I’m following up my last post with this one.

Not only was it great meeting up with Vince, TJ, and all of the guys who came out to the Village By The Lake, but I realized something else:

Other than extremely brief stints on Twitter, mostly to retweet Periscopes and whatnot, I wasn’t online all that much. In fact, because of the meet ups and things that came up at the last minute that were totally unavoidable for me, I was hardly online at all. No Masculine Geek show, no Let ‘Em Burn, and no Red Evening. I didn’t even make any new content. Thank god for automation and having stuff already set up.

I still feel a little bad that I couldn’t be on those shows with my friends, but at the same time, it was refreshing to be “offline.”

After Vince and TJ left to go back to their respective homes, I was able to get online and scroll through my timeline and actually read what was going on and see what I had missed.

Other than a couple of minor things, I really didn’t miss anything.

In fact, the stuff that I did see, while it was the usual fare, spoke volumes to me.

Guys, you need to get off Twitter, at least for awhile. And by awhile, I’m thinking at least a couple of weeks, if not a month or more. Some of the things that I saw, the levels of stress, negativity, and “toxicity” that is out there, you are going to give yourselves a stroke or a heart attack, and I’m not kidding. You are winding yourselves up for no reason other than to wind yourselves up.

Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE was talking about the “presidential debates.” Give me strength. It doesn’t matter which party “wins,” we all lose either way, so why stress and worry about it? It’s been that way since before I was born. The system is broken and needs to be completely torn apart and built again from the ground up, not reformed, revamped, or tweaked.

Railing about it on the internet isn’t going to fix it. It’s just going to give you high blood pressure and an ulcer to boot. Find a more relaxed and productive use of your time.

More and more guys are doing the “wahmen bad” thing. Guys, get offline and go out into the world and you’ll realize that women aren’t really that bad, and some of them are actually pretty neat. You’ll never know that by staying glued to your phones and your tablets and your laptops. Get offline and go outside and talk to them. Say hi. Smile. Wave. You might be surprised when they smile, wave, and say hi back.

The Village By The Lake had an unintended consequence for me, and that was that I was offline for almost a week. It was one of the most relaxing and enjoyable weeks that I have had in a long time. Honestly the last time that I felt this relaxed was probably a year ago when I went out to Atlantic City for the Village By The Sea.

We aren’t designed to live our lives online. We aren’t wired that way. It’s bad for us and our health. Get offline for a few weeks or a month or more. I’ll bet your life gets less stressful and more enjoyable. I’ll bet you’ll be able to relax.

I know that I have, and that was from only being offline for literally six days. I fully intend to do more of that.

Life is short and it will pass you by in the blink of an eye. There are so many beautiful things to see, hear, and experience, and you’ll miss it all by staying glued to your monitors, whatever size they may be.

There’s more to life than the internet and social media. There’s more to life than politics and boo-hooing about the women. There’s more to life than preparing for doomsday, which in all honesty you can’t truly prepare for. Something will always come up that you had no idea was going to happen, and you’ll either deal with it when it comes up, or you won’t. And if you don’t deal with it when it comes up, in a worst case scenario, you’ll probably be dead and all of your problems will be over with anyway.

So instead of worrying about things that you have no control over and worrying about things that in all likelihood won’t happen to you, relax, go outside, and enjoy your life.

Get offline for awhile and then thank me later.

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