There’s a good reason I haven’t blogged for what looks like a solid six weeks: I’m up the walls. Unemployed or not — for I departed the ranks of the jobbers on Dec 31 — I have had too much on my plate. Even my Blogline feeds are stacking up, save for one or two.

So it’s a recession, and we’re all heading to hell in a handcart (or insert your phrase of choice here). Is the feeling of gnawing panic down to the internet?

This is our first experience of recession in the internet age, and so far I don’t like it one little bit. You could say that the internet makes the recession more bearable as there are all those networks to help people get jobs and there is eBay for buying second-hand things.

Yet such things are trivial compared to what the internet is doing to our confidence. The internet has created a global psyche. The web has mentally joined us at the hip, so we can no longer put our heads in the sand. If that sounds painfully contorted, it is because it is. Just as no country can decouple itself from the ailing global economy, none of us as individuals can decouple ourselves from the ailing global psyche.

Through blogs, websites and e-mails, the world’s economic ills are fed to us on a drip all day long. It is not just that we hear about bad things faster, we hear about more of them and in a more immediate way. My worries become yours and yours become mine. On the internet, a trouble shared is not a trouble halved. It is a trouble needlessly multiplied all over the world.

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