Internet Addiction

My name is hardcore dilettante and I am a straight-up internet addict. It’s ruining my physical health. Quitting fb and Twitter helped a lot with the mental health aspect.

extremely online and never gonna log off, all the way since like 1990

An addiction might be defined as what happens when your brain becomes convinced that some inessential element of your life is absolutely essential, so that supplying yourself with it comes to eclipse the importance of eating, sleeping, staying warm, or other basic necessities. There seems to be something about screen-based devices that lend themselves to addictive brain reactions.

DOPAMINE, MOTHERFUCKERS

teach yr children well

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/11/14/563767149/increased-hours-online-correlate-with-an-uptick-in-teen-depression-suicidal-thou

Recently been hearing about creators of the very biggest websites feeling guilty about their part in the creation of them.

What wasn't new to me was that people continually find reasons to keep using the internet for more minutes/hours; that it's like the websites use you. But I was still struck by this somehow, I probably hadn't considered enough the possibility that specific website and device design choices were really damaging my life. Perhaps there's some outside of internet activities I only do because it feeds into a certain internet compulsion?

I generally don't think of myself as an angry internet guy but I've increasingly noticed myself getting angry and then thinking "who or what can I mock without being too much of a jerk?"

I generally don't think of myself as an angry internet guy but I've increasingly noticed myself getting angry and then thinking "who or what can I mock without being too much of a jerk?"

I can very much relate to this. I had to get off twitter because it was fuel for this dynamic.

I decided to keep the internet to Fridays and Saturdays. Optionally Sundays when I'm doing something really time consuming.

It's genuinely troubling to think how much harder this would have been if I didn't live between my parents houses. I just leave all my internet devices at my father's house and there is no horrible struggle necessary.

This is the arrangement I used to have before 2013 and I've really been feeling the benefit from it. It does feel a lot like the good old days but maybe it'll never be the same. I still think about the internet a lot and all the things I'm going to say and do on Friday and Saturday, so there's still this gravitational pull but maybe it's no different than thinking about your next shopping trip.
The first few Fridays I was surprised at how little I enjoyed coming back to the internet and it very quickly became much clearer which websites were just time killers I'd be happier without.

I just have to accept that some internet activities are going to take a very long time to catch up on (like years of Monster Brains, 50 Watts and my youtube watchlist).

If I manage to catch up with my books I want to read more online fiction because there's so much of it these days and it's hard to imagine reading much of it in good time. Maybe I'll have to print it all off and get used to buying more ink cartridges.

My internet was down for 2 days. Struggle is real man. It's like an appendage. Good luck

Maybe I'll have to print it all off and get used to buying more ink cartridges.

if you have a kindle you can copy and paste stuff into a word document then email it to your kindle, that's what I usually do if I want to read a long-form online article (assuming that you don't count the kindle as breaking the 'no internet devices' rule)

I applaud your decision RAG, I couldn't do it. I take it you don't have work or study for which you'd need the internet? (this in itself seems like something that's non-existent nowadays)

A kindle is a good solution. As is an ipad without internet connection, to use it like a kindle, just for stuff to read.

Kindle was partly what got my internet usage out of control. It would be difficult to resist turning on the internet. And also, I want to stay away from electronic screens.

I'm not studying anything these days.

But I'm sure over the years, more and more things will require internet.

I consider having no mobile devices to be my limit. Now that i'll be jobless in 5 weeks, i need to use the web for more than bullshit.

when I am home I pretty much do not use my computer except checking email and what not. Not out of self control but genuine loathing!

This comes of using a cimputer all day at work I think

I just want to paint and go into forests and read paper things

I refuse to admit I have a problem:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a19505007/internet-broken-brain/

glad I never created a Twitter profile

do we have any ex-ilxors who returned to ilx and can tell what life without ilx was like compared to life with ilx?

Really should be more internet - social media detox centres. Based on a recent thread here on ilm in which shit went sour, nobody ends up benefiting from the fall out. Going offline or into some sort of retreat is one option I gusss but most people don’t seem to have the ability to log off and breathe. One of the worst addictions bar none

IMO from spending a bit of time in rehab and step programs, most addictions are (at least in part) people self-medicating for anxiety, grievances and regrets, or otherwise something lacking in their lives. Internet addiction provides the illusion of conviviality, satisfying a self-perpetuated need because it prevents cultivating RL relationships.

Otm, he typed into ilx.

Yeah that’s otm for sure

Also there’s a fear of missed opportunities from not reading posts - it’s like you have to be there at all times to stand your ground which is exhausting and a waste of energy imo

Any time I’ve walked away I feel better, just me but like I always feel worse spiralling into wars with people or even just seeing someone get piled on

yeah the last couple of weeks have been a bummer

i use freedom p aggressively, it works

flopson, you mean you step away a lot

I'm really enjoying not having the internet for a chunk of the week. I still haven't quite figured out how to cram everything into two or three days but I'm working on it.

It's really sad looking at people you admire on twitter acting like they're in highschool trying to say cool things and all the stupid clique behavior.

Some really intelligent people now seem incapable of realizing when their attempts at ingratiation are appallingly gooey.

i remember when I used to care about the internet; for years really. now I fucking hate it and am only on here when I'm at work.

I'm always trying to find the right mix of sites to block and keep. I don't want to block ILX, but I think Youtube has to go. Being on the computer too much has been messing up my sleep lately.

Quite horrifying to think back to how much time I spent checking for updates and looking at things that felt important at the time but weren't at all.

