Admit it, dear reader, you and I have both put on a few unnecessary pounds in the mental department since we made the acquaintance of the Internet. Those empty Internet calories went straight past our eyes and right onto our brains.

“Oh, I’ll just have one more. [click]” “Ooooh, this looks tasty. [click]” “Here, have more, there’s plenty! [click][click][click]” “Does this Internet make my brain look fat?”

It all started so innocently, so seriously. Back in the 80’s, remember when e-mail was a work thing? At Digital Equipment we had an application called Notes (yes, they were called applications then, Virginia). Reminds me now of Facebook, but with a little dignity and a lot longer attention span. How’d we get from there to Google+ which is essentially Lean Cuisine for social networking, an answer to the mental and emotional binge and purge that is the open Internet today?

How long has it been since you’ve heard that 90% of the traffic on the Internet is porn? It’s been a while, I’d guess. I’m thinking that’s because our approach to information sharing has made virtually 100% of the traffic some kind of porn. Food porn. Weather chasing porn. legal porn. politics porn. Whatever pops into somebody’s mind somewhere porn. Hey! Hey! Psssst buddy. Yeah, you, commear. Ya wanna see some really cute baby animals? The real thing! No Photoshop, I promise.

How’d we get here? How did things escalate so quickly from conversation to cocktail party to a full-blown, dignity-be-damned, mid-life crisis, you-just-don’t-understand-us, torrid affair with information half our age?

It is seductive. That little factoid that brings a wry smile to our friends’ faces (or rather an emoticon response). The political link that evokes a flood of comments in return. I feel so ALIVE!!! Wait. Wait. I can stop any time I want to. I can. Breathe. Breathe. Deep breath. Cleansing in. Cleansing out.

I’ve got this image stuck in my head of the guy that gets lifted out of bed by a crane and ends up being buried in a piano box. I find myself wanting intellectual and emotional calorie counts on Internet sites and apps. Do you the think the FCC could come up with the equivalent of Food and Drug’s nutrition labels? Would we trust them if they did? Would we pay any attention?

In my own private Tea Party moment, I’m beginning to believe the answer isn’t found outside ourselves, in better government, more regulation or smarter apps, but rather, somewhere inside each one of us, among all of us.

Hindus have a story they tell about Lord Brahma (and yes, oh crap, I found this on the Internet). It seems that a long time ago, all humans were Gods, but they were behaving so badly with their God-like powers that Lord Brahma decided to take away their divinity. He was unsure where to hide it so that the humans wouldn’t find it and begin to misbehave again. He thought to bury it deep in the earth, but felt that humans would just dig it up. Perhaps, the bottom of the ocean? No, crazed for power and adventure, they’d just swim down and retrieve it. The highest mountain? Same result. Then he had a revelation. He would hide the humans’ divinity deep within each of them, the very last place they would think to look.

And so began our journey. Perhaps that is the energy behind the frenzy that is the Internet. Atheist, agnostic, or religious, there are few of us who do not think some how of the future and our mark on it. Call it soul, call it spirit, call it meaning, we do not want to be thought trivial. And so we throw our pebbles at the ocean, hoping to build an island out there to replace the lost world within.

And, miracle of miracles, occasionally, seemingly randomly, some bit of land appears, some eco-system that acquires… life and some persistence, even on the Internet. It doesn’t, after all, have to be all serious brow knitting reflection. Laughter feeds the eternal in ways meditation can not. The eternal, the enduring is everywhere available, even on the Internet if we’re paying attention.

But over indulgence at any point along the spectrum from giggles to grief ain’t good for you, Roy. It is a tad ironic that the self governed infrastructure of the Internet leads to a completely ungoverned world of content that urges us to indulge every whim and impulse.

As Lord Brahma could tell us, the answer isn’t out there to be somehow acquired by the perfect experience.  It’s not in the cloud, or the next killer app, or better parental controls (who controls the parents?). It’s in you and in me and the choices we make everyday on, and off, the Internet.