You’d think coming back from vacation that I’d be all airy fairy happiness and light.

I’m not.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m in superb spirits – borderline gleeful actually. My excursion in Vancouver proved the perfect digestible bit of R&R combined with some focused writing time. I returned to the Bay Area rested, refreshed and chomping at the bit to tackle the exciting roster of activities that lay in front of the start-up where I work.

I’d not been gone long – physically out of town for just shy of five days - with a bit more than three of those days completely and utterly disconnected from every single digital fetter usually adorning my person.

And the world didn’t end.

How depressing.

I mean come on. Don’t we all like to think that we’re absolutely, utterly and entirely integral to all that we do? That without our sage wisdom and expertise the world would collapse? Or is it perhaps that we, like so many 4 year old children, don’t want to leave the party and go to bed because we don’t want to miss anything.

My take? It’s a bit of both.

Exhibit A: an article in The New York Times Magazine highlighting the phenomenon of “ambient awareness”. This article addresses how, in our hyper-connected state, we have a greater affinity to the people around us. The main thrust of this article was how, thanks to all this social media stuff, we can now be intimately aware of the people with whom we have tenuous (or even non-existent) “real world” relationships.

Bullshit.

It’s all perception.

We may know what someone had for breakfast. We may know they had a big meeting. We may see the videos they shot of their kids at the beach. But do we really know who they are? No. Who a person is certainly comprised by all of these things, but their nature, their humanity is something that I just refuse to believe can be wholly translated without having some actual, real human connection.

It’s true there are some people whose adroit use of social media gives you a broad sense of who they are. In most cases, at least in my experience, these same people also are highly approachable and so when you do meet them in person, you really do know them. Because they allowed it.

But let’s face it, most folks’ communications skills just aren’t all that finely honed and so for the most part you have people who limit what they share to specific topics or parts of their lives, or people whose online persona bears little to no resemblance to the actual person you might meet.

There was another aspect to that article, however, I found a bit more troubling.

It stems from one sentence buried almost near the end, but to me it leapt off the page. It’s in a section detailing the trials and tribulations of a 27-year-old restaurant entrepreneur who had a hard time just walking “away from her online life” … and here’s the part that I found fascinating … “because the people she knows online won’t stop talking about her, or posting unflattering photos. She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what’s being said about her.”

Um. I’m sorry. What?

As I noted above there’s something childlike about someone thinking that they just can’t go away because they’ll miss something or – horror of horrors – someone might talk about them while they’re gone. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to the occasional foray into this mentality myself, but the truth of the matter is that if you spend your time worrying about what other people think of you, you’re wasting your time - because most of the time people aren’t thinking of you.

Has the echo chamber in which we live given us this overinflated sense of self-importance? Not really. There have been overly self-absorbed, self-indulged people long before we tech folk began to roam the earth. But I do believe this echo chamber exacerbates the problem.  And here’s why.

Staying truly digitally connected is time consuming. No matter how many tools may arise to aggregate, prioritize and otherwise streamline social media creation and consumption, it still takes time.  For those who fear the whole “out of sight out of mind” thing, this means committing to the activities required to maintain these digital links. 

Now if you’re one of the billions of people on this planet who have to work in any capacity for a living, that means you now have two jobs – making a living and then maintaining a life.

Exhausting.

And tell me this – where in that equation do you see room for some of those other staples in life? Things like family, quality time with good friends, and yes even that most elusive of things – a bit of off-line alone time as an individual?

Math was never my best class, but even I can see that those numbers don’t work.

Another person quoted in the New York Times Magazine article, Laura Fitton*, says that her social media addiction (my word not hers) actually has made her a happier more calm person.

She purports that the very act of getting thoughts out of her head into a space allows her not only the clarity of vision to review it, but that by being dragged out of her own head the person who becomes most clear in the reflection is oneself.

Not sure that’s a good idea.

Look where it got Narcissus.

*Disclosure:  I know Laura. And more disclosure – we met through Seesmic and Twitter and we have, indeed, become friends. But you know that type of person I described earlier on? Those people whose use of social media is just so well done and truly integrated to their DNA? Laura is one of those.