We need to abandon the internet

I’ve been chronically online for two decades. Maybe the internet took the best of my intelligence, after all.

The internet killed the best of me, you know.

Well of course you do, it’s killed the best of you too.

I’ve been connected to the internet since I was a teenager but back then I had the option to remove myself from it. Coming into this world was an effort and leaving it was a choice I made easily, one that was made quickly. I’d sign out of Myspace and MSN Messenger (to protect my very important secrets), I’d shut down the family computer and wait for the green glow of the power switch to fade. Maybe I’d pick up a book I’d read before. I’d play with the dog, maybe make myself a peanut butter sandwich and watch my shows. Normal kid stuff, nothing special.

Once I stopped needing to shut things down and wait through dial tones, I became less interested in nourishing my brain with all the things I loved before. We exist in a world of hyper connectivity and we’re all so afraid of missing something. The fact of the matter is, it’s not like we’ll escape it even if aren’t online when it happens, media saturation is everyone and our fear is futile. If the media doesn’t tell you, your friends will.

As I got older, I would have phases of reading and for the most part, I did still write a lot. But it all felt like effort, and I felt like age had made me stupid. So I kept scrolling, and made myself stupider. Ultimately, I forgot what I looked like without the glow of a phone on my skin. Slowly but surely, my attention span depleted and the only analog thing I was interested in was a camera.

Once I got my big girl job, I had little time or interest in greasing the wheels of my mind. Fighting a tiredness that lived in my brain and bones, I needed to get out of the world. Except now I’ve realised, it’s been this way for years. This is no longer a comfort and it hasn’t helped me in quite some time. It is one of my bad habits, like picking my nails or rubbing the skin on my collarbone until it’s pink. Doomscrolling is easy and without fail, makes time vanish until it’s time to go to bed. Existing is hard and expensive.

To make things worse, everything I created was for a screen. My work was mostly digital and it was easy to measure my own life with the same performance indicators I used for work. I looked at screens to write important documents, and I edited my photos on my laptop. I made videos for Instagram for fun, until I started measuring those too. I upgraded my tools and practiced, and then practiced some more. I worked until my fingers cramped and my mouth was sore from the concentration that left me biting the inside of my cheeks.

At least there was some creativity in that though, and I can’t deny the improvement in my own skills over the years. Still, there was a disease living in my hands. The brain rot had metastasized to my fingers, which were only creating with algorithms and objectives in mind.

What I find most upsetting is the lack of original thoughts I’ve had over the years. So many of my thoughts and opinions might have been put in my head for me, and I’ve just absorbed them over time. It’s given me a bit of an identity crisis, to be honest. I might have had so many great ideas by now, or maybe I wouldn’t. I don’t know what’s worse.

I consider the death of my brain to be as devastating as a still heart, as catastrophic as a blocked artery or a collapsed lung. It’s just as fatal as an infection that can’t be controlled. This particular type of brain death though is not permanent. You just have to wake up from it.

I think the state of online discourse over the last few months was enough to spook me as my brain shuddered back to life. What am I doing here?

This abrupt wake up call made me take in my surroundings and pay attention to my real life. I don’t think I realised the best parts of me had quietly slipped into sleep, that my big ideas had been welcomed by the comfort of a coma.

Do you remember who you were before you created your first ever screen name? Do you know what used to sit in your hand before you ever got hold of a phone? Your hand feels empty when you put your phone on the bedside table. It’s like a phantom limb, something is missing from your grip.

People talk about brain rot all the time. Back in the day, new words and music would dance around in our skulls, and trivia was filed away for quizzes and awkward silences. We learned lyrics from CD booklets. We got stuck playing a game and had to figure it out ourselves. Original thoughts tapped on our windows when we sat and stared for a while, they’d make their way in through the cracks in the glass.

Without technology, boredom would set in sometimes. Boredom is actually good, it makes space for ideas and keeps our brains ticking, our creativity flowing. Boredom breeds the best of us sometimes, and having no distraction is both a blessing and a curse.

We are no one when we are distracted by the internet, we simply exist - comfortably stuck in the in-between. We float between the living and online, forgetting the former because it’s sometimes too much to bear.

We hold hands with the other ghosts in limbo. There are so many people just like me on the internet, and it’s all so comforting. Until it’s not.

If you’re feeling further away from yourself, riddled with anxieties over things you can’t control and an attention span that can’t tolerate a book or film for its entirety, there’s only one answer. Disconnect, bestie. I promise you can do it. It’s not so bad over here now that the online world is just as ugly as the real one.

I am an eldest child and I swear, I’ve learned some good lessons and you will have to listen to me because I said so. If I was your big sister I would tell you that you cannot sing yourself to sleep with TikTok sounds forever.

Escaping into the internet is now just as horrifying as living in reality, maybe more so. In your real life, at least you can choose your people (mostly). In an algorithmic world, you can’t escape the worst of humanity. You will always be upset by something or someone.

You can try to curate your feed as much as you like, but you can’t carve it with absolute precision. We’re all just feeding the machine, aren’t we? We can’t always control where the food ends up or who feeds from it.

The internet itself is not inherently evil, although certain corners and caves that exist are darker than others. I’m not always brave enough to peek inside them, but I’m told what lurks in the shadows is kind of evil, and a lot of trolling.

The internet is a resource, and it can do some good. It helps people drop their mask and be themselves, or kill loneliness by making friends in far away places. It has its good parts, but it all comes at a cost.

The universe demands balance and you have no choice now, you are confronted with the good and the bad of the world. You drift off into daydreams and nightmares, you face angels and villains. You don’t get to choose, not really. Although all the big social media platforms would have you believe you choose your own environment.

