So, this is unpleasant.
https://www.addictioncenter.com/drugs/social-media-addiction/
Read this thing and shudder uncomfortably. I’m reminded of those t-shirts that celebrate wine and coffee addiction, and the Onion headline, “I’m like a chocoholic–but with alcohol.”
One can sense a near future where people look back on the social media of today the way we recoil in horror from turn of the century celebrants downing glowing radium cocktails.
Radioactivity was new, see? Why would anyone think it could hurt them?
So we look back at addiction, at the one we all know about, and see social media addiction through that bleary eyed lens. We’re chocoholics. We do this every day. For quite a bit of time. But we could quit whenever we want. And we know when to draw the line.
And we’re not hurting anybody. Except ourselves, and then… who is to say? Only ourselves. And that’s the problem.
My parents drank enough, every day, to get a decent buzz on for maybe sixty five years.
My Dad quit for a few years, after a disastrous party where he embarrassed my mother suggested his liver was dying. When he started drinking again two years later, he cut out all hard liquor. He downed shitloads of wine. This worked, if by working you mean avoiding DUIs, embarrassing parties, and making it to age 86 in reasonable health. So. Mission accomplished, right?
Right?
My parents did not identify as alcoholics. AA had been founded the year before my father was born, in 1935, but neither of them would have ever dreamed of attending a meeting.
Sixty percent of the country drinks nothing or a drink or two a week. Another thirty percent are somewhere near the two or three drinks a day line we collectively shrug at, and the top ten percent drink about 10 drinks a day or more.
Where’s the line? Where does problem drinking start? Professionals generally talk about drinking impacting life in negative ways, often health related, without getting at the deeper question, which is what the hell is life for, and what should a drinker be doing instead?
Behavioral addictions often have relatively minor health consequences; professionals look at other consequences to measure the damage done by gambling, say, or sex addiction.
But when it comes to social media? If you’re not looking at the damn phone while driving, or walking, it’s physically safe as houses, as that’s where you do it, often, in your house. What if the real life it displaces was getting soused in bars? Having unsafe sex in bathroom stalls? Skydiving? Hmm?
My parents never missed a day of work from drinking. They never crashed a car. Never got a DUI. Never seemed to suffer social issues. Enjoyed the rock solid marriage, drinking together. They had successful, professional careers, earned Ph.Ds, owned homes, and put an ungrateful kid through college. They left their kids a decent sized chunk of change, after dying in their late 80s after a few weeks of illness, each.
How could anyone say their drinking was a problem?
So we wind our way around to sex, video games, and social media.
As my Mother declined, and I cut her wine to a half bottle a day, which she would sometimes forget she’d had as she asked for more, she told me that drinking was the last thing that made her feel like a person.
So, I think, the hardest part about social media addiction, which addiction specialists suggest about one or two in ten americans could reasonably see themselves as having (the same goes for alcohol, by the way) is what the hell do you want to do with life, really, and why is that thing better, more worthwhile, than Facebook or Instagram or Twitter?
The question isn’t wether you’re addicted to social media. The question is what do you want to do with your life and are you doing it?
Riddle me that, Batman.
Bottom line, you gotta know what you would rather be doing, and you can’t be wishy washy about it; you can’t hope it emerges out of the fog of withdrawal, because let me tell you, the withdrawal, for some, for me, is real and it’s fucking awful.
I’m unclear what my life is for at this point.
This is a fucking nightmare. The social media, maybe, is just a greek chorus.
Heya, I’m almost not sure if I should comment on your posts while you do a digital cleanse? Is that helpful? Not?
In any event, wanted to let you know you’re not shouting into the void. I have a WordPress subscription to your blog and so receive your posts as emails.
I’m reading them and getting a lot of good out of them. Again, not sure if telling you that is helpful or not. Since we met each other for a bit IRL, perhaps it’s OK?
In any event, thanks for the food for thought. My brain is chewing things over. 🙂
Glad you are reading and happy to read the comments; that said, I get what you’re saying.
Our brains are these ecosystems and we keep dicking with them, with every new technology, never knowing when we have released rabbits into the Australian outback.
I am very happy to be in touch with you again; I really liked you. The casual likes and shares and connections of social media really aren’t something I think anyone needs.
Though I did read an article in the NYT that suggested that these tenuous friendly but not close networks are great for finding work, which I think is one reason we have them; we reach out because of economic insecurity. Well to do people have always had this luxury, of not needing other people, in the deepest sense of that word, need. Of course the precarious reach out…
I always read your blog. It’s part of my RSS feed, a simple, useful way to keep up with news and websites that doesn’t require Zuck to choose what I see.
I’m glad you’re off Facebook, because I think the temptation to yell about politics brought out the worst in you, but I’m not sure you need a total fast. I hardly spend any time on FB, but you can write 3000 words on a good day when you’re on it, and I can’t anyway. If you still think ADHD is a problem, we both know there are ways to address it that you’re not really trying.
I always thought you knew what you wanted to do with your life. I hope you don’t decide it’s social media, unless you count writing commentary like this. Maybe you should leverage your Facebook following and get them to follow you here, counterexample of Trump be damned.
Thanks. It is good to know you are reading it. I really should never go back to social media. Maybe announce sales or troll for award nominations or ask the feed some questions that feeds are good at answering. But at that point, I think the platform will punish me for disengagement and give me nothing. Which is fine.
I never got addicted to Twitter for this reason. I never properly engaged the platform. I collected 1300 followers but never got the hang of reaching others using hashtags and interacting with bigger names and the various ways people do that, tweeting ten times a day or twenty or whatever.
I never even signed up for instagram; by the time it was getting big I knew I had enough problems. I am told it is a good place for some things I sorta might want or need to do. Shudder.
If you never want to go back, are you considering burning your bridges and cancelling your accounts?
It’s one day at a time, here, Ron.
We have a very limited palette of addiction recovery metaphors, and the total abstinence AA model doesn’t work for everyone. We tend to simply give up on the people it doesn’t work for.
If they have periods of moderate use we wait for the catastrophic failure, as we make faces behind their backs. What the fuck? We think. Total abstinence for you, dude. Can’t you see it?
I’m going to research 12 step total abstinence and alternatives now. There are harm reduction models used in some populations, for folks for whom abstinence doesn’t work.
Newport says, do a month cold turkey on everything you can possibly shut off, and then add stuff back in, see if you have fucked yourself up again, and then, fix that one thing, instead of wondering why fixing one thing doesn’t fix everything.
This is the insight of the book, which is that everyone wants to sell their quick fix that turned them, briefly perhaps, into a moderate user. That it is intertwined. I think he’d see a lot of the interaction that has made us both, in your case IRC in the old days, but USENET and email, all of it, as shitty conversation, basically, bad for you.
He venerates the Amish in this thing. It’s an extreme take. But it’s interesting.
OK. As I have no intention of abandoning all online media, I have no incentive to insist others do so. I was just responding to your sentence from your previous post, “I really should never go back to social media.” I should have taken it as a symptom of your ambivalence about them.