Putting together this threadpost, I find myself thinking that my thoughts about addiction circle around video games, social media and cigarettes – and a bit about abusive relationships. I’m not sure if this particular post is going to be something I’ll revisit, but it’s probably good to have anyway.
0012 – talk is cheap, fear is inhibitive
What’s interesting is how the internet numbs you. You spend some time on it and it numbs you, you stop thinking in a certain way. You take in information, yes, but there’s a certain process loop that takes priority- and what happens is that you forget about what you want to do, you forget about what you want to create. It’s quite scary, actually.
Sometimes I watch someone else use a device and I get a little disturbed by how intent they are on what they’re doing. Same for watching little children with iPads or iPhones. But then I realize: I’m no different. In fact, if I could watch myself, I’d be shocked, because I’m much worse than any of these other people. I have a debilitating internet addiction and I often don’t even acknowledge it. When I do acknowledge it, I don’t do much about it.
So how do you deal with something like that? Cold turkey is one way, I suppose, but that seems a bit excessive. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater again. There is much good to be had online as long as you remain in control, and you’re the one who decides what you do, how much time you spend, what you pursue, so on and so forth.
I have all these nagging little commitments that I haven’t done enough about because they seem to have such high “activation energies”- but really, all you need to do is to get started. I’m such an irresponsible person.
It’s the going online without a directed purpose that fucks me up. Nobody should go on the internet just to pass time without knowing what they’re doing. Nobody should just randomly pop on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Quora etc “just because”, until they’ve accomplished whatever they set out to accomplish each day, because those are massive time-sinks that will just swallow you up whole, unless you have a sort of discipline and willpower that I certainly don’t have. Could they be cultivated? I certainly intend to find out.
there’s still so much to learn, still so much to do- and it’s not like I have a lot of things to learn- there ARE a lot of things out there to learn, but if I could, I’d just focus my learning on a few points. I need to learn how to focus, I need to learn how to say no, I need to learn how to recover from falling off wagons, and I need to design checks and balances into my routines… I keep thinking “I can’t wait for next year where everything’s going to be awesome”, but that’s not a healthy way of thinking- I should focus on the here and the now
0070 – social media and me (and games and addiction)
“Our music was shit, so I dealt with this by competing on relationships- I wrote personalized messages to as many real people as I could, and I maintained as many conversations as I possibly could. I think at my peak I might have been juggling hundreds of conversations (asynchronous, of course- not all in real-time). I also think I’ve always had an appetite for over-sharing and for writing a great deal. […] I always had this edgy creative energy… I became the equivalent of a chain-smoker on social media. Always online, always having discussions, always have something to say.”
“I’d get rewarded for it with likes and shares, and it all felt really good emotionally. But it also felt a lot like running in the same place. There’s a certain paradox that emerges- when you’re busy trying to sound smart, you don’t have the time, space or energy to actually develop real “smartness”- which I will define as genuine perspective, informed opinion. You can’t do your research in the heat of keyboard-battle or the latest news cycle. If you care about making real contributions, I think you owe it to yourself to step away from social media from time to time.
I went off Facebook and found myself suddenly spending a lot more time on Twitter. It was like my brain has this nervous, anxious energy that spills out, and this energy follows the path of least resistance. Facebook was the first. When I dammed that one up, Twitter was next. When I dammed that one (not as drastically as Facebook, because I still do use Twitter for work related purposes), I actually found myself going to Tumblr to write a little. It was spilling out of me. I’ll keep looking for the next person to talk to.”
“Erm so I wanted to talk about how I don’t feel like I need Facebook in my life anymore, even though it was a total addiction for me a while ago- first thing I check every time I get on a computer, I need that notification fix. It made me feel significant, like i mattered.
This addiction was interesting to contemplate- i used to be a video game addict, and in anticipation of that I swore to myself never to install games on my smartphone, because I imagine I’d regress into pathetic addiction. Well my wife installed minion rush and bakery story on my phone- and strangely, i’ve only played a little of the former and absolutely none of the latter.
This is interesting to me. I used to be obsessive about games like Simcity and I used to play Mafia Wars quite a bit on Facebook. Why do I not bother anymore? I think the answer partially lies in the work that I do- I already kind of optimize things at work, so that part of my brain is kind of used up. The idea of bothering with optimizing a fictional bakery strikes me as almost grotesque- there are so many real things in the world that need optimizing, why bother with something in a game? (I used to be on the opposite side of that argument- games teach you skills that you can apply in the real world- but I guess once you lose your training wheels, there’s no reason to get back on them.)”
