Stand Up and Face Your Internet Addiction

I have been connected to the World Wide Web for over 10 years now and will be the first to confess that I probably spend a little too much time online. Okay, way too much time. I've often wondered how many others are in this state of denial and if they are actually capable of recognizing the addiction signs. I'm here to help, so take a look in the mirror I'm holding up and see if your image is staring back at you.

If you have experienced blocks of lost time while online, chances are pretty good that you were not abducted by the mother ship but it is more than likely that you got caught up in that awful trap of clicking links on the pages you were visiting until you end up forgetting where and when you started. To make matters even worse there is now a great little toolbar available called "stumbleupon' that will randomly send you to sites that match your interests which you can give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" to. The toolbar then caters the sites even further to your preferences. This is like crack to the internet addict and I am loathe to mention the website address as I don't want to be your pusher.

Another sure sign of addiction is when it comes time to list your friends. If your best friends have names liked Casper32, DarkKnight, or ladiesman69, then it's a pretty good indication that you are spending a little too much time in front of a monitor as opposed to a living, breathing human being. I understand this part to an extent as someone who is painfully shy and doesn't do well in social situations but no amount of "friendships" fostered on networking sites like Yuwie, Facebook, or Myspace will help you when it comes time for someone to help you lift your heavy items when you are moving house. For that you need real people.

The joy of shopping and visiting the mall is another pastime that is lost to us web junkies. When just about anything you can think of is available 24/7, 365 days a year just by clicking a couple of buttons, then what is the point of going out to shop? It's this type of thinking that leads us all down the slippery slope of avoiding physical interaction with others of our species and becoming a slave to the modem.

Think about it for a moment. If tomorrow the entire World Wide Web ceased to exist, just how much would your life be affected? I'd have to re-learn skills like writing checks to pay bills, trusting someone other than myself to make travel arrangements, and waiting till 6 PM to catch up with what happened in the world in the preceding hours. It's a little scary, when you think about, how much we rely on electronics to simplify our life and how lost many of us would be without them, so my advice is to take one day a week where you don't use your cell phone or computer so that you can practice for the day when the entire network crashes and we have to write and talk again just like the old days.