Confessions of a Functional Internet Addict

I feel completely fine now. Physically, that is. My sense of smell is back, my cough is gone, I’m only fatigued for lack of sleep. I’ve been isolated in my apartment for nearly two weeks. It’s like April all over again. No more chance encounters with a neighbor or a bodega clerk. No more meeting friends in the park, huddled on a blanket surreptitiously removing masks for the cheap thrill of sipping cheap wine in public. As my symptoms (and my fear of the reaper) faded I’ve become increasingly engrossed in something else. Something frightening in a very different way. On Friday night I was so enraged by a series of Reddit comments that I spent ten minutes pummeling a pillow and screaming in my bedroom at 3am. I’m amazed my upstairs neighbors didn’t call the cops. I deleted my account in a blind fury and tossed and turned for hours, strangling myself in the floral duvet until dawn.

On Saturday I put my laptop in a drawer and decided not to open it for the rest of the weekend. I knew the internet would have a harder time tempting me without this more compelling of vessels. I restricted myself to quick, essential google searches on my phone and occasionally responding to texts. I’m proud to say that so far I’ve only broken this rule to print out a recipe for lemon cake and now to type up this sloppily handwritten text.

In the past 24 hours I’ve read an entire book: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson — I haven’t been, but it’s become a fixation of mine these past few months. I worry it might happen after I post this essay. I’ve also rewired a vintage table lamp, made a huge batch of New York style pizza dough, and spontaneously baked a mediocre lemon cake. Morale has improved substantially but I still have flashbacks to that exchange on Friday night. I catch myself revising a pithy retort; an outraged screed; a self-pitying apology; a pointedly cruel direct message. I imagine my adversary screaming alone in her (his?) bed at 3am. This thought soothes me. I return to my book.

In some ways talking politics and culture with anonymous strangers has been my saving grace in quarantine. There have been moments when a clever political compass meme was my only respite from morbid fantasies of a violent death by COVID, drowning in froth-corrupted lungs like the soldier in that poem I memorized in high school before Google became my long-term memory. I feel ever so slightly lifted from the intellectual decay that’s been creeping up on me in the years since college; yet at the same time I can sense my consciousness being reshaped in real time. It’s deeply unsettling, a blurred face appearing in the upstairs window of an old family photo. My life has been flattened, stretched thin like pizza dough, from a tangible, physical existence into a perpetual game of mental Frogger. I spring from one digital lily pad to the next with only minimal reflection, almost never touching anything but a keyboard in the process. I read a small tidbit, I react, I briefly collect my thoughts, I write a response, and I forget all about it two minutes later unless it makes me so furious I fume for days.

I know this isn’t a novel observation. I’ve read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and Cal Newport’s Deep Work. I think Adam Curtis has explored this idea, though I can’t quite remember and I’m still resisting the urge to Google anything non-essential so you’ll have to fact check that one for yourself. It’s something we’re all aware of on some level — the political impact of social media, the whiplash of the 24-hour online news cycle. “Masks don’t work and if you buy them you’re going to kill healthcare workers!” “Masks do work and if you don’t wear one you’re going to kill grandma!” “Stay home!” “Go back to work!” Our collective consciousness is a goldfish. We all know this by now. Has it always been this way? Who can say? It seems to be rapidly accelerating — a lesson in exponential growth, as if we needed another one.

A few months ago I deactivated Facebook and Instagram and became obsessed with The Center for Humane Technology’s research on the negative effects of the internet. It felt like a fresh start, a journey to a gleaming new world where my attention span would regenerate like a salamander’s tail. Today, after 5 months in a one bedroom apartment with Instagram and Reddit my constant companions (and Twitter my annoying roommate who sings in the shower), those days feel like a fever dream. I feel worse than ever. I wonder if Friday night was my rock bottom. I try not to entertain the idea that it can get much, much worse but deep down I know it can — I read an article once about an internet rehab in Washington state.

