i had an emotion on the internet

oh no!

“The only monster here is the gambling monster that has enslaved your mother. I call him Gamblor! And it’s time to snatch your mother from his neon claws!”

The internet is a monster, and it has enslaved me - and probably most of us - in its iridescent claws, much like ‘Gamblor’ once enslaved Marge in The Simpsons episode $pringfield.

Lately, I have felt extra glued to my phone. There’s a lot of personal stuff going on for me right now. There’s also a lot of big, negative stuff - too much - going on in the world. Perhaps that’s why it’s felt impossible to disengage from the internet. It offers me both connection and distraction. It’s my crack, LSD, meth and heroin rolled into one.

It’s not just me, though, right? It seems as though many of us are currently complaining about the same thing. We’re no longer having fun on the internet. It no longer feels optional. We feel stuck in the worldwide web’s sticky net.

There have been some excellent articles about this not-so-new phenomenon lately - The New Yorker published a great piece about brain-breaking.

There were a couple more excellent articles on this topic that I read quite recently - like, within the last few days - but fuck. I can’t even remember where I saw them, or who wrote them. This is the effect The Internet is having on my brain these days!

What can I really add to this Greek chorus of critique? Yes, I feel a sense of timelessness - I disappear into the world of my phone regularly; it is a place where time doesn’t exist. Yes, I feel constantly anxious - in a ‘jonesing-for-a-fix’ way, when I’m away from my phone, and in an ‘I should really put this thing down’ way, when I’m engaged with it. But that’s not interesting to talk about. Everyone’s already talking about experiencing those same things.

All I can add is how being online has been making me feel emotionally - something I’ve not seen discussed much, so far, in other writers’ content.

Entering online spaces always used to make me feel like I was entering a bodiless world, where my feelings were cast aside, where I was simply drinking in information. For a self-conscious, at times socially awkward person like me, social media always felt like a safe haven - it gave me the chance to consider my words before I let them loose, without the pressure of being spontaneously erudite or witty. It was, in a way, a method of disconnecting from myself. I was ‘cooler’ online, both in temperament and in social capital.

But this has changed. I’ve been having some pretty visceral reactions recently. I’ve been feeling things.

I was reading some comments on Facebook the other day (I know, my mistake!) and I became aware that I was having an Emotional Reaction. Once, to a post where sexist, racist people were making their repugnant views public. And then again, beneath a post where someone asked their followers to share the most ‘unhinged’ things their parents did during their upbringings. I suddenly felt really sad, reading things like ‘My dad, a roofer, nailed me to the roof to ensure I stayed put while he went to the shops’ and ‘My parents used to make me eat dinner alone in the garage every night’.

I was feeling empathy for the stories of people I’d never met. Not even stories - micro-admissions, a line or two. I mean, I couldn’t even verify if these stories were true. I suddenly became aware that reading those stories was a big fucking waste of my energy. I’m all for empathy, but come on. I have better things to do with my limited time.

I also became aware that if I hadn’t clicked on those posts, if I’d been doing something instead of scrolling my phone, I could have saved myself from having Emotional Reactions in the first place. They were completely avoidable events.

Boy, what a revelation, I can hear you sneering, dear reader. Hey, spare a modicum of empathy for me. As I mentioned before, social media can function like a drug. The knowledge that it’s something I bring into my life daily, willingly, by logging on, is not the easiest thing to accept. I often feel I’m doing it against my will.

It would be different if those aforementioned commenters were friends, or people I’d met IRL. But they weren’t. They were complete strangers. There is no comparable real-life situation in which I’d be eavesdropping on random people’s trauma stories.

I know this isn’t a novel observation, but social media is just plain weird. It’s not a social ‘space’ or ‘event’, it’s a noticeboard. A giant, infinite, immeasurable noticeboard. The reason we feel empty after a while of scrolling and reading is that these noticeboard interactions function so differently to real-life interactions. Join the conversation, bleat the advertisements for many of social media’s behemoths, yet social media ‘conversations’ do not function the way real-life ones do. They are closed back and forths, limited to specific topics. Sure, threads might evolve into sub-threads, topics might veer. But social media posts, especially the controversial ones, amount to debates with no conclusion.

They leave us feeling lacking. They pique our emotions, but we don’t find resolutions for our feelings. Nuance is lost. Others’ emotions and motivations are assumed. Links, so many links, are shared - it’s impossible to ever read them all. It’s never as satisfying as a real life conversation - most of which, unless they’re arguments, beget a modicum of basic respect and compromise. Social media threads always leave us wanting more of something indefinable. A resolution, a conclusion that never comes - and never will. We could scroll our feeds all night and never see the same thing twice. Social media is infinite.

And it might just be killing our ability to converse in real life - to respectfully debate and understand each other. Rather than increasing empathy, social media tends to exacerbate black-and-white thinking, leaves us in echo chambers of people who agree with us, and increases our tendency to react to differing opinions with cruel, knee-jerk reactions.

It’s probably no surprise to you, dear reader, that social media also negatively affects our ability to interact in real life, reduces our relationship satisfaction, reduces our attention spans, and is associated with higher levels of social anxiety.

The good news is that, though it’s not always an easy task, we do have the power to put our rectangles down. It’s just a matter of doing it.

I will be making a big effort (not for the first time) to disconnect from social media - at least, from doomscrolling and from reading comment sections. I suggest that you do the same.

We really have better things we could be doing.