Delete Instagram from your phone right now. Delete Reddit. Delete whatever app it is that you keep checking. Maybe even delete your iPhone?
Is there something you have done every single day since 2007 without a break? I have been sober as long as I have had an iPhone — so I can assure you it feels like a long time to do something or not do something.
I am giving great thought to having a more curated iPhone experience. Bring back a flip phone. Try that for a month, kinda like Dry January except in July. See what happens. Join me? You can have all the other tech in your life. Just no iPhone (or smartphone) for a month. A hard reset.
I’ve already been having an on-again and off-again relationship with Instagram (and the news for that matter). Why? It feels like it takes more than it gives. And what social media is actually taking from each of us and all of us — a constant leakage of attention, original thought, and presence — feels additive and heartbreaking. (The talented Ezra Klein, as always, delivers on the topic of social isolation and how social media makes us feel more lonely, which is a national epidemic.)
NB: After I posted this blog, I saw two things that are highly relevant — a study about the relationship between smartphones and the mental health of young people. (TL;DR: The younger they start, the worse it is.) And this cover story in the Wall Street Journal today is about the rise in deaths in young people.
Rule one: Never read Internet comments
In the last week, there have been a number of moments that, for me at least, truly mark the end of an era and seem to fit into this bigger narrative of the “Internet media tide shift.” The end of BuzzFeed, the end of Vice, the end of MTV News, the death of an OG blogger who at 47 tracked along with all my early media milestones. In sum: It’s the end of “the good-ish” Internet. (Listen to this podcast.)
After graduating college, I worked briefly in Dot Com 1.0 and then (mis)spent my youth in the lower circles of New York City media, reporting and writing, drinking at long-ago bars like Siberia and Botanica. The Internet was still emerging; I started a Facebook account in 2006 under a press invitation “to see what it was all about.” I worked at an actual daily paper newspaper in New York for which there is no Google-lable archive; then I went on to work at the Huffington Post where I experienced both the best and worst of what was yet to come: Eyeballs and comments.
I am not the first to wax poetic about the early aughts in New York when emerging online news was dishy and cute. But it started turning quickly. The 2012 election was when I realized I didn’t want to have a place in media — at least not online media.
We were reporting on Obama’s personal finances, including his investments in the Illinois state pension fund in which he was enrolled as a senator. State pensions are giant chunks of investments (much like your own 401(k)) where what you’re actually invested in is quite obscured from you and you have often no choice in the matter.
In short, the Illinois pension had investments in a whole bunch of things counter to Obama’s platform which was a line of attack by the Romney campaign. The pressure was on me, as one of the writers covering money aspects of the campaign, to skew my story for maximum outrage. “Obama Invested in Guns.” The editor suggested I write this headline because it would have desired front-page effect: Clicks. I cried — not a great journalist response and also a clue I was on the wrong field. His feedback? “I can’t believe you actually care this much.” (The same editor went on to work on tabloid-sizing the weather.)
I just didn’t want to participate in the click machine. After a decade in media, I knew I was emotionally on the way out. Also, I needed more income. So I took my exit in 2013 to work in tech marketing (a more nakedly honest approach to clicks and a different story about skewed incentives but we can talk about that later.) Anyway, I found my old story and it seems benign now but it felt like an early pivot for me.
Tapped out, tap in?
This is the backdrop to my ongoing wrestle with the way the Internet and media culture and our devices have turned on us. Beyond feeling some nostalgia for an earlier time, I can’t shake the feeling that something much deeper and much weirder is happening to our brains and souls. I have been trying to tap out (or more precisely tap in) to find some equanimity.
There are different words people use to describe the disease of self right now — depression, malaise, languishing, and boredom. The actions people take to display the disease look like anger, rudeness, incivility, and worse. But dig around and you often find under that a deeply enmeshed and often addictive relationship with the phone, the Internet, the media, with scrolling.
“I feel like my boredom is centered around all the distractions of my phone, internet, etc. I’m so addicted and it’s boring. Keeps me from chipping away toward goals. Or more meaning, connection.” - Text from a friend
And within that, there are so many layers — the content itself, the speed at which it moves, the colors, the dopamine, the heightened feelings, the mindless fiddling, the sheer length of time without a break from it, and the desperation when your device is not nearby. Our emotional misery is what’s being monetized (Scott Gallaway’s blog post is an excellent take on this.)
Just like alcohol, the phone/media/apps don’t have to be an addictive place — it’s what we bring to it. The phone has also done beautiful things for my relationships with people. I scroll through my text messages and I see warmth and connection. A private Signal chat group I am in with a half dozen college friends has been a lifeline since that horrible voting day in November 2016. My sisters share photos of my nieces and nephews several times per week. I have probably been able to stay sober since the beginning of iPhone-time because of years-long threads going on with sponsors and sponsees.
Yet I have deliberately tried to untether myself in the last year and pushed myself to make a real-life community even when it’s awkward. I go to 12-step meetings and yoga regularly, take pottery classes at a community studio, socialize with almost anyone willing to have a coffee, talk to my neighbors, volunteer, and walk the dog. And yes, I have a loving partner and that is a big part of it too. And maybe there is something to be said about just getting older. Sometimes it is fucking work and I’d rather hibernate alone with my phone, but I am also committed to staying in the community, sane, and healthy.
You might say at this point, “Hate the game, not the player.” But truly, for all your students of Marshall McLuhan, the message is the medium.
More than anything I want to try a re-set on my own landscape of thought, presence, and feeling that’s not constantly in the Frequency of Device. It’s ok to not carry the universe in my pocket at all times. It won’t kill me to set a real alarm clock, use the mapping device already in my car, take 10 extra minutes to look something up and call, or have an intuitive sense of how many steps I walked.
Do I really need to lose my soul to gain all that?
Well, let me try for a month.
Right on point, yet I've never considered letting it all go. For better or worse, as a constant traveler, often it all gets too busy on this end to click daily (read: surf vs sleep) and feel like it consumes my life. There's also the good fortune that most of the friends I do keep in touch with are scattered throughout the continent - many who I'd reconnected with on social media. My sobriety circle in fact seems to rely on it. Sad, fortuitous, and true.
Having said this I'd love to drop it all for a while and just live, and create, and take other little things in that life presents....and as likely with many of us, it comes down to a word; someday.
While I didn't ditch my smartphone, I did delete Instagram, Twitter, and all other social network apps from my phone from November through the end of January. It was really hard at first and then really, really good. If I wasn't working on The Rebis and trying to grow community, I probably wouldn't use Instagram anymore. I'm hopeful that Substack can be a more organic and authentic alternative but it sort of feels like hard work to actively engage on here, too. Requires a lot of essay reading! Which I'm often grateful for, given that it puts me in deeper connection with people's thoughts.