#101 - The first step is admitting you have a problem

Well hey hi hello there friendos hope y’all had a lovely week!

I’ve spent mine attempting the first steps in breaking one of my absolute worst soul-draining habits: checking my phone.

There’s a question I’ve been coming back to over and over again the last few weeks and my lack of ability to answer it has inspired some real panic.

Who told us the internet was good, anyway?

Because I know what I was told when we were setting up the first AOL disk in the Wilton house in 1997, and what all of my don’t ever tell anyone on the internet your age or real name or location seminars I went to throughout middle and high school were telling me, but let’s be honest, the internet they were speaking about and the internet of today are barely comparable.

Yes, pop-up ads always existed, but they weren’t using aggregate data to target us, the websites were self-coded HTML nightmares bursting with personality and little mouse cursor’s that left a trail of sparkles behind as you swooshed it across webpages.

But I’ve come around to admitting it fully the last few weeks: I have a problem with the internet. Specifically the internet on my phone. And iPhones do that fun thing where they record & report your screentime and every Sunday I somewhat bashfully check the notification that I knew better than to silence (we all have to face ourselves at some point blah blah blah) but recently I clicked into the “see all activity” and uhhhh didn’t like what I found! Did you know they track pickups?

I am addicted to my phone and the stimulus within it.

Of course I am, it takes a concerted effort not to be! And just like many addicts in the first stages of admittance, I’m resentful of the fact that I no longer think I can simply stop at any time. I think I’m going to have to really do something about it.

Ugh! Fine.

Wasting time is the biggest tragedy I can think of. You know, right up there with wasted opportunities.

And I don’t want to feel like I’m giving the most precious time I have to insidious tech companies that in no way have my best interest in mind. They want me addicted. This wasn’t a willful give over, my attention really was stolen from me.

I’m challenging myself to be more thoughtful these days, and part of that means consuming things that were made with some consideration.

Full news articles rather than seeing a tweet of the headline and a quippy response. Books that were edited by a professional because while I so appreciate that self-publishing is an incredible opportunity I get taken out of my enjoyment by so many authors who can’t figure out how quotation marks work.

(Like, I am the queen of the comma splice, but I’m also not charging to read my shit, y’know?)

Anyway, I think that I want to live a considered life. I know I feel better when I take time to do things thoroughly when I spend the time to clean out the fridge and prep the vegetables and I know I don’t always have the energy to do it but I also know that that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pushing myself to do the nice things for future-me is actually how I’ve completely modified my behavior in the last year.

“If you finish [the task] right now you get to feel good about it for the rest of the day.”

“You can lay here in bed this morning but you’re not allowed to beat yourself up about that choice for the rest of the day. And if you can’t do that, you should just go for the walk since you know you’ll feel better if you do.”

“Tomorrow-me isn’t going to want to clean the dishes any more than I do right now.”

I’ve done a lot of unlearning about how I spoke to myself. It’s the conversation I have most often and I was not showing up to it the same way I did with my friends. And I have to spend the most amount of time with myself so wouldn’t life be better if I got comfortable and stopped being so fucking mean to myself all the time?

Too much of my time was wasted in guilt-trip-self-flagellating because you can take the girl out of Ireland but you can’t take the guilt complex outta the girl!

(My guilt complex is actually stunning fully-furnished apartments that I have set about slowly dismantling because I don’t have an inner cop it’s more like an inner landlord tbh! Which like, gross! ew! stop rent payments immediately!!)

I’m getting better at doing things rather than just saying I want to do things.

It’s a daily practice and often annoying, but I know it makes my life better and more full and that’s truly all that matters.

(This current rush of “I can do anything” attitude is in fact because I’ve just cleaned underneath my sink, a task I have been putting off for a literal year.) (I followed it up by scrubbing the everliving shit out of the stovetop. Please clap.)

But!

A big part of that has been to admit stuff and live in reality and tell myself the truth.

This is a really hard commitment to make because it takes away the buffer of denial. Have you tried living in late-stage capitalism sans all repudiation? It’s near impossible and the feeling of admitting defeat has been eating at me.

I think, in general, I’m doing the best I can. But I think a little bit of denial is needed, because we’re more aware of suffering than ever before and all of our necessary choices force us to wrestle with it on a daily basis and so it’s hard to maintain that awareness.

I’ve felt for a long time like leaving social media would mean becoming unaware. And maybe at one point that was true—Twitter in its heyday was the place to follow reporters and get scoops. I remember the day I joined it because I read on my way to dinner that Michael Jackson was in the hospital, and by the time we left his death was trending. It was the first time I experienced real-time news in the palm of my hand. This was the same month that everyone on Twitter had green squares as profiles and changed their time zones to try and spread awareness of Iran’s Green Revolution protests.