“I had some time to kill a while ago when I was early for dinner with friends, so I thought I’d spend a bit of money at a video game arcade I used to get all excited about going to. I went there and looked around for a while, watched people playing some of my old favourite games. I expected to want to spend a little money to relive it all, but strangely, I didn’t. It almost looked a little sad- I saw a few guys dressed in shirts and pants, obviously dropping by after work to relive their childhoods maybe… what does it mean? Isn’t it a kind of escapism?
It occurs to me that I could say the same about smoking. I’ve greatly decreased the amount I smoke, but I still enjoy the occasional cigarette… why though? Intellectually I know it’s stupid and unhealthy and smelly and all of those things. Is it possible that I will one day feel for cigarettes the way I feel about playing bakery story or going to the video arcade? I think it’s possible. I wonder if it’s possible to engineer/accelerate that process. I’ll be thinking about that one. Seems like I’ll need to get my high/fix from something else. Maybe writing/work. We’ll see.”
0100 – quitting an addiction is like leaving an abusive relationship
“Our vocabulary for addiction and personal change or development is so limited. It’s so simplistic and juvenile, and it’s somehow self-evident to me that if we improve the way we talk about these things, we improve the way we deal with them.
I think that’s because the inverse seems to be true- the more simplistically you talk about something- the more bluntly, the more we overgeneralize, the likelier we are to get things wrong. And we get things wrong in a very broad, blunt way. When we’re precise, we still get things wrong- in fact we can sometimes get things very, very wrong. But then we learn. This isn’t the case for broader strokes- we’re “somewhat in the ballpark”, and that’s “okay”. So there seems to me to be a relationship between the way we talk about something and the way we deal with it.”
“Anyway. I want to talk about cigarettes for a while. I’ve talked about them many times before, and I overdramatize them, but this is my blog and I want to talk about them so I’m going to talk about them. And let me illustrate the original point with a statement: It’s been about a week since my last cigarette.
That statement by itself doesn’t actually tell you very much. Am I trying to quit, or not? Was I a heavy smoker prior to that, or not? Most people won’t even really ask these questions- but then and again, to be fair, most people don’t really care. Other smokers or ex-smokers or on-again-off-again smokers might be interested, but even then that’s probably rooted in self-interest- we want to know how others are doing so that we can figure out “where we stand”. It’s insidious, how much we care about these things.”
“I’ve said that there are certain similarities between cigarette addiction and Facebook, and games- all of them are games in a certain way, and Facebook is a lot about identity creation- you want to find out who you are, in the context of the people of your life. I caught myself scrolling back through my old status updates and shares to see what people respond to- because in a small way people are a representation of reality, of “the market”, of “nature”. It’s like doing comedy- you might find all of your own jokes funny, but you also want to see what people laugh at. (Reminder: Louis CK’s description of what he did to be like George Carlin is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen, and it’s very compelling and it speaks to me as a creator of some sort. That’s how you create- you have to discard. You have to kill your babies. It’s way, way harder than it sounds.)
Ermm…. shall I get back to smoking? I wanted to think of a dramatic way to say this but I’ll just lay out the facts in a boring way- I started fooling around with cigarettes at the end of 2006, early 2007, became a full on smoker around mid 2007, really really serious by 2008… I loved them, they meant something to me- they kept me company, they understood me, they let me express myself, they let me be me, blah blah. I happily smoked throughout 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012…. thousands of cigarettes (500 packs is 1,000). Thousands and thousands. I attempted to quit three or four times, and never really went more than three or four days- usually when I was really, really sick. (You don’t enjoy cigarettes when you’re horribly sick, so you might as well just not smoke- and at the end of the illness you’ve been smoke free for 4 or 5 days, so you might as well keep going. Some people might pull this off, but I think it’s not a sustainable strategy- one that’s likely to hit failure.)
To quit smoking you need to go into a very different place and build failsafes that’ll keep you there- the simplest version of this is a completely different way of looking at yourself, at cigarettes, at life and the world- but easy for me to say all this, I’ve never quit smoking. What makes me confident that I can, though, is that I quit Facebook (for about 3 months, fine), and going back to it makes me feel like it’s never going to be the same again, and that I’m going to have to leave forever. I’ve also broken ties with some really close friends- and ultimately that’s what quitting smoking is going to be like, leaving an abusive relationship. And that’s much easier said than done, because abusive relationships are never 100% bad. In fact that 50% or less of good in the relationship is going to look better than most of the shitty good in the rest of the world.”
