Wouldn’t it be nice to just one day wake up and see good news for a change? This constant cycle of opening my phone in the morning and seeing an abundance of miserable headlines clog my screen is enough to completely ruin the rest of my day. Not only is it utterly depressing, but it’s also a right nuisance. The fun-sucking updates go on all day – beeping and buzzing into the twilight hours with shock after shock, horror after horror – until the moment your weary head finally hits the pillow and collects all of the day’s information to create some wild and crazy dream.

And not the good kind, either.

Now, I’m fully aware and in agreement that we should all keep up to speed with society’s movements and changes, especially if it’s something important we need to know about or could possibly improve – being well-informed on those kinds of matters is beneficial to the world. However, this plethora of woe and terror that influxes my news feed every couple of hours – constantly reminding me of how our planet has gone to shit – that, I could really do without.

Hearing about it on a 24/7 level (with the only uplifting break in-between being, “It’s Feelgood Friday!”) is starting to wear me down. There is such a thing as knowing too much and, I don’t know about anyone else, but, having all of this information thrust at me so frequently is ruining any hope I had for a positive future.

As someone who is still relatively young, I have a lot of excitable energy and yearning to explore the world around me. My fascination for new places and niche experiences is what drives me, and being able to put those plans into action is what motivates me to live. Yet, discovering that the place I want to see most is notoriously dangerous for solo travellers or finding out that people are becoming duller and more narcissistic than ever, is enough to put me off leaving my house! I’m now even too scared to make new friends, just in case they turn out to be an incognito oddball with a penchant for guns.

With all of this craziness, it really is no wonder we’re the loneliest generation alive. Social media may have been an impressive idea in its heyday, but now, thanks to this inundation of knowledge and stalker-like connection, things have gone too far.

We’re all in each other’s pockets and yet, we know nothing about what’s really going on. Everyone has 1000 friends and 10,000 followers but no one seems to have that 1 true connection.

This is why I’d rather keep myself to myself. This is why I would rather be single than taken. This is why I’d prefer to live vicariously through fiction than reality. Because, amongst other reasons, realising that the real world is becoming more superficially nice and less intrinsically sensical is making me depressed. It’s as though so many people have an agenda or that there’s always a hidden price to pay for something that should be standard.

Is being normal really that hard?

Of course, I want to see new things. Without question, I want to wander around new places and have genuine connections with people to make memorable moments, just like they do in all the movies. But heck, even the movies have started to incorporate the weirdness, too! Mimicking the crap that goes on in our everyday lives seems to be an essential part of the modern epoch. And with this obvious rise of bad news occurring so densely in the millennial era, it’s making the concept of kindness seem more and more out of reach.

Is there really no escape? Has the digital age well and truly taken over? 

Despite the fear that I’m fighting a losing battle here, I’d like to think not. It would be nice to believe that it’s possible to bring back a little bit of the analogue beliefs of the past generations. Whereby, if you wanted to talk to somebody, you made a little more effort. You didn’t just send them a nonsense meme or hound them with drivel – you had something proper to say to them. No one got offended because you were “online” but not speaking. People lived their own lives and came together organically. Life had its stressors, granted, but not the same ones as it does today. Dramas had their place on the 6 o’clock news or in soap operas – not at our fingertips.

Perhaps it’s time we somewhat disconnected from the digital world in order to regain some peace of mind in the real one? After all, they say “ignorance is bliss” for a good reason, and I’d definitely like to get some more bliss back into my life.

And in my future.

…What about you?