Distraction is not always a bad thing. Art is a distraction, it inspires and it helps us heal. It keeps us moving when we can’t put one foot in front of another. When we’re heartbroken, we still have jobs to go to. When we’re lonely, we still have bills to pay. When the world stopped moving in 2020, millions of people turned to film, tv and yes, TikTok, just to feel better or learn how to make banana bread.

The problem is, our connection to the internet is permanent. It's so normal and commonplace to be here all the time, that we forget there’s an alternative way to cope.

We used to have dreams that didn’t include screens, and we used to fall asleep without scrolling.

Tough love is never easy. I love my screen, but it doesn’t love me. It won’t hold my hand as I die, nor will I care by then. Scrolling is like snacking, I gradually stretch my stomach until I eat so much that I never feel full. It’s all junk food. The only answer is portion control.

I’ve noticed that by putting my phone on Do Not Disturb for days at a time, life can be quieter. Shutting out the noise is a privilege, I know. It’s not the same for everyone. I have the luxury of putting my phone down when the venom starts to penetrate, but some people have to live with the poison.

Some people live through wars and natural disasters, and I know a lot of people don’t have the luxuries that I do. I am lucky to even say that I’ve been so privileged my entire life that I unwillingly destroyed my own intelligence for a time, an intelligence that was given to me by my easy access to education, books and art.

I know tuning myself out of the horrors of the world is a privilege, and I am not saying to not consume anything. Media is important and news is necessary. Without a critical eye though, both of these things can easily be a weapon. Now more than ever, we need media literacy and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s in short supply and the internet shoulders a lot of the blame.

I’ve never worried about my media literacy, that’s always something I’ve kept a tight hold on. Media was my first fascination, and eventually, my degree. My general rule of thumb is I check the news on a daily basis, but I don’t follow news organisations anymore. I’ve started being a lot more selective about consumption, a lot more picky about voices.

Something else I did to cleanse my feeds was a long, overdue look at my accounts and friend lists. I culled my Instagram followers without mercy. It was time. We’ve all had enough of each other, so I took pleasure in setting my ghosts free as they pass on to the next life.

I used to take great pride in being one of the chronically online. I knew all the inside jokes, the memes, and the hot takes. It was all so fun. I loved it here.

Finding other chronically online people in real life was a thrill, finally finding someone to chat utter pop culture nonsense with. Sometimes talking about all that we knew for hours. DMing memes back and forth, talking about Trisha Paytas’ place as the problematic mother of the internet, we’d learn new ways to be funny from people more witty than us.

Last week, I deleted TikTok from my phone. Being from the UK, I was unaffected by the 14 hour ban but I just did not want it anymore. There was a time when I’d sink hours into that app without hesitation. Over the last year or so, I’ve really cut down, only opening it a few times a week. I just don’t feel like I need it anymore.

I can’t quite bring myself to delete my Twitter (I will never call it X and you can’t make me, I am a millennial). I’ve been there since 2009 and it’s one of the last remaining ties to my past lives.

Last week, I told my brain twin (chronically online friend) “I don’t want to have ruined my entire mind by the time I’m 40.”

It’s a shame that I didn’t come to this conclusion much sooner. But I am a child of the internet. I was there for the first big internet boom of the late 90s and early 2000s, and as any early adopter of something, I can’t quite kill my fascination with it. I’m not scared of it even though I should be. I believe in it, and I want to know what makes it tick.

Everyone talks about how harmful social media and our everlasting connectivity is. Of course it’s bad for us, overexposure to most things can poison you. Until I took some of it away, I never really noticed how badly I needed my fix or how anxious it made me.

It turns out that after two decades of being online, I had the world’s worst hangover.

I had a good run, though.

If I ever complained I was bored as a child, I was told to go outside. I did not think two decades later this would still need to be drilled into my head. It turns out maybe our parents were right about something, after all.

They insisted on no phones at the dinner table, until we moved out and had a phone in one hand and a fork in another.

They were afraid of this, and it really is becoming a thing of nightmares. Technology keeps moving, and it keeps learning - a lot faster than we do. Phones are just an extension of self. They’re an extra limb, one you now receive as a rite of passage.

My camera roll has over 100,000 photos, and my Notes app is bleeding with words that sound too stupid to put anywhere else. My phone might be an extension of me, but I don’t want it to be.

I was not made by Apple, nor am I a product developed by Google. I am not the brainchild of Silicon Valley. I’m just a girl, but I could be more than that, if it wasn’t for my phone.

I say all of this but the curse of being self aware is that I realise that right now, I’m writing on Substack (as if Substack isn’t a form of social media itself).

In my defence, Substack has reignited my love for actual books. I read a book a week now, and I read countless essays and poems on here. I connect with people who take care of words like I do. My phone pisses me off a lot, so I don’t use it for writing. It feels unnatural anyway. I write notes by hand, and read and type with my laptop. I nourish my mind with original thoughts and ideas, it’s so much better when they aren’t my own.

Sometimes, it might just be enough to sign on for an hour and then sign out. It’s what we used to do back in 2002, usually because our parents needed to use the phone.

It might even be helpful to read something longer than 280 characters, for crying out loud.

I believe the kids would tell you to “Touch grass”, but I’d just suggest going outside without a phone in your hand, letting the cold whistle through your ears and the frost bite at your fingers. Just exist for a while, maybe let yourself get bored on a walk so that you escape to somewhere secret, to a hiding place worth visiting now and again. Imagination is an ancient and sacred escape, but you'll lose it if you don’t use it.

We need to abandon the internet, just for a while. Just long enough to hear the hush settle over us.

Like any addict, I can’t cut myself off entirely.