In 2020, when I was around twelve, the pandemic struck. Online school days were six hours, so I sat in front of the computer for six hours or more. At its best, this lead to me making some of the closest friends I’ve had, but on the other hand, my social media addiction began. My drugs of choice were Reddit, Tumblr, and Quora.
As the other pages on my website suggest, my life revolves around an interest in art and books, which social media has been the bane of. For one, it drastically erodes one’s attention span. When confronted with walls of text, or even a single paragraph, a classic phrase dropped by netizens is “too long, didn’t read”—it’s (understandably) more easy and fun, after all, to deluge one’s mind in light and color than put forth effort and energy into critical analysis. A friend of mine often watches six videos at once while playing video games; just one year ago, he’d recommended me Les Misérables, a 1,400-page novel about France, morality, and class struggles. Now, online content has taken away his ability to seriously read. I don’t want to find “walls of text” daunting as he must now, but entertaining and challenging. In order to do that, I’ll have to step away from social media for good.
It also dulls engagement and critical analysis—we try to stimulate ourselves as much as possible in as little time as possible, but that leads to shallow understandings of everything we’re consuming. It takes time to understand books, but social media robs us of the patience for them by making us constantly seek new sensations and new emotions.
While we all try our best, it can be so easy to slip into bullying, prejudice, and hatred, especially on social media, where there’s an endless stream of ideas, images, and opinions, and so little time to properly understand their origins. Scroll through almost any comment section online and you can find something rude. People saying things such as, “no one asked”, “kys”, “ok little bro”, and so on. Making caricatures of groups they don’t like. They care more about one-upping each other than being understanding and finding peace. (Add the fact that many of them are stressed, tired, depressed people letting out their feelings on others.) Of course, there are exceptions, but speaking generally, social media are simply not a pleasant place to be. Seeing so many mean people corrodes and hardens the heart (in my experience.)
There is a Vietnamese saying which goes, “Close to ink then you are dark, close to light then you are bright.” Even if you dislike how many people act on Reddit, Twitter, etc., simply dwelling around their users enough will abase you to think just like them. Through hundreds of hours of scrolling, I emptied my mindset of books and art, replacing them with terms and phrases like “based”, “redpilled”, “blackpilled”, “Reddit moment”, “tradwife”, “soyjak”, and so on. Although I’d been too proud to consider myself a Redditor, all this scrolling had made their opinions, impressions, worldviews, and slang had slowly become mine. Moreover, I’d scroll endlessly, and suddenly realize it was 1 AM and the house was silent, and fill with shame and self-disgust; only to come crawling back the next day. If that wasn’t chronically online, what is? And when I had my first online argument... that was a turning point for me. I realized how I’d let myself become.
Things could’ve be different. At that moment, there was also a nineteen-year-old, world-famous pianist named Alexander Malofeev. He was a fellow zoomer, but was out there performing in international competitions. How? Well, for one, he didn’t bother catching up on online drama...
This was made on the basis of more personal reasons. To be very frank with you, I’ve always struggled to make friends. I’m quiet by nature and rarely stay afloat in group conversations; moreover, I’m the new kid at my school, and people (understandably) find it difficult or unnecessary to talk to a reticent stranger. Online, however, nobody is the “new kid”; it’s easy to start conversations and find people willing to talk.
I think there is a difference between having a life online and being chronically online. On one hand, one can “live online” by scrolling on TikTok for nine hours a day, consuming endlessly and mindlessly to fill the emptiness inside. On the other hand, one can use the Internet to simply find others with common interests, or form friendships. True, offline connections have something online ones can never have, and it’s very difficult to fully avoid the detriments of the Internet, but again speaking honestly, having friends here is much better than having none.
I know this was a lengthy read, but I wanted to describe my reasoning fully. If you made it this far, thank you; I appreciate your interest. On a final note, I'd like to say that if I came across rather strongly anywhere here, it's because of my own experiences and values. There are many good parts of social media, but personally, it screwed me over.
Page created March 7, 2024. Last updated May 8, 2024.