And I also remember the Twitter protests being ruthlessly mocked in the traditional media. Like right away. And I’m sure part of that was reactionary to losing their status and so discrediting the “thing the kids were doing” was a great way to bluster about new vs. traditional media. But my thoughts were always that even if it didn’t make a difference, why was a bunch of people becoming impassioned about a revolution half a world away a subject of derision? At least they cared, at least we were broadening the scope of their understanding of what was happening outside of our borders. Right?

Social media did make us feel powerful. It was a tool that could have so easily been used to catapult talented people to the top of the pile—it could have been an incredible democratizer. (It, instead, has now been at the root cause of multiple atrocities and genocides!)

And internet companies were cool for a while. Most people can rattle off a minimum of five job perks of working at Google—and that was before they used to pay their employees to make recruitment videos disguised as casual “life in a day of a marketing lead at Google” tiktoks where the girlies couldn’t actually show what work they did (because it was tasks like planning these videos and other confidential information) but they could & did show all the perks and snacks and food and “working spaces” (because we hated offices with doors and then decided we were “over” desks and like please I’m begging someone to think of the ergonomics!) and then their comment sections were filled with vitriolic comments about how they were overpaid and did nothing all day because everything is bait and that’s why the internet isn’t fun anymore!

We didn’t regulate the internet, so it fell to the worst impulses. And the companies snatched up all their competition but we had a congress that didn’t understand how these companies make money nor did they care to apply anti-trust laws that could have prevented monopolies, which like look, capitalism is bullshit but capitalism without competition is so much worse!!!

And then the brands made accounts, and they hired really funny people who were internet savvy to run them, and then the newsfeeds started having more and more ad inserts, and at first it was just one or two and things were still in chronological order so it still felt like we had control but then they upped the ads and showed us what they thought we’d like. And then one of them really figured out the algorithm and by that time our attention spans were so shot that one-minute videos were perfect and you can just infinitely scroll through them which is a perfect example of dark UX!

It shouldn’t be on us as individuals to solve a lot of the worst problems that screen addiction brings.

But it is, and I want to stop being in denial of my problem. It’s not like I have to quit the internet altogether even! I just have to stop carrying it around in my pocket. I want to form my own thoughts again, ones that aren’t immediately informed by dozens of others.

Being in denial is honestly just so exhausting.

The other thing is, we can’t turn off just one emotion. We dampen all of them. And suddenly I’m upping the levels of delusion to what’s happening around me. I think it’s bad that I’m constantly learning new (often horrifying) information all the time and having it directly next to a funny observation about the most trivial thing in the world.

The up-down yo-yo effect on my own psyche helps me understand why some people respond so aggressively to innocuous tweets—they have so much pent-up emotion from scrolling the feed and we’ve been encouraged to share every single thought to up engagement, so people do engage—but it’s often misdirected. And they’ve now documented a raw emotion for everyone to see and our reactionary selves are often not fit for public consumption!

I also think it’s probably not great that I’m then exposed to people’s opinions that I never would have otherwise heard and it makes me trust people less. If the recent public execution on the Subway wasn’t horrible enough, why don’t we compound the tragedy by reading every single worst take possible about why it’s okay to murder someone on public transit if they yell before they’re murdered??

Like no thanks, absolutely not!

A lot of people are out here sharing their first thought. And the filters of what we should say, and the appropriate audiences to stay it to, have been completely eroded because the companies wanted it that way.

Share! Every thought! All the time! It’s your thought and therefore must be something you believe, and if you feel even slightly bad for having that thought you should definitely share it because what if someone out there agrees with you and can assuage the guilt you felt?

I know that letters to the editor have always existed, that people used to send hate mail to celebrities, because they had to handwrite it, because it had to be a complete thought, because paragraphs are made of sentences and you had to spend money on a stamp to send it, it was at least more thoughtful.

There were many steps that had to be taken, so many checkpoints for people to calm down and assess their reaction.

I really wonder how much hate mail never made it to the postbox because someone made a cup of tea and by the time they finished the energy had dissipated.

Also, writing things by hand physically exercises thoughts in a way that typing does not because typing requires us to become part machine as we type, it activates a totally different part of the brain isn’t that wild!!

So, can I cause absolutely no harm and consume every single thing in a completely ethical way? No. It’s a rigged system.

But I have to get closer to an approximation of an honest existence.

I can’t deny the reality I live in, any of it. And I’m addicted to my phone, to the constant stimulus of the internet, and I would like my focus and attention back now, please!!

When I’m looking at my phone, I'm no longer in reality. I'm in my phone.

That's where I am.

In some ways, it’s the most powerful invention in human history. Genuinely unbelievable how distracting it is and the endlessness of the possibilities it presents. But I don’t have any desire to utilize social media to benefit my life in any way, so why am I giving so much of my time to it?

What can I get done if I commit to breaking my habits and forming ones that are informed by thoughtful decisions? Because the impulse I have to just open up a new tab and start scrolling is frankly, embarrassing. I did it last year while I was screen sharing with my boss (who is, thankfully, my sister) on Zoom. Just midsentence opened & scrolled. I didn't even notice had done it until she pointed it out.

