Living offline, as much as possible, I originally wrote this article by hand on Monday 20th January, 2025.

Enjoy this new addition to the Gen X Diary.

Suzanne Beenackers
creating 20th century lives

—

An important insight just came to me.
Because I’ve known for years being online was changing something fundamental within us, making us fragmented and broken. And I also knew that the key to success in ANY AREA is what I call the Coffee Pot Problem.

The problem to be solved is this:
“What Coffee Pot do I need to BE, what is the content, the life, the people, the work, that I need to be able to HOLD, when I have achieved my success?”

We always focus on how we get to the content which goes into the pot. Money in our bankaccount, car on the driveway, lover in our bed. Or, also very common, we focus on BEING the correct, well-educated, responsible content ourselves!
So others will take us into their coffee pot (their lives)

So they will buy our book, invite us for coffee – oh, if only we could be such tasteful coffee that EVERYONE would love to get their hands on us right?! Wrong – 
Offer us a job, accept us into their community.

Come 2025 and we would kill to be invited over for something or by someone who will accept us for who we are (the best coffee in the world, among many other things) and offer us a home.

Now up until 2010, 2015, somewhere along those lines, I would have given you a fair chance of finding that.
There was still, at heart, a calmness and peacefulness to life, which had a way of grounding us.
Of confronting us with reality with the others around us. With our circumstances and with who we truly were.

This was a place of solitude and although we could fill it up with television or visiting social media sites through our browser;
Using apps for social media for news, YouTube and sending texts, was absolutely not the common practice it is today.

And the algorithm revolution in the wake of Facebook being the first to crack the code and in its slipstream the entire internet;
That had not taken place.

It wasn’t until 2016, 2017 when everything was, and is, connected to everything. And our brains get overpowered the moment we turn on our computer or phone.

By 2016, 2017 the revolution had been completed.

By then the majority of us were compromised by the internet and we were no longer in control of our own mind.

We became the messengers and the henchmen of ideas that were not our own, and that had been spoon fed to us.

If the roots of who you were and the values you had and held and lived by, were not rooted as solid as an 600 year old oak?
You were permanently connected to your digital media in order to be bled and harvested for everything that was of use.
And at its first sign of replenishment of resources.

Your time, your awareness, your emotions, your identity, your aesthetics and looks and of course – your money.

The first person to point out what the consequences were of this Matrix-like behavior/situation, where we are little more than bodies in a pod drained for our energy, was Cal Newport.

His book “Deep Work” (2016) explains how creating uninterrupted time brackets is the key to staying productive.
Combined with his book “Digital Minimalism” (2019) they explore the fundamentals of what happened, the dire consequences and of course what to do about it.

The books are an education, about how to hold on to your intellectual resources, in an online world capitalizing on what took you a lifetime to build.

But that is just the productivity side of things. A very narrow capitalist, yet of course necessary countermove to protect what’s yours. And very much needed for your own survival, if you don’t want to end up naked, bald and spinning in a pod drained like a battery, and with your mind entertained in our version of The Matrix (the internet!) so you don’t wake up.

Knowing what Deep Work is, and how you can protect yourself on the most basic level, is the bare minimum.
Understanding the spiritual consequences of a life lived without consciousness, would be the highest level on which we can discuss this.
But I will not do that in this article.

However, I will meet you halfway. And with the one-size-fits everything version of this story, that can be used for any area of life you may be concerned about.
From productivity, spirituality, to finding love or your life’s purpose.

The Theory of the Coffee Pot.

Or the missing, compromised, broken or fragmented coffee pot. In fact I think most of us have become SIEVES at this point. 
Designed to filter and let the liquids through, and holding on to things we’ll throw away.

In my opinion, until 2016, 2017, most of us had a Coffee Pot.
A place to hold our lives.
And if we had wanted to upgrade for success my advice would have been, knowing what I know today, to improve your coffee pot.
To learn how to HOLD bigger, better, different things.

One of my favorite examples in this, is with a rock star.
A rock star is someone who is able to hold space for the energy of tens of thousands of people, in an arena or stadium. Now they don’t “just” do that of course.
It is an outcome achieved through everything they do and are, including how they show up online and in their interviews.

But a rock star can be seen as a coffee pot which can hold space for tens of thousands of people in a stadium, and millions worldwide through their work including their visibility in the media.

This is an entirely different coffee pot as the one needed to play at weddings or doing corporate gigs, although some may overlap.

