We Shouldn't Need a Meme (Part Two)
On the Unreality of Digital Life
Read Part One.
How much digital stimulation can the human body take?
The answer can’t be infinite. It likely varies from person to person, and surely one can build up a little tolerance. But the flip side of alcohol tolerance is dependency – and it would seem that the people who need the greatest amounts of digital stimulation are often the ones who exhibit the greatest signs of addiction.
For any person, there must be some theoretical upper limit of daily screen time, although it probably varies from day to day and it’s almost certainly a soft limit rather than a hard one. In Deep Work, Cal Newport suggests that the upper limit for most humans for intense concentration is about four and a half hours a day. Most of what we do on screens is shallow (rather than deep), and therefore we can do it for longer than that, but it still takes a toll on us.
After being plugged in for too long, I notice that I don’t feel good. Something feels physically off. I’m drained but awakened, tired without having expended effort, uncomfortable and in need of rest. It’s similar to the feeling one gets after a difficult, multi-hour exam in college or high school, only without even a tiny sense of accomplishment.
Notably, this abates completely after going outdoors for a little while (without any interaction with any device). The weirder I feel, the longer it takes, but it never takes longer than I’m willing to spend outside. Sometimes, I will go skiing or hiking and spend several hours (or more) without any digital interaction. It is difficult to describe in words the peace that descends upon me during these periods.
It has been suggested that what many people need in 2023 is a dopamine fast – in other words, a sustained period of boredom, discomfort, or complete absence of pleasurable sensory stimulation (i.e., screens). This makes some intuitive sense – human beings sleep every night in order to rest from the day, and so forth. Most people at least sense that if they spend all of their time online and don’t go outdoors, they begin to grow stir crazy.
Some will get hung up on the dopamine hypothesis – and yet I think that would be losing the forest for the trees. Whether or not endocrine imbalance, or some other factor (or combination of factors), is the causal link between screen time and poor mental (and physical) health, the point is that we need to take breaks from our devices. Dismissing that point because a study fails to replicate, or because critics of social media are engaging in a “moral panic,” is narrowminded.
Almost a decade ago, Nicholas Carr made a similar argument in The Shallows, which didn’t rely on dopamine as a mechanism. While he didn’t have nearly the evidence that we have today, Carr’s work now seems prophetic.
Jonathan Haidt has made a strong case that there isn’t simply a correlation between social media and anxiety (and depression) in teen girls.1 There is causation (strong enough correlation is evidence of causation). Anxiety has risen across age demographics, not simply in teenage girls, and many have linked it to factors such as increased exposure to negativity online (bad news, toxic comments, etc.), the false comparisons forced on us by social media, the alternate voyeurism and performance we find ourselves engaging in for cameras, and online hate campaigns (i.e., “death by a thousand darts” on Twitter). But the rise has been so disproportionate that it cannot be underemphasized that it has been outsized in younger demographics and especially females. If you doubt that claim, please take a look at the numbers yourself.
Separate and apart from what we do during our screen time, I wonder whether simply the amount of time we spend online is a factor. And even the people who believe they are most immune are not, in fact, immune to whatever harm may come from spending more time online than is healthy.
To come back to the point I was leading into at the end of part one, the most grandiose critics of modern digital (and real-world) life are probably spending too much time online.2
It Can Happen to Anyone – But the Solution is Easy Enough:
One of the most interesting things I learned from The Coddling of the American Mind, was that the teen girls with the most real-world extraversion are the least susceptible to harms of social media. That is to say that girls who had very active in-person social lives could spend more time on Instagram without the same side effect as peers who had semi-active social lives but spent hours a day on Instagram. In other words, spending time with friends in the real-world is an antidote to anxiety, whereas loneliness in real life combined with endless hours online is a toxic combination.
I reference this point a lot because I think it’s crucial. Perhaps one reason I didn’t notice any weirdness in my peers until I was leaving college is that most of my close friends were runners, and we spent hours outside every day without devices (followed by more hours inside talking to each other).
If you reread that last sentence, you’ll notice that there’s another important factor: physical activity outdoors. Not only were my friends and I spending lots of quality time together, we were doing it outdoors – for many of us, that included very physically demanding training. I covered all this in my essay about being a physical person in a digital world, but inhabiting the real world inures you a little better to the unreality of digital life.
Still, I want to emphasize that I think all human beings are somewhat susceptible to what I’ve termed “the weirdness” of the digital realm. It isn’t just teenagers – social media addiction, for instance, affects seniors and mid-career office managers and people of all walks of life. Ditto for video games. And don’t get me started on the topic of porn addiction.
