On the Internet Not Being a Thing 

Can you even imagine the Internet not existing??

I grew up without the internet even being a thing, as I’m sure many of us (oldies) did. It just didn’t even exist whatsoever in any form that we could use. Which seems absolutely crazy now, the way black and white tv and no hair straighteners seems crazy to us 30-somethings now.

My year at school was the very first one to start using email and I remember us choosing our very first email address (which I still have now!!) which I found so exciting.

Can you imagine at all the internet not existing now? I find it absolutely bizarre to think about how different my life would be without the Internet and it’s hard to fathom how life would actually be without any type of online world. It almost seems like how could it possibly not exist, the same as water or air not existing (only a slight exaggeration).

I wouldn’t be doing this for a job for a start.

I would be wholly texting people rather than talking on WhatsApp to the vast majority of people in my life that I message.

My 7-year-old daughter wouldn’t have had an American accent at times because of YouTube (True story. The ladies at her nursery had presumed her Dad was American before they had met him. She didn’t watch that much YouTube I swear).

Netflix wouldn’t exist and I would never know the pure joy of Gilmore Girls and Harvey Specter. Well, I could have watched them on regular TV perhaps, but I couldn’t have binged watched like a mofo and would have had to wait a WHOLE WEEK for another episode.

We wouldn’t constantly be comparing our lives to those with perfect ones on Instagram. That would be nice I think. I do wonder how differently I would feel about myself if I didn’t constantly witness others (online) lives.

I wouldn’t have half the friends I do now. I would never have spoken to or met a lot of the people who are an important part of my life now and whom I love wholeheartedly. That is such a weird thing to think about.

Maybe we would all be less intelligent if we didn’t have Google at our fingertips every time we want to know something. We’d have no idea who Zoella is or how to spell onomatopoeia or know what floccinaucinihilipilification means.

We wouldn’t be able to order all of the things from Amazon constantly or ASOS when we’re a bit tipsy (just me?). We would have to actually traipse round shops to look for new clothes. I would have to physically visit Holland and Barrett to get my many, many vitamins. Ahh, online shopping I love thee.

Would we all be sicker because of the wealth of information and health advice we can get online? Or would we all be less of a hypochondriac because we couldn’t google all of our symptoms and discover we’re going to die tomorrow?

Then there’s also the much bigger, worldwide things that might be very different without the Internet. The likelihood is that we wouldn’t all be trying to reduce our use of single-use plastics after seeing those horrendous photos of sea creatures surrounded and trapped by all of the plastic floating in our oceans and us all talking about it online. Things wouldn’t be able to go viral on social media and so the #Metoo movement and the positive outcomes from that may never have happened.

I find it so fascinating, and weirdly scary to think about the Internet never having been a thing. Maybe we’d all be that much happier without the pressures of social media and comparison, and worrying about our children being old enough to want to use it.

But the Internet has opened up a whole other world to us. I love what it has given me; that I can be sat in my dining room with a cup of tea and my cat snoring peacefully next to me whilst I’m writing this, that I have made wonderful friends whom I talk to every day, that we have blogs to read and someone always online to talk to if we’re feeling lonely, that we can order a book online to download to our phones and always have with us to read. We can save time by shopping online, and then waste that time we’ve saved by scrolling through Instagram for 45 minutes. We can find out about the vast world around us and learn about other people’s experiences and perspectives.

Maybe life would be easier without the Internet. But would it be better? I don’t think so.