At eighty-two, I tend to occasional doubt and paranoia. Is that light-headed feeling a stroke? What would have happened if I’d fallen down those stairs? Is my dog/friend/husband/self going to die? Should I chance it and go to India?
In her book, How To Live, or A Life of Montaigne, Sarah Bakewell describes Montaigne’s vigil at the deathbed of his close friend, Etienne de la Boétie., who says, “I am soon to be thirty-three. God granted me this grace, that all my life up to now has been full of health and happiness. In view of the inconstancy of things human, that could hardly last any longer.” Thirty three? I hadn’t given birth to my first child by then. Everything’s relative, and solid advice from the past doesn’t always fit our modern challenges. At my age, however, I have the gift of memory of the before times.
My personal paranoia began around 25 years ago with bogus telephone calls. They were obvious and I just hung up; but today, they’re more sophisticated: that police organization asking for donations, the acquisitions editor who wants to present my work to movie producers, the sales pitch of a person from an unidentifiable country with an accent so thick I can’t understand her. How did this person in the Philippines get my phone number?
Moving past the telephone to Facebook, I receive daily Friend Requests from fake men. Though I instantly delete all male doctors or oil rig workers, this hoax presents a threat to me. Either someone wants money and has a plan to get it from me, or maybe they want to infiltrate my personal systems. Simply conjecturing the depth of despair and loneliness driving engagement with these fraudulent creatures is depressing on its face. Receiving daily threats to my well being is depressing on its face. These invitations do not come from someone who is fooling around; they have a plan, and since Facebook does not remove frauds before they reach users, it is up to users to protect themselves.
When I go onto online sites, I am in a fight-or-flight state of mind. When the internet blew up recently and a banking transaction wasn’t possible online, how glad I was that I’d ignored the ridicule I endured when making paper printouts of my accounts. The belt has not completely replaced suspenders.
Even banking and government sites have been hacked. My personal information has been collected in more than one hack, and I have no idea what the hackers intend to do with it. Red flags tremble with every online connection. The modern international criminal gangs recall the ruthlessness of Clockwork Orange and modern disinformation campaigns and surveillance were foreshadowed by 1984. Animal Farm is still about all of us.
It’s easy enough to say, “Just get off this or that site,” but all online interactions are sullied by caution and doubt. For our survival and mental health, we’d all be better off taking, whenever possible, what life feeds us in real time and real place. I welcome the good things that have resulted from modern technology, for example, the new connections made on Zoom and the speedy transactions that are now possible, but we can increase our reliance on real life to give us solid rock to stand on. We can re-establish that balance.