And for those tempted to dismiss this by pointing out that teenagers are young and impressionable - while one typically thinks of teenagers when one hears the words “social media addiction” or “Instagram-induced anxiety,” one typically thinks of a much older group of people when one hears phrases like “went down the Q’Anon rabbit hole” or “online conspiracies.”
I don’t mean to get hung up on these points. My message is simply that every person should be wary about their own supposed immunity to digital weirdness. Especially the people who see it as their role in life to go “deep into the belly of the beast” to chronicle and map and report on the weirder and darker corners of the internet. They may start out relatively immune, but one must be careful when setting out into the abyss to slay monsters.
It isn’t good for a reporter to get to close to his or her source. I fear many of these fish who don’t seem to know that they are wet have gone too deep. To be honest, I’ve even worried whether some of the mainstream critics, like Haidt, were becoming overwhelmed by their unpleasant task. Perhaps it isn’t possible to go in and to re-emerge unsullied.
(This is a good time for me to interrupt the narrative for a moment. If you’d like to go deeper into the abyss, so to speak, you can read this sidebar I wrote about the corrupting nature of digital weirdness – corrupting both to mainstream figures and reactionary types, as you’ll see. This is the sidebar I referenced in Part One.)
If no human can be said fully capable of withstanding the weirdness, the clear takeaway is that everyone should limit the time they spend online, and especially in the weirder corners. I, myself, avoid the weirdest corners, preferring only to gaze at a glimpse reflected in the mirror (i.e., a journalistic piece about those corners), and even then I come away needing to go for a run and stare at the sky and the grass for a while.
Even a strong constitution will be overwhelmed if the dose is strong enough. Every constitution requires antidotes to poison – in this case, real-world friends and family, mindfulness meditation, going outside, getting sleep, exercise, movement, physical discomfort (cold showers, ice baths), and eating nutritious foods.
Knowing Oneself (Another Digression about Health and the Body):
Meditation and mindfulness practices can help people understand their bodies better – but so can simple physical exercise. And, once again, time outside, exposure to heat and cold, sleep, fasting, eating real food, time spent without digital distraction, not overusing medications or performance enhancing drugs etc.
Each of these things helps you to better understand and recognize the signals your body sends you. Experienced athletes can often better diagnose the source of aches and soreness than nonathletes. People who drink a lot of water have a better idea of when they are or are not dehydrated. Those who have spent time in cold and heat have a better sense of what temperature variation their body can handle and they more easily recognize the signs of trouble coming on. In fact, the people most susceptible to heat illness are those who have spent all their time in air-conditioned settings, because when it comes on heat illness will appear to them to come all of a sudden out of nowhere.
Individuals who spend time outdoors also begin to know the seasons and the weather in a tangible, physical way that cannot be gained any other way.
Fasting is one of the best examples of a practice that helps people to align the signals their body sends them with their actual physical needs. The human body does not need to eat every day. The feeling you experience when you haven’t eaten in three hours is not a sign that you are “starving” or that anything bad will happen to you. Just because you are used to eating regularly does not mean you are actually as weak or fatigued or sick as you feel when you haven’t eaten.3 Only people who’ve gone without food for long periods of time really know what hunger is and isn’t.
They say there are five senses. Technically, there are more than that. Interoception is the sense that allows you to perceive what is going on inside your body (for example, pain, hunger, nausea, urge to relieve oneself etc.). You don’t “touch” your upset stomach. You know it’s upset via a different sensory mechanism.
Proprioception is the awareness of your body’s position in space. It is related to aspects of athleticism, specifically coordination, stability (including sense of balance), and perhaps agility or even mobility. Athletes generally have better proprioception than nonathletes, because they practice moving different parts of their body all of the time. They know what it feels like to do a move, assume a position, practice a shot, throw a punch, etc. to the point that they no longer need a mirror to know what their form looks like.
Why the long digression?
This is a long-winded way of getting at the fact that human beings lose touch with their own bodies when subjected to 24/7 digital entertainment, while encased in climate-controlled environments lacking in physical challenge or similar stimulation.
This can fuel a feeling or perception of losing touch with reality. In other words, the world begins to feel less real to you and your body begins to feel more like a “meat suit” and less like, well, you.4
Because the mind and body are linked (the mind, after all, lives within the body and is a product of the body), loss of touch with reality won’t simply affect the body.