When I see something notable, a rat chewing on a bagel or a neighborhood restaurant with a “permanently closed” sign, I reflexively compose a short comment summarizing my thoughts. I think in abbreviations like “tbh” and “lmao” and “bc” as though they were real words I could say out loud (accidentally doing so has become one of my biggest fears). When I’m away from my devices I compose a running list of search queries that play over and over in my head until I can release them into the wild. “substitute water for milk when baking” “basil safe for dogs” “start date syrian civil war” “ghislaine maxwell us citizen” “identify hot wire in lamp cord.” I keep hesitating over the spelling of common words as I handwrite this draft, waiting for autocorrect to swoop in and create order from the chaos. The computer has fully and completely become the interface through which I exist in this world. It’s shocking in its banality.

I still do plenty of things without a device in my hands. I water my garden, I read printed books, I jog, I rewire lamps. I cook using printed recipes to save my computer from death by flour and splattered grease. Yet all of these things carry a whiff of unreality. It’s been said ad nauseam about social media: if you don’t post it, did it even happen? “Do it for the ‘gram!” So why is this feeling dogging me, now more than ever, when I only maintain one public social media account? I don’t share anything connected to my real life on Reddit. I have trained myself to use Instagram only to browse. I rarely even give in to the impulse to snap a picture of a bizarre mannequin in a store window and text it to friends. Yet anything I do, or see, or say that’s constrained by the bounds of material reality is no longer quite real. The physical world has become a kind of uncanny valley, a flamboyantly textured wax museum between the glossy flatness of my thoughts and the words I read on the screen. Speaking of Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener’s phrase “matte simulacra of a world they had replaced” frequently bubbles up from the recesses of my brain. It feels profound. I wonder if I’m losing my mind.

Like most addicts, I don’t want to be this way. I’ve started mainlining 90s rom-coms, fantasizing about being Meg Ryan in a world where email is still a novelty. I don’t just want to ditch my smartphone and join the Jaron Laniers of the world as a modern day ascetic. I want the world to discover a monastic vocation with me. I want none of this to have ever existed. I want the textures of physical life to feel banal again, the glowing pixels to resume their unreality. I want the internet to be a choice, a tool, an encyclopedia — anything but the surrogate life it has become. I was going to make an allusion to Second Life here but that no longer feels apt; if anything, physical life is the second life, our bodies fleshy avatars for an online presence. Someone much smarter and much crazier than me once said, “When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional.” I feel this profoundly in every fiber of my being.

I know what some of you are thinking. “Just log off!” “Go enjoy nature!” “Learn to meditate!” “Spend time with friends and family!” In 2020 BC (before COVID) this would have been decent advice, if eye-roll-inducing. In 2020 AQ (after quarantine) it reads like asking a depressed person “Have you tried laughing more? I read online that laughter has health benefits.” Physical isolation has become a mandate, our only means of contributing to the greater good as the world crumbles around us. Staying home alone is our civic duty. Internet addiction was just starting to seep into the cracks in our lives when the pandemic opened the floodgates. The proverbial frog in boiling water has been microwaved.

I don’t think this is just an extreme case of internet-addled neuroses that will only afflict those of us quarantined alone. I think we chosen few got an unfortunate opportunity to play the tape forward. We’ve been treated to a sneak peek, a 6-month free trial, of a life where reality and artifice have inverted themselves. To exist is to stare at a screen. To have friends and family is to text and video chat. To live in the world is to consume an endless drip of digital headlines and six small meals a day of media hot takes. Putting your devices away to spend an hour in the garden; baking a cake from a printed recipe; taking the dog for a walk without bringing your phone. All feel like a form of escapism now. Like shirking my responsibility to exist. Like deliberately hiding from the people I love. Like telling myself an elaborate lie. “Look at this garden! These books! This lemon cake! This is your life!” I know deep down these are untruths. I know the book and the garden and the lemon cake aren’t real. I know those odious Reddit comments are still out there waiting for my response. My laptop pulses in a kitchen drawer, a glowing elephant’s foot boring a hole in the wood. “Come back,” it pleads. “The real world is waiting.”