One year at university, I gave up the internet for Lent. It wasn’t an especially holy move. I was just curious what would happen if I no longer depended on Google for answers to life’s biggest questions:
But you wouldn’t believe how complicated it gets when you can no longer consult your favorite search engines oracles for your life questions, big or small:
- The weather? … During Lent, I would have to actually call that number grandma dials with her corded phone, and listen to an automated recording of the time, date, and cloud cover.
- The capital of Bulgaria? … I could approach a reference librarian, but let’s be real. Who does that anymore?
- Stock prices? … who am I kidding? I’m part of the Cohort of 2008. My generation hasn’t been able to acquire meaningful assets!
Questions for the internet
As it turns out, I’m not alone in my questioning. In fact, many people direct their deepest concerns and worries to the Internet.
I might… know this because I googled big questions the other night. The upside is that I found y’all’s questions so fascinating that I quickly forgot my own:
In this post, I’m sharing the questions that auto-complete fills out for me (click a photo to see the whole Flickr album). They range from questions about love (Why do they always leave me? Why do they look like unhappy rabbits when they do?)
To questions about our furry friends:
There are heart-felt questions about our fathers:
And our mothers: 
And questions about our children:
Bigger Concerns
People of all ages seek help for their worries about our country: 
And their worries about their own future: 
The Fearful Internet
Actually, now that I’m on to it, we’re afraid of lots of things. Priests and best friends move over… it seems that Google is the new confessional:
We’ve apparently all got impostor syndrome in life: 
And we’re not sure what to think about relationships: 
Or how to understand the people we love: 
Whether male or female: 
We’re concerned about the future: 
And we have big questions: 
Through all of this, we’re trying to figure ourselves out:
We don’t know why humans do what they do…
…but we’ll never stop asking questions about it! 
(And yes, you can click through these images for many more questions!)