The Virtual Masks of Addiction
The internet acts as a breeding ground for artificially created personas.
In an odd way, with the advent of the internet, I’ve watched these addictive “masks” that people wear take on virtual shape. The internet acts as a breeding ground for artificially created personas, shaped by the altered reality of addiction. On social media, a person can give a face and a narrative to their altered reality. Is it any wonder there are people who have become addicted to Facebook, social media, and their smartphones? Who feel compelled to constantly monitor their online presence, to make sure the “mask” doesn’t slip?
Is it any wonder, then, the power of something like online gaming, where an altered reality can become a supercharged avatar operating within a virtual world? Online gaming allows people to not only create new identities but also spend a significant portion of their lives subsumed by them. With the creativity of online gaming, you can customize these personas to look as much — or as little — like you as you want. Gamers speak about the draw of the freedom within their created avatars to become either more like who they think they are or the opposite of who they’re afraid they are.
Hasn’t that always been a hallmark of an addiction — the ability to transport yourself into an alternate reality, allowing you to escape a painful truth? All sorts of substances and activities can provide the conduit for such desperate imagination. When imagination and alternate realities are stripped away, all that is left are those painful truths. This generation now has a wider choice of options, of places to hide.
Because I am of a certain age with teenagers of my own, and because of my profession, distressed parents tend to find me. In the past, because of my work with those who have eating disorders, there seemed to be mostly parents of girls and young women pulling me aside and speaking in hushed tones. However, in the past several years, because of recent books concerning boys and technology, parents of boys and young men are balancing out the ratio.
I met with the parents of a twenty-year-old who were distressed about what was happening to their son. Things seemed fine throughout high school, but after graduation, his mother said, Michael didn’t seem to be making much of a life for himself. All he wanted to do, they told me, was play games on the computer. They were alternately concerned, angry, frustrated, and fearful about his seeming lack of ambition.
When I met with Michael, however, he considered his online gaming to be anything but useless. Their vision of his future and Michael’s own were significantly at odds. High school was over and the point of divergence between his plans and theirs could no longer be avoided. The stress of that schism was sending Michael running to the alternate reality of his addiction — video games. Real life contained all the stress of failure, disappointment, tension, and strife between him and his parents. Increasingly, he found him- self slipping into the virtual world, where he had control over his persona and, more importantly, his battles. Leaving behind his avatars meant facing the world only as himself. And Michael was terrified of being inadequate, unable to live up to his parents’ expectations and his own.
Addictions are not the real world. They create artificial avatars that promise to fight your battles and shield your pain. They promise to hype your attributes and pump up your skills and abilities. They promise to make you more than you are without them. In truth, however, they do the opposite. They create more battles than they resolve; they produce more pain than they shield. They downgrade your attributes and degrade your skills and abilities. You become less and less with them than you could be without them, losing your sense of reality and identity. When an addiction becomes your identity, you can have difficulty knowing who you are anymore.
Authored by Dr. Gregory Jantz, founder of The Center • A Place of HOPE and author of 37 books. Pioneering whole-person care nearly 30 years ago, Dr. Jantz has dedicated his life’s work to creating possibilities for others, and helping people change their lives for good. The Center • A Place of HOPE, located on the Puget Sound in Edmonds, Washington, creates individualized programs to treat behavioral and mental health issues, including eating disorders, addiction, depression, anxiety and others.
