I've always spent a lot of time online, having been one of the "quiet kids" at school with few friends. During the pandemic, though, I developed a routine of spending up to ten hours a day on social media, a habit I'd spend the rest of my life trying to fight. I had the misfortune of being sucked into the worst corners of Discord, 4chan, and Tumblr -- here's why I'm trying to quit.
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.
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 don't like to think of myself as a 4chan loser -- I have largely normal political opinions, and no deep hatred of other races or genders. However, the people I met online still subtly influenced my mind. I don’t use words like “redpilled”, “transracial”, “youngshit”, “ropefuel”, 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?
Sometimes, when I talk to people offline, I'm reminded of how different our lives are in this aspect. My older brother once asked me if I knew what "blackpill" meant -- he was eighteen at the time, but I'd known the word since I was thirteen. Another time, talking to my classmates, I mentioned the shock/gore videos people send on Discord as pranks, and they looked at me like I was some sort of freak. Even though I didn't like that kind of thing, either, my classmates still associated me with people who do simply because of the way I spoke.
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. I cannot deny how formative the Internet has been in my life, though, and still spend time on it, though in healthier places such as this and Discord, where I run a book club.
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. My mother is developing eye problems, but wouldn’t listen to me when I advised her avoid her phone before sleeping because she “needs” Twitter and YouTube. 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.