Balancing online and offline life

Image by lintmachine via Flickr

Couple of years ago my online presence was limited to surfing, emailing and sometimes chatting. Friends were mostly the part of the offline activity. Over the time some friends left the city to pursue different career and rather deferred life elsewhere. Emailing was the main source of keeping contacts. But the time has changed ever since. The so-called socializing has become more prominent online activity than offline one. Emailing and traditional instant messaging became redundant and online social networking took over their place.

Perhaps rosy looking picture at the beginning of these networks, which was mostly painted by unprecedented enthusiasm towards this new platform, started intruding my offline activity very aggressively. The truth is that the true friends, even with sporadic contact over many years, don't forget you. But these online platforms somehow created some kind of compulsion and obligation that I should always check these portals, compensating the desire to meet some of them offline. As we age, we tend to have other responsibilities like that of new work, new projects, new goals and, this social activity seems to be intruding the time reserved for these. And these online social activities have become more like an addiction.

Now that the excitement of this new platform is fading away, the need is to realign it to ones routine life. As the online activity is important for socializing with ol' friends, the offline activity is also as important to socialize with the people with physical presence in real time. Anything, any sort of activity, in excess is always an addiction. There must always be trade-off or balance between any two opposite ends. This is not only valid in this context of online-offline activity, but also applies to anything at any stage of life.

I always believed that the world is neither left-handed nor right-handed, but rather both-handed. But rarely humans tends to see it this way. But the time always has the answer in the end. And everything results in blind balancing.