So until 2016, 2017, that would have been my advice:
To achieve something you must become the thing that holds it.
A bigger, better coffee pot, 9 out of 10.
A different coffee pot, 1 out of 10, if you are going a new route.
Try something new.

However!
By now, we are all without coffee pot, and instead we have become SIEVES.
We do nothing else but filter out the noise hoping we catch a piece of gold in our sieve.

But year after year, wouldn’t you say we only end up with rubble??
And wash out our money, time, awareness and humanness, addicted as we are, to hauling one more time.

So unless you aspire a life as a top notch sieve (f.e. headhunting, thrifting, or other versions of looking for gold) I suggest you throw in the sieve, and get yourself a basic coffee pot to start holding the things you want out of life.

Until 2016, 2017, we were all self-sufficient to a degree, but we also had something to offer to others (space in our pot).

This brought a certain equality between people, and with that a basis to have a good relationship.
But this would soon become a relic from the 20th century.

We don’t have coffee pots anymore.
And there is a lot to say that they won’t be needed either.
Or that the majority of us, with our online behavior, really do need to be able to let go of 99.9% of the stuff.
That it is that, which is the key to success in the 21st century.
How good of a sieve you are.

But my bet is that the things you dream about, the things you want, desire, crave, and also need in order to live a full, rich and meaningful life;
Require a coffee pot.

For you to root deeply, like a 600 year old oak.

Or to be able to hold space for as much as 125.000 people and for three nights in a row.
Like rock star Robbie Williams playing Knebworth in 2003.

In 2013, we were unprepared.
We didn’t know our awareness, our consciousness, the very thing that makes us human, would be taken from us.
We didn’t have any defenses, and are still at the beginning of setting collective boundaries in the form of laws and regulations that protect people from losing agency over their own lives.
We’re slowly getting some regulations, for children and teens.
So they can grow up, before they are exposed to these toxic structures and big tech predators.

But it is still so early, it’s the wild west out there.

And it is really up to you to fend for yourself here, and to get your own coffee pot back.
Best place to look?
Pre-2013 You.

Or better yet; Try the 20th century.

.
Suzanne L. Beenackers
20th century writer, diarist & yoga teacher

☕️ Buy me a coffee
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 🇳🇱Tikkie van de week 

“From Coffee pots to Sieves”
was handwritten on 20th January 2025, and posted on the 30th.
It is the fourth Gen X diary entry. 

You can follow this series by subscribing to this World Between Worlds blog.

 

 

When I started this project in July, I clearly had no idea what I was getting myself into.
If I did, it would not have fallen flat, taking two months to return.

And I can’t remember what I wrote those first two blogposts, which were released shortly after each other. If you want, you can read them under the category Gen X diary

I’m here because I got two wake up calls, that both reminded me:

“Hey, you!
Yes you, Suzanne!
How about your 20th century life?!”

Wakeup calls that have brought me back here, writing. And I am not betting my newly found 20th century life on it, that I have all of the pitfalls covered;
But things have definitely changed, with an all new plan to nail it this time.

The first wakeup call was a reread of a post I wrote for my Secret Diary on Substack. It’s one of the few free/open ones, and you can read it here.
And if you want to unlock all episodes, then become a paid subscriber.
But this one is on me.

The diary entry was about Austin Butler, an actor at the heart of the Millennial generation.
Since I am at the center of Generation X, we are separated by exactly one generation.
The blogpost was about how Austin Butler had totally nailed living a 20th century life.

He doesn’t flaunt it, but I recognize a paper notebook carrying, leather boots wearing, analog camera savvy 20th century dweller when I see one.

Rereading it reminded me of my abandoned quest for a 20th Century Life, and with it this abandoned Gen X diary as well.
It also rekindled a professional fire, that I want to dedicate the rest of my life -which I intend to be a tremendously long stretch- to being a 20th century writer.

I want to be the one who chose to stay behind, surrounded by 20th century topics, and view them with the context of still living offline myself.
Of having thrown my timeline in reverse when I was halfway, choosing to go back instead, because I recognized that the work I came here to do was to be done from there.
Not from moving forward with the rest of us.

I can’t remember if I shared this in the first two posts, or if I had even had this insight yet, but this whole being a guardian of the 20th century-stuff, really shot root the moment I set a very old age for myself.
If I succeed, then at a certain point I will be one of the very few still living, who are from the 20th century.

