#4 Are we running out of personal space?

My mom always tells me that I should be thankful because she respect my personal space so much that she sends me a message only once a week. She says that other people my age (26 at the moment) get together with their family once a week. I'm not sure if that's true, I guess I haven't asked my friends about that.

A couple of years ago I read in twitter that being always available is a very new concept. The tweet talked about how now with technology you can instantly message anyone you know. And because of that people expect you to get back to them pretty quickly, like within hours or at most a day since you got the message.

Before the internet, there was the phone, the piece of technology my parents grew up with. A quick search tells me that the first cellphones were made around 1981 and popularized in my country in the 1990's. My parents had around my age when commercial cellphones started to get popular.

Before that was the phone, which I guess is was similar, but you could only access it if you were at home. Which meant that if you were outside then you were completely cut off, just having a conection with people through proximity. Cellphones changed that I guess, but in the early days calling and messaging costed money per call minute/message. So nobody expected you were always able to call them and you also didn't want to call people whenever you liked.

Going back to today. Is this ok? Is being always connected and always alert to what's happening healthy?

A lot of horrible things are happening in the world all the time. Heck, things are happening in my country right now, we have a fire in a forest nearby and the air smells like smoke. Also next week I have to vote on the new constitution draft, which I haven't read yet and apparently sucks according to people I respect. I will give it a read before the voting day though, just to know what is happening.

Going back again to personal relationships, I think its not healthy to be constantly connected. I think we should use email, messaging apps and social media as letters and magazines. You don't expect other people to respond to you in a couple of days or maybe a week. Maybe more? I don't know.

I guess I want it to be ok to not check my email or phone for a couple of days. But even that has consequences.

I don't like to chat, I just don't like it, I don't know why. It may be because of my ADHD. But my friends love to chat, we have a group chat and the talk a lot. Everytime we hang out it is like I'm completely out of the loop, they know exactly what has happened to each other in the last couple of months, while I don't know nothing.

Everytime they have to explain the new gossip to me. I don't think they get annoyed by this though, but it feels weird. Because I am not always connected and I don't take the time to catch up to all their messages I kinda fall out of the loop.

I don't know, we live in a weird time. And I wish I someday find a way to adapt to it, learn to have a healthy relationship with this new technology and also my friends. I'm super sleepy now so I'm going to sleep. Good night!