So not only are my actions not my own, the act of scrolling is mostly useless because I’m clearly not even taking in any information when I’m doing it!

Sometimes I will be on twitter, close the app fully, and then immediately reopen it. Like, iiii don’t think that’s a conscious action anymore babes!!

I used to really think it was Part Of My Personality to be the most informed. To have seen everything already before everyone. I thought I had to always make others aware of exactly what I brought to the table. It was my self-imposed admission fee. Looking back, all it really did was rob me of moments of shared discovery with other people.

I no longer think of myself as an amalgamation of traits for people to thumbs-up or thumbs-down and average together to see if they like me.

This break in habit is helped by the usability of my favorite sites tanking.

I deleted all the apps off my phone last week, and I put the kindle app in the place they used to be. I know if I have nothing at the end of that too-familiar path I will be more likely to re-download the apps. I don’t want to begrudge myself the fact that I’m not just going full Luddite and going to get a flip phone. I absolutely need the Maps app on my phone. I use Facetime to make calls to friends abroad for free and I used to have to go get phonecards to make that possible so I really appreciate that advancement in technology. It’s incredible to have access to so much knowledge in the palm of my hand—but it’s a lie to pretend like that’s what I’ve been using it for.

Screen time addiction is really worrying.

Especially for young children. I’m not a parent so I don’t think it’s my place to judge the actions of people who give their young kids the chance to engage with screens, but I do want to point out the change in children’s content. It used to be the most heavily monitored form of media, there are intense guidelines around what can air and how characters can be used in advertising. Spongebob couldn’t just pop up to sell me cereal and t-shirts during the commercial breaks on Nickelodeon, because regulators understood that kids were unable to distinguish ads from the content of the show. Contrast that with every youtube blaring ads for their merch mid-sentence, giving kids the exact phrases to convince their parents with, creating an “I have to have this to fit in” vibe mixed with a “don’t you want to support your favorite creator” guilt-trip.

(And look, if I get into the ethics of family vlogs and kids participating in videos and the lack of regulation around content aimed at children these days we’ll be here literally all day. Please don’t trust YouTube Kids to be stringent with their guidelines, they historically have never proven a vested interest in children’s health or safety.)

Addiction is the right word for it. And addiction is dysregulating.

The times I’m most aware of my need to just check is when I’m writing in my journal. Reach, open, swipe swipe, close. So I started writing down every time it happened and apologizing to the journal (it was in an effort not to shame myself while still documenting the behavior because shame is not a motivator for me!) and what I immediately noticed was how often the impulse occurred after I had started to breach a topic I knew would make me uncomfortable or be more difficult to explore.

The checking was acting as an escape hatch.

Nope, no, let’s not go down that path, quick, let me find thousands of things to occupy my brain with instead and maybe I’ll react to one of them and then go on a tangent about those thoughts and then, and then, and then…

- What I imagine my unconsciousness mind sounds like when it’s trying to “protect” me

No one ever told me spending a ton of time on the internet was a good thing to do.

In fact, many many people told me it was a bad thing to do.

But it was fun. It was easier. There was gossip, news, and behind-the-scenes bits at my fingertips.

I’ve felt boring recently. My life hasn’t been boring, but I feel like I have been.

I think it’s because I’m stuck in a loop and the loop is inside my phone. And I like the times I’m not on my phone better than when I am on my phone. And I don’t have to give it up completely and forever but I do have to reach a level where I mean to engage with it—and honestly, I just think once I rid myself of the compulsions I won’t want to.

Last year I wrote/podded about how I had stopped reading snark and I think it was one of the most positive changes I made. I don’t think that exposing myself to that kind of negativity was making me a better person or my day more entertaining. And I just see a lot of genuinely talented people making incredible content that is housed on the apps and it just kind of breaks my heart because I wonder what would happen if that talent wasn’t constantly being used to churn out at least one video per day because the algorithm demands consistency in exchange for exposure.

I deleted the apps. And this week the results have been really apparent.

My average amount of time? Almost halved!

The amount of pickups hasn’t, and that right there is how clear it is that the act is a compulsion.

(This week, Chrome’s my #1 most used because I’ve been searching out Zelda shrine walkthroughs constantly—I love this video game so much but am, in fact, terrible at puzzles!)

Anyway, I don’t want to deny myself a reality that I know will make me happier because of the effort required to rid myself of these habits that don’t improve my life.

I at least like myself enough to try y’know?

The internet could have been so many things, but it, like so much, was ruined by the marketing industry. It revealed a little too much about our habits, and those data points were then used to cultivate the most clickable content. Worst human impulses, exposed and exploited!

Regardless of intention, it was incredibly harmful.

No one ever told us the internet was good.

Except for the people who stood to make a lot of money by convincing us it was.

Previously from the archives:

One year ago: #42 - May 14 @ 10:36am

Two years ago: #5 - Oh, the stories these (glass) walls could tell.