram stayed for a while, but both were locked down. The next phase was to stop watching so much news, both online and on television. Not because I wanted to bury my head in the sand, but because I wanted to see what would happen if I stopped feeding the fear machine every day.

I suspected I would have more time.

More calm.

More space for family, health, and friends.

Digital news and social media had helped turn me into a grumpy old curmudgeon.

Enough of that shit.

April 2018: the personal network

After deleting Facebook, I briefly created my own short-form space.

The idea was simple. A personal social network without the network. Short updates in one place. Longer writing somewhere else. A little corner of the internet that belonged to me, not a platform.

It was another version of the same instinct.

Publish on my own site.

Syndicate elsewhere if needed.

Do not build a life around borrowed rooms.

The project itself was small, but the thinking behind it mattered. I was trying to take back ownership of my words, my attention, and my time.

April 2018: the enlightened hermit

Someone had warned me that leaving Facebook would be social suicide.

I would disappear. No one would know who I was.

After almost four weeks without it, I did not miss it at all.

I also had not heard from many people who had once been listed as “friends”. That told me something useful. The platform had been masking the true shape of those relationships. Some were real. Some were not. Many were just names in a list.

That was fine.

The more I withdrew from social media, the more in touch I felt with myself.

I still had commitments pulling me in different directions. Volunteering. Favour jobs. Old promises. Things I had agreed to over the previous few years that no longer fit the life I was trying to build.

Meditation had started to help there, too. I felt calmer. Less anxious. More able to see ways out of problems I had helped create.

My focus had to be on my family and closest friends.

Balance mattered.

Being centred mattered.

I was still in the world. Just not so much in the digital one.

May 2018: away from keyboard

By May, we were preparing for a long-overdue holiday.

Nothing extravagant. We were not leaving the country. We were just getting away for a week.

My laptop had died a few weeks earlier. I replaced it with a desktop and dual monitors, which meant it could not come with us. That turned out to be a good thing.

I decided to leave almost everything behind.

The smartphone would come, but with Do Not Disturb switched on. It would only be used when needed, which would not be often. I bought a book and intended to start and finish it during the week.

For the first time in a long while, I wanted to be properly away.

Not performing absence.

Actually absent.

August 2018: the reclusive potential

Despite my best efforts, I remained something of a loner.

I did not see that as a bad thing.

I had been writing for a motorsport site, which I enjoyed and hoped might one day bring in some income. But in ordinary life, I did not have many friends. Acquaintances, yes. Friends, no. Only a handful.

That felt about right.

I like my own company. I like being with my small family. Sometimes I wonder whether life would be different if I had a larger circle, but large circles look like hard work. They need maintenance. They create expectation. They generate noise.

A small number of real friendships seems better than a sprawling network of people you kind of know.

Facebook friends lists had always struck me as strange for that reason. Hundreds of names. Sometimes thousands. But how many of those people would actually notice if you disappeared?

My friends are dear to me. I value their privacy, and I want them to value mine. Leaving Facebook, and later reducing my use of Twitter and Instagram, was partly about protecting that. Protecting the right to be less visible.

Anonymity had become harder to find.

Twenty years earlier, it was still possible to blend into the noise of ordinary life. You could write a letter. Make a phone call. Visit someone. You did not need to maintain a public-facing version of yourself.

I knew we would not return fully to that world.

But I could still shape my use of modern technology into something closer to it.

I did not need to own every device.

I did not need to be reachable everywhere.

I did not need to make my life available for casual inspection.

By then, my priorities had changed.

Reduce debt. Reduce stuff. Get healthier. Create more abundance for my family.

That was enough.

September 2018: again

September arrived quickly.

I was only weeks away from turning fifty.

Would I make it to one hundred? Not unless I changed a few things.

Nothing fancy. Put better things into my body. Move more. Keep it moderate. Try to build something sustainable.

A friend took a photograph of me around that time. When she showed it to me, I almost fell off the chair. Reality has a way of doing that. Seeing myself in profile made me realise how bad things had become.

If I did not make changes then, I doubted I had much more than twenty years left.

That sounds dramatic, but it did not feel dramatic at the time. It felt practical.

I wanted a modest life, free from unnecessary stress. I wanted to meditate daily, open my heart, trust my gut, and stop ignoring what felt wrong.

September had to be about three things.

My son.

My wife.

Myself.

That was where the energy needed to go.

What the nonline period taught me

Looking back, this whole period was not really about Facebook, phones, diaries, dumbphones, meditation apps, or notebooks.

Those were only tools.

The real issue was attention.

Where was it going?

Who was taking it?

What was I getting back?

I had spent years giving pieces of myself to platforms, plans, favours, half-formed business ideas, and vague versions of the future. Some of it mattered. Some of it taught me things. Some of it was just noise wearing the clothes of purpose.

Going nonline did not fix everything.

It did not make me rich.
It did not make me thin.
It did not solve work.
It did not turn me into the calm, centred man I kept imagining.

But it did reveal the pattern.

I needed fewer inputs.
Fewer promises.
Fewer borrowed platforms.
Fewer imaginary obligations.

I needed more time with my family.
More walking.
More writing.
More quiet.
More ownership of my own days.

That was the point of it all.

Not disappearance.

Return.