Tarah Walsh Writes

Reconfiguring my life has been harder than I expected–and in ways I never anticipated.

It’s a beautiful, crisp Tuesday morning. I pour myself a cup of coffee, crack open my laptop and check my email.

Crickets.

Two years ago, I dreaded opening my email for another reason— scores of Slack messages and emails flooding my inbox before 9 a.m. — I didn’t want my cortisol to spike before I’d finished my coffee.

I got exactly what I wanted: a quieter, slower life. A life of intention. A life with less distraction from technology and meaningless noise.

I didn’t realize how much I had defined my worth around that noise until it stopped.

As a millennial, I built my career in a world of laptops and email and pinging messages. Like many of my cohort, I was a de facto technology expert in the office teaching my superiors to convert Word documents into PDFs, resizing images, fixing printers and wireless connections and eventually, running the entire digital strategy for organizations.

I built my career around one of those jobs that didn’t exist a few decades prior. One of those jobs that everyone keeps telling us we can’t imagine artificial intelligence will usher in and benefit everyone—except for the social media era.

At the height of social media’s prowess, I was in demand. Leading teams, developing integrated digital strategies across channels, getting conversions, creating digital-first content—SMS, email, paid media, blog content, multiple social media channels for multiple brands—you name it, I was spinning it for the masses.

At first it was fun. I used my creative brain for all sorts of different projects and challenges. Like a game, always shifting with big rewards and near misses—making content for humans and organizational goals while also pulling one over on the algorithm—

ahh, friends. The sweet allure of it all.

I was hopped up on just the right combination of dopamine and cortisol that left me high one day and bone tired the next. It paid me well. I gained some nice job titles. I was busy. I felt important.

Yet somewhere along the way I started to loathe it.

The cortisol days outnumbered the dopamine hits. The game started sucking the creative joy instead of fueling it. I saw the guts of this giant, optimized media ecosystem up close, and I hated what it was doing to everyone—what it was doing to me.

I saw how manipulative the algorithms were, how it optimized for rage instead of nuance and deliberation and love. This network, these tools that were promised to create community and friendship and stronger institutions were breaking them.

Once I saw it, once the scales fell from my eyes, I couldn’t unsee it—the cracks were everywhere. We were the product in the machine.

Our data, our lives, our communities, our democracies, our time—our precious, precious time and attention—ground within the gears of technological progress.

What bargain had we made? What bargain had I made?

I needed out.

Nothing is ever so easy.

While I’ve reconfigured my career, and it is indeed much quieter and my mental health much saner, the machine is built. And I have been thoroughly trained and reshaped by it.

Bit by bit, I’m reclaiming myself. Remembering a childhood and a perspective not defined by the grind, the ping, the electric buzzsaw of our current world.

I often fantasize about a big plug that powers all of the internet—one that I can pull and do a hard reboot on this pile of digital shit we’ve created. Start over. Realize the promise and dream of the early internet.

I resist the urge to scream into the void—a void that has become quite literal for me as my inbox churns more slowly and notifications quiet. Instead, I sit with myself and listen to the birds chirp as the voice in my head hums to their song.

Occasionally, I dip my toe within the waters of the content mill, swimming upstream one day, following the current the next—searching, searching, searching.

For community. For connection. For sparks of joy. To find ways to make my creative brain whir within this sludge-y digital world.

Maybe I’m wrong.

I hope I’m wrong.

I want to write. I want to create. I’d like to earn a small living without losing my mind to the digital noise.

I don’t know if it’s possible.

I suppose we’ll see.