So its been my first month in Japan ! Yay !
And its been totally great.
Its also the one month anniversary of :
- Living in a country where they don't speak any of
the languages I know.
- Living in a country being a pure vegetarian where
the concept of vegetarianism is as unknown as multi-dimensional time travel.
- Living as the only Indian girl in Osaka( this point might be debatable
but trust me I have seen a few Indian business men in Osaka but haven't
yet seen a single Indian girl in Osaka.)
- Living without Internet during weekends and no internet at
my apartment( its a bold step for me ).
- Living without a cellphone or any contact number.
- Living without IM chatting for a month .
- Living without being a member of any social networking site or
being active on any of them.
Now the last four things are by choice. Since I am in Japan I am
trying to test out the zen way of life,the simple living concept,
less is more etc. And it has turned out great.
Having internet at only specific times makes me prioritize my
tasks when I do have internet.
During the weekends I get to go out, get back to my hobbies,
do some reading. Not checking your email every few minutes doesn't
change anything, not checking your email in 2-3 days also not does
change much !
Not having a cellphone didn't make even a slight difference in my life.
You have public telephones to make calls and I use Skype to chat
with my family.
Not IM chatting has been interesting. I stopped chatting when I had
really insane amount of work. But now it turned out a social experiment
for me. I have come to the conclusion that if someone actually wanted
to contact they will email me anyways. And its much better than having
a huge list of friends where you realize that there has actually
hardly been any conversation with 90% of them since long and all
they end up is just being names that become online and offline on your list.
As for the social networking experiment. I was researching on a
design project where I had to study current social networking
habits and was surprised to see how much in detail people gave
and absorbed information and their need to be ever connected .
I was a member of many social networking sites, being moderately active.
So I wanted to see if I could exist without them. So I went ahead and
deleted my Orkut, Twitter, Friendfeed, I still kept my facebook and
flickr account but didn't contribute anything on them(had to keep at
least 2 -I feared too harsh withdrawal symptoms) .
And of course I have this blog which I would say is kind of a form
of social networking. Observation on becoming relatively “anti-social” –
Didn't affect my life as much I had imagined, I can definitely live
without those sites.
I suggest everyone especially people of my generation, who feel
they need to be forever connected and need to have “feeds” to
every freakin' thing their “friends” have been up to, to give this
a shot- be only connected when the need is there, rather than every
freakin' moment you are awake.
Seriously its not as bad as you imagine, trust me I lived with an
iPhone 24/7 that provided me ever ready connectively and now I don't
even have an active cellphone here.
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