Sometimes I wonder if my attraction to Facebook and my habitual Internet news sites is voyeurism. Why else would I be so attracted to the superficial aspects of other people’s lives? Why else would I care so much about photography, and spend so much money and time to take pictures of people I don’t know or care about?

 

It’s not healthy. Not good for me or anybody else. It’s normal for early adolescents to be easily hoodwinked by an over-concern for appearance, but it’s tragic to see it in adults. At sixty-six I think I finally merit that classification, even though I often seem to have the mental makeup of a fourteen-year-old.

 

What is the difference between me sneering at Melania Trump at the Republican National Convention and an old lady peering through her curtains and judging her neighbors? Do I really care if the Clinton Foundation is corrupt? What does any of it have to do with me, anyway?

 

Now the news has become a 24 hour entertainment venue. I can watch it and think that by being an informed citizen I’m doing something productive, but I know that’s not really the case. If my use of the Internet and social media were to encourage and support others who were actually trying to do something productive, it would be a non-pathological use of these media, but all this gawking and rubbernecking in front of my laptop is getting me down. Guess I have to find a life that’s not about consuming and sharing images.

 

In this part of Chiang Mai, for some reason the power goes out often. Sometimes I can imagine an explanation for why it has failed, and other times, I simply shrug and look at the overhead wiring, a rat’s nest of weathered cables. Now that the rainy season is finally here it has cooled off a bit, so a temporary lack of air conditioning is no longer life-threatening, but it’s annoying to suddenly be deprived of the Internet. My computer freaks out. You’d think it was a Chromebook instead of a real laptop, but nowadays there’s little difference. Windows 10 is alarmed that it can’t verify my log-in, even though I never asked to have to log-in to begin with.

 

In fact, I never asked for Windows 10 to begin with. They sort of bullied me into it by warning me that the systems I had paid for and use in the past were no longer available. I used to think Google was the good guy, but now I think all these browsers and email providers are insufferable, trying to upload every image I capture or word I write, in case I might want to “share” it later with my “friends” who are obviously voyeurs like me. What they really want to do is become my storage provider, and eventually charge me for that service. I hate them.

 

Yes, I spend far too much of my time online, yes I do suffer from withdrawal pains if I am offline for more than half a day, yes, I care far too much about the reactions of my “friends” to my innumerable posts which are often simply cries for attention. Help, I’m on the other side of the world, living as an economic refugee in a country where no one speaks English. Sometimes when I’m out on my motor scooter I come across an elephant walking down the road. How’s that for noteworthy and unusual? Better take a picture and share it with someone who might think it unusual and even better, might envy me for having such an interesting life.

 

It’s all so horribly junior-high. Am I popular with my classmates? Mix that adolescent anxiety with the bucket-list concept for those heading to the last round up. As death approaches, I have a duty to myself and others to consume peak experiences that can be photographed, videoed and succinctly described in a caption that would not bore or confuse. If I fail to tick off the boxes on my bucket list, then I will end my days as a confirmed loser.

 

How do we escape this superficiality? By having a set of core beliefs that resist the ebb and flow of fads, the manipulations of advertising, the trends promoted by magazines (the whores of advertising), and the rigorous and soul-deadening edicts of the Establishment, whoever they might be at the moment.

 

When I was in high school during the Vietnam war, I would watch John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, making fun of hippies and war protesters. I knew these men were not on my side. If push came to shove, they would be on top and I would be on the bottom. I vowed then and there to have nothing to do with them, the armed forces, ROTC, the Republican Party, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and any of his minions, the names of whom: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kissinger…still make me queasy to this day