I like ILX a lot and really enjoy posting here and reading everyone's posts, but I hate how much time I spend on the internet and I wish it were possible for me to find some balance. This weekend I'm anxious and feel like crap about an observation at work that didn't go well, and I have to wait until Monday to find out how badly I screwed up, so I'm unable to concentrate on anything and I just keep refreshing the same sites. I know I'm doing this as a way to numb my brain and fast-forward through the weekend, but knowing I'm doing that doesn't help me not do it.

I used to live in a cabin with no internet, where I had to drive into town to check emails, and that was great because I had internet time but it was automatically limited and my home was an internet-free space. I wish I could go back to that.

There are some ADD-centric tools that can help with that. Like apps that will shut off your internet access after a prescribed amount of time.

Cold Turkey is a good one.

I've been using one, but unfortunately I've figured out how to get around it by opening an incognito window.

Try Cold Turkey, it's wise to your schemes, including incognito mode or changing the date/time to circumvent the lock.

Oh good! That sounds great, thank you!

yeah I use cold turkey a fair bit, it does the job!

I've been thinking about this very thing today, before I saw this thread. (Irony right there, I guess.) I really do have to figure out some way to lessen my time online. Cold turkey is inconceivable. I wish I were the kind of person who could say "Your house is filled with unread books and unwatched movies and unheard music--why don't you spend most of your retirement attending to that?" and follow through, but I just don't have the mindset or discipline or whatever is needed to do that. So much of my occasional moodiness is attributable to the internet in one way or another.

It's brutal, isn't it? I'm sitting in this room filled with books, and it's like I can't even see them.

Lately I've been reading books about the attention economy and I still get distracted mid-sentence by the very mechanisms being deconstructed therein.

Disconnecting myself altogether from social media has helped immensely, both with the extent to which the internet gets its hooks in me and the extent to which the internet contributes to my feeling like shit.

Like on the extremely rare occasion that I open Facebook, I start feeling like shit within minutes and know it's time to step away again.

Trump being in power for four years made it possible for me to surgically seek content, both on his re-electability, and his approval ratings, desperate to see signs of an end.

when he left, that still left things like daily COVID statistics, news on vaccines, stimulus, etc.

when this is over....might finally be at the point where like, the internet is just 'there' again, like pre-2016.

i go on FB to say happy birthday, to msg my best friends who chat w/ me daily, and a new friend from years back that I have been chatting with. maybe see if any new friends got vaccinated.

then PM my brother to tell me the hit he thinks he got in Little League Baseball 24 years ago was actually a fielder's choice.

then I'm done for the day

At least for me, there's an underlying problem here which is that my moods/sense of self are too dependent on how I do at my job from day to day, and there's something soothing and numbing (though also inherently depressing) about the internet which makes me turn to it in a time of low self-esteem and then creates a feedback loop that makes me ultimately feel worse.

I get very little out of Facebook but can't disconnect entirely because my brother and I started a Facebook group back in college which has somehow grown to have more than 6,000 members, many of whom are lonely old people who rely on it as a major part of their day, and I'm the main moderator so I have to check it fairly routinely to make sure they haven't all started screaming at each other about politics.

Just to add to the Cold Turkey recs, I recently shelled out for a lifetime subscription to Freedom and it's been the best purchase in years.

When I've been particularly scattered I've sometimes gone and looked at a painting for fifteen minutes — it seems to effectively settle the mind, though it can yield a certain melancholy. I took up the practice after reading about a medical instructor who took his students to a gallery when they couldn't distinguish between skin lesions in this NYRB article. For me it doesn't particularly matter if the painting is by a professional or not, just so long as there's something I can dig into with my eyes.

Thanks for the heads-up, LBI. If you've experimented with Cold Turkey as well, how does it compare to Freedom? I've never tried the latter.

It's been rough for me lately as well. I try to use the Hosts file to block websites like ILX and Youtube, but somehow I’ve gotten accustomed to just mechanically opening the file and unblocking them every time I turn on my computer – all it does is add a few more steps. I should try Cold Turkey.

I think it helps to not regard internet addiction as an individual failing. Huge numbers of people are internet addicts. Our brains are not evolved to use this technology in a balanced way, especially when social media and streaming are engineered to suck up as much of our attention as possible.

I really do hope new websites come along that steal the best parts of twitter and tumblr (pillowfort and mastodon are pretty much ripoffs of tumblr and I'm curious to see if they build). Still never joined twitter but I've been looking at it a lot and it definitely makes me unhappy. Something about twitter and tumblr makes the word "doomscrolling" seem a perfect description of the feeling of using them, regardless of subject matter. There needs to be somewhere that gets content to people more efficiently, shares & spreads (retweet, reblog) well and gets rid of the trivial and shitty stuff. But I kinda would like to go back to the blogger and forum days and just accept the tradeoff that they aren't as good for sharing & spreading content.

Since my last posts above, I've moved to my father's permanently, so I don't weekend binge anymore, I try to keep it to just a couple of hours a day (I'm failing badly at that recently).

xp Yeah, it's horribly addictive, and like all addictive things it targets whatever you're already feeling bad about, briefly gives you the illusion of making it better, and ultimately makes it worse. So it's hard not to feel like it's an individual failing because the way you experience it is so personal, but it's definitely a widespread problem.

I actually got rid of my smartphone a couple years ago and it was great, about three days of feeling like a part of me had been amputated, and then this wonderful freedom, where I could leave the house, get on a bus, go to a cafe or whatever, and not have to think about the internet until I came home again. But now, with lockdown, I'm almost always in my house surrounded by computers, so not having the phone doesn't make much difference.

Internet Addiction is a thing, but refreshing the same websites during a time of stress is the new version of re-reading the same newspaper article/book and not taking any of it in.