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Hello World. I turn 25 in a few weeks, I can't remember a time without being surrounded by technology. I remember playing the original Snake on my grandparents Nokia 3610 and playing Populous on the family PC. I've grown up online and I've grown tired of it.

My entire conscious life I have had access to the worlds knowledge at the press of a few buttons, before I was even a teenager I won a local math competition, now if you asked me an equation I couldn't do in my head my first instinct would be to pull out the supercomputer in my pocket and substitute it for my brain.

I've always seen stories of how people surrounded by tech everyday - usually tech workers - grow disillusioned with technology after any number of years but now in 2025 with the rise of AI and the social mediafication of everyday life this technological fatigue seems to be affecting everyone, young people in particular are deleting their social media. Florence Plant wrote a good column for the British Psychological Society on parallels between social media and narcissism, and her ultimate decision to delete social media for good.

Narcissistically back to myself, when I was 16 I setup my own forum, not a Reddit-esque feed but a fully fleshed out message board with a team of moderators and somewhat active userbase - now long gone with the domain being squatted by one of the many domain registrar services. I've contributed to others and created my own magazine websites, whether this is journalism, research or just writing for the sake of writing. By any measure, I should be an advocate for new technology - but in reality, I couldn’t be further from it. I have no interest in tech innovations at all.

My latest project which I have now taken offline was a music magazine. The last post on there was trying to convince that the early 2000s Houston rap group The Color Changin' Click were responsible for modern rap music. The reality is they are just one of any number of artists that contributed to the rise of the genre, after writing that post out and having it published for a few months I realised it is no better than the new trend of YouTube videos that treat old irrelevant media as some under-rated masterpiece responsible for everything we love today. I just wanted to write about a rap group I liked - but to try and stand out I had to find a deeper meaning in it all to justify it to myself. Which in the end did nothing but contribute to the meaningless 'slop' you forget about as soon as you click away.

Writing a blog like this is a protest to the social mediafication of life, there isn't anything good that can come of constant exposure to other peoples daily lives or their thoughts on everything, which makes this ironic in a way. I'm writing about how I don't want to see other peoples writing. There is a difference though, to read this you have to seek it out, but if I opened any social media within seconds I would see a dozen people post about things that won't matter to me as soon as I have scrolled to the next post, not against my will but certainly against my best interests.

So lets stop the meandering around the point. Social media fatigue has led to identity fatigue in todays world. People are growing up with their entire personality being dictated by the web, friendships are formed and broken through a screen and any one persons self-understanding is being morphed by what they think they should be through online advertisements and inauthenticity. The algorithm - whatever that means to you - is replacing lived experience and becoming a poison on the formative years of entire generations.

I'm not intending for this to become some critique on modern life - I'm an uneducated mid 20s man with an unhealthy relationship with technology. In an effort to disconnect over the last year or so I've tried it all. Going without a smartphone and using a dumbphone, going cold turkey completely on the internet, deleting social media or trying the many 'digital minimalism' methods shared in online communities also looking to disconnect. What I've realised about this though is unless you already have another hobby ready to dive deep into or some offline social support group you will come crawling back, for so many people social media has become their outlet so without something else to keep their mind occupied it isn't a matter of if but when you reactivate your accounts and go back to doom scrolling.

Personally, in the last 10 years all of my personal relationships have been dictated by the internet, forming parasocial relationships with 10-follower SoundCloud musicians or Twitch streamers, joining guilds in video games that take over all of my social interaction for the same guild to then fall apart on any given weekday to never interact again. Through my bouts of self reflection and social media deletion it cuts off any interaction with even the people I know in real life - if the conversations we are having online are so unimportant that you wouldn't reach out offline to talk about the same things why do we have them at all?

Hopefully I can use this website as my outlet, whether it is rambling posts on life thoughts such as this one or showcasing projects like I had the motivation to do 10 years ago. Maybe it will become something like the many blogs available to browse on the Blogroll Club site, or maybe I never post again after realising the stupidity of such a project when I wake up tomorrow.