r/BackOffline

Saw a Spanish meme series going around. Same caption on every panel: "we've normalized this so much that this is a luxury." Eight contrasts. Office vs. meadow. Coffee tower vs. eight hours of sleep. ChatGPT vs. thinking with your own brain. Supplements vs. actual food. Tinder match vs. coffee with a friend.

What's the small, dumb thing in your life that you didn't notice becoming the luxury version? The thing that used to be normal and now feels like effort.

I'll start: Time in nature. I value it a lot now when I can spend some time surrounded by nature, I love it.

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I make dinner most weeknights. I have, for some time now, made it while listening to a podcast at 1.5x speed, which is the speed I read at, which is the speed I do most things at.

Last Wednesday I put the radio on instead. The local station, the one with weather and traffic and a guy who plays jazz between 7 and 9. I chopped onions slowly and let the pasta water boil while I just stood there. I heard a song I didn't know.

Took 35 minutes instead of the usual 20, tasted the same, and it didn't blur into the other ones. I'm not turning this into a thing, that's not the post. The post is that I noticed I had been doing it the other way for so long that doing it normally felt strange.

The friend is having a baby. The party was small, with people I had not met before in the kitchen.

The hostess introduced me by name and asked me to fill in the rest.

The first three sentences out of my mouth were where I work, what I do there, and how long I've been doing it. Then that I live in the neighbourhood, and a joke about commuting.

I don't think anyone at the party noticed. The conversation moved on.

I noticed.

I don't have a fix for this and I'm not pretending I do. I'm noticing that when someone asks "tell us about yourself," I default to a LinkedIn answer in a way I didn't five years ago. I'm sitting with this.

The next time someone asks, I am going to try to lead with something else, even if it comes out wrong. I don't know what the something else is yet. That's also the loop.

This is the thread for what you planned for the weekend and what actually happened. Going first so it doesn't feel like an audit.

Plan: Fly home to see family. Three days, fully there, no laptop opened, no Slack opened. They live in another country so this is the closest thing to a big event my calendar has.

Reality: Got to my parents' house Friday night. Made it to Saturday morning before opening the laptop "for fifteen minutes" at the kitchen table while my dad was making coffee. Stayed there an hour. Sunday brunch I checked Slack twice. Once because something had pinged, once because nothing had pinged in too long. My mom asked me twice what I wanted to do that afternoon and my first thought was... laptop.

There were maybe ninety good minutes on Saturday afternoon when I actually was there. We walked to a place I used to go as a kid and I was in the conversation. Most of the rest of the weekend the same low static was running underneath everything else.

Loved being with them. Hated the Monday list piling up in my head while I was there.

Drop yours below, busy brains. Plan, reality, and whatever the gap was.