Sometimes I feel like a police scanner – to the extent I even know how a police scanner works. I scan constantly through my computer and phone throughout the day, every day. It is kind of a ritual but more of a neurosis, if I’m honest.

It is an odd combination of FOMO (fear of missing out) but also a form of hyper-vigilance. I look and constantly wait for “things that need to be tended to.” A utility bill. An enticing post or meme. A bank statement. Friends’ birthdays. All things that may need my “urgent” attention.

I am so familiar with this pattern now and the feelings it is trying to manage.

My life’s work has been trying to pull back together the fragmented pieces of myself that flew apart when I was a child and young woman. Pieces of myself flew apart on several occasions before I hit the proverbial brick wall.

When I was younger, I suffered from a bad case of arrogance of youth. I overestimated my importance and ability to change the world. It is a common arrogance that life thrashes out of most of us.

Most of us settle into familiar routines as we grow into adulthood. I see that as a gift life gives us. Even plants have to find a place to dig in and take root if they are to become fully mature and productive. It underpins the philosophy “to bloom where you are planted.”

These days, I am not so sure young people are able to access and develop those routines as easily. Young adults fret and fuss about the basics way too deeply into adulthood. Their conversations are an all too familiar commiseration about how difficult life has become. Houses are unaffordable. In longterm rental accommodation, equity cannot be built. And equity has always been the most familiar and reliable route to financial security.

So people everywhere – just like me – are enraptured by the world available to them on their rectangular anchors. Problem is – and the problem is becoming much clearer to many – the online world is illusory. It is full of bias and singular POV’s and fragments of truth.

Constantly surfing the internet is like eating and eating at a buffet and yet never feeling full. It is like watching kids play on the other side of a chainlink fence. It is like blowing kisses to loved ones on the other side of a glass wall.

Nothing can take the place of that perfect first bite of something sinfully delicious. Nothing can replace that extremely particular sensation of joy and pleasure. Nothing beats good old-fashioned hugging and giggling to bond us to each other.

So I’m devising a plan. To wean myself away from this obsessive ritual of device scanning and become more deliberate about how I spend my time. The aim is to calm my mind. To stare down the internal “to-do” list. The aim is to settle down incessant demands that are largely self-created.

For the past several months, it seems all I needed were tchotchkes from online stores which I was sure would add heaps to my sense of peace and security and wholeness. Those tchotchkes have not done that and the message is coming through loud and clear that I need to shift direction.

So I have set a path. The boundaries of that path are ill-defined at the minute but that is the process new ideas go through to get born. Less time online. More quiet time with myself and in nature.

I could wrap this up by saying something clever like, “I’m heading to the internet to find articles on exactly how to do that!” But I won’t. I’ll take my coffee outside to listen to the sounds of our community starting its day in the distance and the birds in the trees around us waking up.

There is inherently more comfort in nature than chasing illusions on the Internet. We all need to relearn that.

I’m pretty sure those birdsongs will comfort and settle me. Excuse me while I turn this off to go do that.