Putting together this threadpost, I find myself thinking that my thoughts about addiction circle around video games, social media and cigarettes \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
0012 \u2013 talk is cheap, fear is inhibitive<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s quite scary, actually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes I watch someone else use a device and I get a little disturbed by how intent they are on what they\u2019re doing. Same for watching little children with iPads or iPhones. But then I realize: I\u2019m no different. In fact, if I could watch myself, I\u2019d be shocked, because I\u2019m much worse than any of these other people. I have a debilitating internet addiction and I often don\u2019t even acknowledge it. When I do acknowledge it, I don\u2019t do much about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019re the one who decides what you do, how much time you spend, what you pursue, so on and so forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have all these nagging little commitments that I haven\u2019t done enough about because they seem to have such high \u201cactivation energies\u201d- but really, all you need to do is to get started<\/strong>. I\u2019m such an irresponsible person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s 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\u2019re doing<\/strong>. Nobody should just randomly pop on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Quora etc \u201cjust because\u201d, until they\u2019ve 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\u2019t have. Could they be cultivated? I certainly intend to find out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n there\u2019s still so much to learn, still so much to do- and it\u2019s 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\u2019d 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\u2026 I keep thinking \u201cI can\u2019t wait for next year where everything\u2019s going to be awesome\u201d, but that\u2019s not a healthy way of thinking- I should focus on the here and the now<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0070 \u2013 social media and me (and games and addiction)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n “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\u2019ve always had an appetite for over-sharing and for writing a great deal.\u00a0 […] I always had this edgy creative energy…\u00a0I became the equivalent of a chain-smoker on social media. Always online, always having discussions, always have something to say.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I\u2019d 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\u2019s a certain paradox that emerges- when you\u2019re busy trying to sound smart, you don\u2019t have the time, space or energy to actually develop real \u201csmartness\u201d- which I will define as genuine perspective, informed opinion. You can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019ll keep looking for the next person to talk to.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Erm so I wanted to talk about how I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019d regress into pathetic addiction. Well my wife installed minion rush and bakery story on my phone- and strangely, i\u2019ve only played a little of the former and absolutely none of the latter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s no reason to get back on them.)”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I had some time to kill a while ago when I was early for dinner with friends, so I thought I\u2019d 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\u2019t. 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\u2026 what does it mean? Isn\u2019t it a kind of escapism?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It occurs to me that I could say the same about smoking. I\u2019ve greatly decreased the amount I smoke, but I still enjoy the occasional cigarette\u2026 why though? Intellectually I know it\u2019s 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\u2019s possible. I wonder if it\u2019s possible to engineer\/accelerate that process. I\u2019ll be thinking about that one. Seems like I\u2019ll need to get my high\/fix from something else. Maybe writing\/work. We\u2019ll see.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0100 \u2013 quitting an addiction is like leaving an abusive relationship<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n “Our vocabulary for addiction and personal change or development is so limited. It\u2019s so simplistic and juvenile, and it\u2019s somehow self-evident to me that if we improve the way we talk about these things, we improve the way we deal with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think that\u2019s 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\u2019re precise, we still get things wrong- in fact we can sometimes get things very, very wrong. But then we learn. This isn\u2019t the case for broader strokes- we\u2019re \u201csomewhat in the ballpark\u201d, and that\u2019s \u201cokay\u201d. \u00a0So there seems to me to be a relationship between the way we talk about something and the way we deal with it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Anyway. I want to talk about cigarettes for a while. I\u2019ve talked about them many times before, and I overdramatize them, but this is my blog and I want to talk about them so I\u2019m going to talk about them. And let me illustrate the original point with a statement: It\u2019s been about a week since my last cigarette.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That statement by itself doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t even really ask these questions- but then and again, to be fair, most people don\u2019t really care. Other smokers or ex-smokers or on-again-off-again smokers might be interested, but even then that\u2019s probably rooted in self-interest- we want to know how others are doing so that we can figure out \u201cwhere we stand\u201d. It\u2019s insidious, how much we care about these things.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I\u2019ve 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 \u201cthe market\u201d, of \u201cnature\u201d. It\u2019s 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\u2019s description of what he did to be like George Carlin is one of the most powerful things I\u2019ve ever seen, and it\u2019s very compelling and it speaks to me as a creator of some sort. That\u2019s how you create- you have to discard. You have to kill your babies. It\u2019s way, way harder than it sounds.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ermm\u2026. shall I get back to smoking? I wanted to think of a dramatic way to say this but I\u2019ll 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\u2026 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\u2026. 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\u2019t enjoy cigarettes when you\u2019re horribly sick, so you might as well just not smoke- and at the end of the illness you\u2019ve 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\u2019s not a sustainable strategy- one that\u2019s likely to hit failure.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n To quit smoking you need to go into a very different place and build failsafes that\u2019ll 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s never going to be the same again, and that I\u2019m going to have to leave forever. I\u2019ve also broken ties with some really close friends- and ultimately that\u2019s what quitting smoking is going to be like, leaving an abusive relationship. And that\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 0105 \u2013 be aware of your addictions and dependencies<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n “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\u2019m 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\u2019re not nearly as enslaved as you think you are, or as you behave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I honestly think going off Facebook gsve me some perspective on smoking. I think my \u201csocial\u201d addiction might be worse than my nicotine addiction- which makes sense of you think about it because we are deeply social creatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I\u2019ve been a parasite, dependent on others for my self worth and validation to some degree. I tell myself that I\u2019m smart and don\u2019t have to work hard at anything and I use that idea to try and show off, maybe. I don\u2019t know. Maybe what I\u2019ve always needed was a really public failure. But even then I typically find some way to psychologically insulate myself. I\u2019m really good at that. I protect my psychological state at the expense of my relationships, my legacy, my everything. Maybe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The whole phenomena is honestly too complex for me to do justice to in one attempt, 1000 words or not. I\u2019m not sure if clarifying it will be helpful. I\u2019ll just dump some observations in the meantime. Remember this is what I do to pass time on trains instead of social media or games\u2026 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\u2019s simply stopping me from properly acknolwedging negative feedback\u2026”<\/p>\n\n\n\n