In 2020, when I was around twelve, the pandemic began. Online school days were six hours, and it really encouraged habits of sitting in front of a computer all day. At its best, this led to me making some of the closest friends I’ve had, but I also developed a habit of spending my entire afternoon and night on social media, something I’d spend the next three years fighting. Here is why I left.
As the other pages on my website suggest, my life revolves around an interest in art and books; they are very time-intensive, and social media will destroy your attention span so you’re too weak to handle them. “Too long, didn’t read” is a classic phrase dropped by netizens when confronted with something longer than one paragraph — it’s (understandably) more easy and fun, after all, to deluge your mind in an endless swarm of light, sound, and color than to challenge yourself and push your limits as a cure to boredom. But eventually you can’t live without this stimulation — I once met a pianist who couldn’t practice without watching Subway Surfers, and my friend used to play video games while watching five or six other videos at once. Having our need for fun constantly satisfied is turning us into very fragile people. A short attention span makes them very hateful, too, because they’re too impatient to truly learn about the world and realize it’s an endlessly complicated, mixed place.
Something you notice about people who spend too much time online is that they have little interesting to say about their personalities — they don’t build cool things, ramble about history, play sports, make music, fish, exercise, explore. Social media serves all their entertainment to them on a silver platter, so to have fun, they don’t need to get creative or go through the effort of trying challenging new things. If you read their Carrd/Twitter/whatever descriptions, at most they’ll provide a long list of brands, singers, and video games they enjoy consuming, or a list of people they don’t want to interact with. Nothing of real substance that makes them stand out. My friends have told me I seem to live like someone from a movie, and I believe one reason why is just because, spending so much time offline, I’ve had a lot more time to discover myself and make fun, crazy memories.
There is a Vietnamese saying which goes, “Close to ink then you are dark, close to light then you are bright.” I used to be too proud to consider myself a “real Redditor” because I read Leo Tolstoy and whatnot, but all my scrolling had made all of Redditors’ habits become mine. Even though I don’t use words like “looksmaxxing”, “soyjak”, “redpilled”, “based”, the very fact that I know them betrays what I’ve spent all my time doing. And sometimes I’d scroll and scroll until I realized it was 1 a.m. and the house was silent, and feel unimaginable self-disgust, only to crawl back online the next day. If that wasn’t chronically online, what is? And when I had my first petty online argument... that was a turning point for me. I realized how I’d let myself become.
Things could’ve been different. At that moment, there was also a nineteen-year-old, world-famous pianist named Alexander Malofeev. We were both born in the “digital age”, but he was out there performing in some of the most prestigious music competitions in the world. He was making history. How? I suppose by practicing in his free time rather than reading J.K. Rowling’s Tweets.
After years of effort, I’ve finally been able to quit all that nonsense, and in its place spend several hours a day reading and playing the piano. Nowadays, I mostly stay on Neocities and on Discord, where a few friends and my book club are; even so, I use them infrequently. I suppose these are still social media, but they (I believe) encourage passive consumption a lot less, and actually demand conversation and creativity. Given you avoid large servers, Discord feels like a meetup between real people.
The further I get from social media, the more abhorrent it becomes to me. The websites here on Neocities are so filled with personality. Just to name a few — Astro’s Sound Hell, which is filled with self-composed music and maximalist Y2K graphics; Xanthe Tynehorne’s, which has actual shrines to Greek gods. How cool is that? And when I happen to return to social media, what do they offer me? Sensationalist articles, softcore pornography, political extremism, hatred; violence, sexism, Elon’s newest tweet, troll farms, cosplayers twerking. People saying “The U.S. has no culture” (have they ever read a book?) “Kill all x,” “kill all y.” What a mess. How could I ever want to go back?
That being said, it is rather unnerving to watch as everyone around me — friends, family, classmates — become more and more dependent on their phones. When I was young, my parents loved to tell me to get off my phone, and now that I’m a teenager, it’s funnily the opposite. They’re all willingly heading into the cesspool I scraped my knees climbing out of, and they haven’t realized it yet.
Page created March 7, 2024.