That was the moment this half-baked idea or inspiration to live in a 20th century way, and not online/ digitally – a concept I have been toying with since 2019- really acquired its meaning.
It now had its Why.

So, again, I don’t know if that part, about setting myself up to have a very long lifespan, if that was already a thing the last time I wrote you.
But it is now, so when I reread that Austin Butler post, I now had both his inspiration, of seeing someone so young really rocking that analog lifestyle;
And I also had my deeply rooted Why, of wanting to do this.
Seeing this was my work, as a writer.

The Austin Butler post was the first wakeup call, and then at night I got the second.
Which was so dry, so simple, so bland really, that I kept staring at the page, feeling all the emotions it brought up for me.
It was like the full magnitude of a problem I had vastly underestimated revealed itself, triggered by something that was almost arbitrary.

The word I read was:
“Addiction.”

And it came from the introduction of Nikki Sixx’ Heroin Diaries. A year-long outtake from his 80s diaries, Christmas to Christmas. He was a world famous rock star with his band Mötley Crüe, and so addicted no one held it possible he would see the next decade.
He overdosed twice to the point of being pronounced dead on at least one of those two occasions, and probably both.
I listened to the audiobook version years ago, and from what I recall he died twice. And rose twice.

But now I was in bed, opening the 10th anniversary 2017 edition of the Heroin Diaries, which is an absolute work of art with beautiful graphic design and glossy pages, and all in my favorite rock star colors (are there any others? black and red!), and I didn’t get past the introduction which was an A-Z lexicon of Wikipedia definitions.

Addiction:
A compulsion to repeat a behavior regardless of its consequences.

And:

It is quite common for an addict to express the desire to stop the behavior but find himself unable to cease.

In favor of the book, I do want to point out the Wikipedia list of definitions is counterbalanced by the addict’s definition of these words, on the next page.
Nikki Sixx did not write an AA manual here.

So fast forwarding, that definition reads:

Addiction
When you can give up something anytime, as long as it’s next Tuesday.

And I realized I was addicted to using my internet connection.

I don’t have any apps or notifications on my phone.

So if you wonder why I only do grid posting on Instagram, no stories, and why tagging/ links/ pins are absent?
You now know why!
They don’t work on desktop.

But despite having such a clean phone, I was still compulsive with my internet browser, checking email and news.
And on my desktop I was also always logged on to Instagram and Twitter/X.

I used my internet access as a pacifier, the way I once used smoking.

And although of course, there have been days, weeks even, when I stayed clean and enjoyed the bliss of the offline 20th century life I had promised myself;
And with the reward of being able to face any future Austin Butlers in my life, standing firmly in my own 20th century boots!;
 I had not done it understanding the severity of the situation.

That I was dealing with a digital addiction.

And frankly, I also think that concepts like digital detox or digital minimalism, are also poor words to give this whole thing some weight.
I mean, yes, if you read the books they will spell out for you how your whole brain is highjacket by the neurological rewards internet algorithms give you.
And yet;
These books are not printed red to black, with letters brutally scratched into them. And words like “harrowing” and “heartbreaking” on the back.

Despite users of digital media (effectively, all of us) having their entire brain, free will and wallet, ravaged by algorithms and having virtually no control over it;
We are still not addressing people throwing away their lives this way.

We do not feel the same urgency as when witnessing addiction to drugs or alcohol.

Even obesity, a food addiction, for better or for worse, generates more attention than the fact that anyone with notifications on their phone or opening digital media hoping for a dopamine hit;
Is addicted to internet.

Whether I start counting in 2019 or last summer;
I stepped into this whole living a 20th century life thing with the same stubborn denial as 1986 Nikki Sixx thinking he could quit heroin any time.
Instead of realizing it had already taken our lives, figuratively speaking.

What binds us, 1986 Nikki Sixx and me, is that we both let it get out of hand, and that what we both held onto, was a diary.

But what I will do now, just like he did, is to quit and to recover.
And beat the harrowing odds all addicts share.

Because if he did it, an 80s rock star who outdid all the others in terms of what he used and consumed, and no one thought he would get through;
Then obviously, it can be done.

And not next Tuesday.

.
Suzanne L. Beenackers
20th century writer, diarist & yoga teacher

☕️ Buy me a coffee
🌎 Paypal
 🇳🇱Tikkie van de week 

“Quitting digital addiction. 80s Style”
is the third Gen X diary entry. 

You can follow this series by subscribing to this World Between Worlds blog.