0105 – be aware of your addictions and dependencies
“I think I was well and truly addicted to Facebook. I think it was a legitimate psychological addiction, dopamine and all. And I think walking away from that revealed a lot to me. And I’m coming back to some maybe acid thoughts here but life is a trip and you can go anywhere you want. You can smash stuff and throw things out the window- there may be some repercussions but you’re not nearly as enslaved as you think you are, or as you behave.
I honestly think going off Facebook gsve me some perspective on smoking. I think my “social” addiction might be worse than my nicotine addiction- which makes sense of you think about it because we are deeply social creatures.
So I’ve been a parasite, dependent on others for my self worth and validation to some degree. I tell myself that I’m smart and don’t have to work hard at anything and I use that idea to try and show off, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe what I’ve always needed was a really public failure. But even then I typically find some way to psychologically insulate myself. I’m really good at that. I protect my psychological state at the expense of my relationships, my legacy, my everything. Maybe.
The whole phenomena is honestly too complex for me to do justice to in one attempt, 1000 words or not. I’m not sure if clarifying it will be helpful. I’ll just dump some observations in the meantime. Remember this is what I do to pass time on trains instead of social media or games… why did I just say that? Trying to make myself look good. Overdeveloped skill. It might be useful on the other side of growth but for now it’s simply stopping me from properly acknolwedging negative feedback…”
0175 – behavioural change is about seeking new equilibrium states
Behavioral change and equilibrum states
Earlier at lunch I was chatting with a couple of colleagues about behavioural change. When a group of people attempt a lifestyle change, some people persist while others fall off the wagon. What differentiates the successful instances from the unsuccessful ones? [3] Clearly there’s a whole system of things that need to come into play- it’s rarely ever one single adjustment.
Think about it. Things tend to end up in equilibrium states. If one random input is all it takes to transition you from one state to another- say, from a couch potato to an athlete, then chances are that you will make that transition on some arbitrary, random day. Chances are that you’ll already have done it. Because changing one single element is easy to do.
What actually happens is that we get highly invested in our positions, and we develop or inherit multi-faceted systems that keep us where we are. Let me say that again for emphasis- we get into highly-stable local maxima, and what got us there is designed to keep us from going anywhere else. It becomes a sort of ‘regulatory framework’.
So if you’re a smoker, chances are that you’ll develop habits and rituals that keep you tied to the root habit. You’ll smoke after meals, and meals feel incomplete without the smoke. You’ll smoke after sex. You’ll smoke whenever you drink. You’ll smoke when you hang out with your friends, who “coincidentally” all happen to be smokers too.
Before you became a smoker, smoking was your form of escape from reality. It was a getaway. It was thrilling, exciting. After a while, the getaway envelopes the totality of your reality. It seeps into your skin and into every fibre of your being, it becomes a weight around your ankle. The new lens became a new set of blinders.
Addiction aided, abetted and protected by lifestyle
The same happens for any kind of addiction or bad habit. It’s an entire lifestyle. A world view, even. This is one of the hardest parts of behavioral change. You effectively have to perform a religious conversion of sorts. You need to change the person’s fundamental identity.
I think that’s the single most important thing. If the person’s identity doesn’t change, any behavioral change you witness initially is likely to be a farce, a performance. (Obviously, they have to at least somewhat want the change. Otherwise you’ll need to first convince them, and it just gets an order of magnitude harder each step of the way.)
It’s not so black and white, of course. What happens is that you first need to consider the possibility of an alternate identity. You experiment with slightly different behaviour… you need to “try out” all the components separately and have a couple of full-dress rehearsals before you can finally make the leap and change altogether.
B: What does growing up look like to you?
A: Well, growing up is when I’m a good parent to myself. When I’m taking care of business. When I’m sustainable, when my health– physical, psychological, emotional, social, all of those things– are well taken care of, and I’m able to help other people as well. When I make other people healthier just by being in my presence, because I’m so helpful and kind and loving and gracious and inspiring.
B: You have lofty aims for a validation addict. Are the two related?
A: That seems very likely, actually. Do I really want to be kind, or do I just want all the good feelings that come with being kind? I think David Foster Wallace drove himself crazy thinking about this, and clearly there are some sort of paradoxes and Zen puzzles here to be contemplated. The reality of it is probably that the distinction doesn’t matter, all that matters is actually being healthy. The labels aren’t all that helpful.