What Nightmares Are Made Of

Few things are more horrifying than the thought of someone going through my search history. Nobody needs to know of my morbid fascination with people who hide bodies in their homes.

Like many humans in the digital age, I spend a lot of time online—usually looking for answers to questions I wouldn’t have bothered asking before the internet was invented. It’s not that I didn’t have questions in the past; I just wouldn’t have cared enough to go searching for answers.

How to Squander Your Life Away in One Easy Step:

Here are a few examples from my search history to illustrate just how thoroughly I’ve wasted my time on this planet so far. In order to keep my blog PG-13, these examples are more uninspired than horrifying, but they serve to reflect the sad state of affairs inside my mind.

Finding answers used to be hard. Really hard. You had to know somebody, maybe make a few phone calls or (god forbid) go to the library. What would happen if rather than reaching for my phone or iPad to look something up, I paused to ask myself if I would bother researching this topic if I had to do so the old fashioned way. If I were to stop using my laptop as a Magic 8 Ball, I’d estimate a productivity increase of approximately 40,000 percent.

So what does this mean for the big picture? It means that over the past 12 months alone, I could have written a couple of books, produced daily content for my blog, read several dozen novels, learned Japanese, exercised, cleaned my house and earned a degree in astrophysics.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for less technology—that would be crazy. Technology is today’s key to discovery, and I like to consider myself the Nikola Tesla of useless knowledge. That being the case, if the technology for instant gratification didn’t exist, would I really take the time to research urban sinkholes and narwhal mating habits?

You bet your ass I would.