At this point it is a bit of a cliché to discuss how bad phones are for us, how addictive they are, etc., but I will anyway. We all know they’re bad for our attention spans and have a clear effect on how we function in the world for the worse. It’s not even a question or a secret anymore: they’re bad for us and we keep using them because our social lives are tied to them, covid keeps getting worse, and we’re stuck in a sort of sabotaging loop.
Unfortunately, if you’re any kind of creative person who is attempting to get their work noticed or sold in any way, you cannot forego using the internet entirely. It still boggles my mind to think that we’re in an era where, we as artists do not really need corporations and companies anymore. Although it would be nice to get published in a traditional manner, I can probably make more money over time by just publishing whatever it is I want to myself. Successful authors like Ottessa Moshfegh might make more up front, but I always have the potential to make more over the long-term. There is also something infinitely more rewarding in doing things myself instead of being a pampered pussy like so many artists are nowadays. I prefer being a cult figure who is discovered by people who genuinely like my work rather than someone people are told to like by the establishment. And I am still so amazed that I have sold books to people from all over the world; all because of this internet shit. But going back to what I said, it’s a slippery slope. If you do not treat your social media use like a bank robbery (get in and get out: do not hang around after the crime has been committed) you will have more taken from you than you take from the system.
A solution I have found that works very well for me is the sudden and random internet cleanse. What I mean by this is simply choosing a random time in your life in which you longer use the internet, any form of a screen, or certain apps on your phone, for a certain amount of time that is at least for a week minimum. It can’t be planned too far ahead; it needs to be jarring and a shock to your system to feel the benefits. When you make such a major decision, what you will find is that your brain is forced to work differently for the duration of that week or however long you decide to do it for. The purpose of doing this internet cleanse is to restart your brain as if it were an old computer, and to reset your circuitry. You want your synapses to fire differently from time to time, otherwise you will be stuck in a rut and become a passive person incapable of generating their own thoughts and work. You don’t want to become like everyone else, a leech off the system; you want to be an autonomous person, a doer instead of a consumer.
It’s better to stay off the internet entirely, but let’s say you decide to only curtail your use of an app like Twitter or Instagram for a week. What starts to happen is your brain will work in a different manner and show you what you might have forgotten it was capable of. The thing about using these apps and being addicted to your phone is that, when you are in the middle of such a crazy addiction you don’t realize how much your thinking has altered. You don’t think you’re becoming a changed person when you’re in the thick of it, but it does have an affect. I believe I was lucky to be born at the precise time I was: I remember the exact moment in time in 2007 when the iPhone was first introduced (I wrote about this in my novel The Lost Generation), and I notice a clear difference in how people acted before and after. There are certain younger people I feel a little badly for, because they were never alive during a time in which being alone and disconnected was a natural way of life. If you observe certain people in their late teens and early 20s, you’ll see that some of these people are clearly suffering from an addiction and simply unable to put their phones away for longer than 5 minutes without tweaking (I have discussed how socially incompetent these types are before). In the past, being alone with your thoughts was normal. Now, it actually feels like a challenge to be in that type of solitude.
It’s the same as any other big problem that ruins people’s lives, like alcohol or crack or heroin or whatever else. We don’t like to think of these phones as harmful as a real drug, but in my opinion we really should. They are effectively numbing us all, giving us a constant source of dopamine whenever we choose to want it (which is obviously a lot of the time in this world of chaos we’re living in). We’re like rats constantly pressing a button for more of some drug in a lab study. The phrase, “When something’s free, you’re the product,” gets shared around a lot these days for good reason: in some ways, it feels like these things available to us are somehow purposely designed to pull us in, and waste our time. It is a constant barrage of stimuli, an assault of the senses that renders most people ineffective to do much else other than stay locked in. Even when you’re not using your phone, you can sort of feel its pull on your psyche, an invitation to always check out what’s going on in the world at large, or your own personally little curated world, at all times.
The biggest problem with being constantly stimulated by our phones is that it also means being constantly provoked. Stimulation is a misleading word for what it is, it’s really a provocation. I don’t think the human mind is really built to be under repeated stress like using a phone brings on. We are not wired to stare into a screen that can offer so much for such long periods of time. It’s highly important to take some time away from it to give your brain a rest, reboot, and change of pace.
One of the biggest things I have noticed when experimenting with my breaks from internet/phone usage is how much my energy level is different. I feel like I have a lot more energy to work with in general when I am not taking those repeated hits of dopamine to the brain and using the internet to distract myself. When the repetitive stimuli attacking me goes away, I am left with a more peaceful state of being. It’s the calmest feeling to not have to be using your brain to think about meaningless things over and over. A picture of a cat, a video of a dog petting another dog, a gif of a woman shaking her ass to put you in a trance, a photo of a hot girl to jack off to, another obscenely pornographic gif to put you into a zombified stupor, a text from a friend, a new e-mail, more, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it? In the same way boxers discuss not doing anything with women or themselves before a big fight and focusing on redirecting their sexual retention to beating their opponent, it is best to be mindful of how you’re wasting your energy in a day, even if it is for something that seems as low-effort as using your phone. The deceptive thing about it is that it seems very easy, but over time there is an accrual of how much time one wastes doing things they don’t truly care about. You should guard your energy and be very careful with it.
Consider the act of Tweeting for example. Twitter is considered a “microblogging” site. Think about what that means: for every second you spend blogging for others on a free website, you could have saved up all that energy and used it towards something macro. Why bother microblogging too much when you can macro-write (if that makes sense)? The time you spend doing something incredibly minor doesn’t seem like a big waste of effort on the surface, but it’s still a part of your day. There’s a gap in your creative work/the other shit you want to do as a result. There is no way Dostoyevsky would have written Crime and Punishment if he were Tweeting the whole time concurrently. If Tolstoy had an iPhone War and Peace would’ve been 100 pages long.
I first noticed this energy phenomenon when fasting. Every year for a month I try my best to fast for a month straight, and something I’ve learned is that when I have less energy to work with from food and drink, I have to be more conscious about how I’m using the little energy I have to work with all day. For example, if I am fasting, I simply do not have the energy to do something as simple as singing or rapping along to one of my favourite songs or I will get worn out quickly. I also cannot engage in too much vigorous movement on a fasting day. Simple things we all take for granted require careful consideration when fasting, because if you go too hard you just won’t make it from sunrise to sunset. I know it sounds weird, but I do think that on a larger scale, this is the same concept as what happens when we use our phones too often: our energy leaks in the wrong areas without us realizing it. When you have an internet cleanse, or a “Phone Fast,” you will begin to see a hidden reserve of energy you probably forgot you had.