For some people, spending too much time online might begin to blur the distinctions between emotions, making it more difficult to detect whether one is happy or sad, angry or excited or surprised. At the very least, physical symptoms of pain or discomfort or sickness or pleasure will be less discernible. Reinforcing the perception that reality is blurring.5 Supposedly, some young people actually claim to identify more with their social media avatars than with their physical body (meaning that their subjective sense of self is more tied up in their online persona than in their physical self, at least according to them – this is taken as dispositive by the sort of person who thinks that subjective feelings define the self, and not dispositive of anything by the sort of person who doesn’t). Whether or not this is true, it is seems similarly true that people of all ages can develop a strange sense of attachment to their smartphones – to the point where they feel almost as though it is a part of their physical bodies.
A quick way to regain that sense of reality is to do something intensely physically difficult. When you’re cold, or exhausted, or hungry, you become keenly aware of reality. Your avatar in the metaverse doesn’t get cold or tired or hungry – it doesn’t feel anything at all. Because it isn’t alive. And you are.
Finally:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb said that “the difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.”
In the fall of 2022, Professor Megan Fritts of University of Arkansas at Little Rock offered this scary anecdote: in all the years that she has been teaching philosophy, she has been asking her students about Robert Nozick’s “experience machine” (a perfect virtual simulation that could produce whatever pleasurable or noteworthy experience you desired). Over the years, more and more students have stated that they would try the machine, or even go in and never come out. In 2022, apparently all but one of her students said they would go in and never leave.
While the internet is far from Nozick’s experience machine, it does function as something like a watered-down version of that thought experiment, at least for some people. Fish swimming in its bizarre depths don’t know they’re wet, just as the enslaved individual within the experience machine imagines he is free. Having willingly given up his freedom, he imagines he could take it up again with just as much ease. But he is trapped in a prison of his own creation.
I am not sure that there are demons lurking within the digital realm. And I do not think that algorithms can really take away a human being’s free will – which in every case is being relinquished by choice. But there is something scary there, if one looks too hard.
Someone recently asked me if I thought the internet was infinite. Literally, no, it isn’t. But in the sense that infinite refers to a thing that lacks an end and the internet is constantly growing larger, I suppose it can be said to be nearly infinite. A chasm that appears to go on without bottom is an abyss and it seems apt to say that the digital world is an abyss, and that even the most well-intentioned explorers can fall in if they tarry too long. Some people fall in and never come out. Some people come out, but they are shaken.
And there are frightening things in the abyss. Things that a human being cannot stare at too long without becoming corrupted. Even a deeply grounded person comes away from the abyss sullied, as if the abyss – ungroundedness itself – can reach out and physically touch an observer.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
When one struggles to make sense of an overwhelming quantity of information – not all of it true – with a wide variety of narratives – not all of them false – both of which are only being added to over time (and at a rate that exceeds your or my capacity to assemble), especially when this is all presented within a communication apparatus prone to social contagion and network effects, one touches “ungroundedness itself.” Not that there is anything real about the notion that there is no ground to stand upon – for the ground exists as much as anything else, and certain more than does the false world of pixels and electrons. But such an overwhelming experience, well, overwhelms.
A common bit of advice given to people struggling with anxiety and depression is, “you are not your feelings.” In other words, you are not simply the sum total of your emotions. Distinguishing between emotions and reality enables people to function in the world without becoming overwhelmed. For instance, “I feel sad, but that doesn’t mean I am incapable of going to the office today,” or “I feel angry at this person, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are friends.”
Or “I struggle to make sense of the world, but that doesn’t mean the world doesn’t make sense.” Or “I feel as though I have no ground to stand upon, but that doesn’t mean the ground isn’t there.” Or “I doubt the world, but perhaps what I should doubt is myself.”
Perhaps this is the error made by all of these people who have “gone too deep” into the internet. They take in an enormous amount of information, struggle to absorb and process it all, and they feel like the world doesn’t make sense anymore. But all that this really means is that they feel a certain way.6 The remedy is the same for anything else: distinguishing feeling from reality, pausing in one’s absorption of information until one calms down (just as when one feels sick from eating too much food, one stops eating and digests, rather than continuing to stuff oneself).
Perhaps the people who feel the most ungrounded are just spending too much time online. Perhaps the apocalyptic prophets of our informational doom are really just oversaturated themselves from too much time on their phones without enough sleep. Perhaps the mappers of our postmodern hellscape are really just too absorbed in their task to realize that nothing real has changed very much.
Even artificial intelligence (a misnomer if ever there was one) hasn’t changed anything fundamental about the world. Perhaps within my lifetime, it will. But the most important things almost never change. Too many people think that human beings must constantly engage in a process of “redefining” what it means to be a human being in such and such a time and such and such a place. But human beings don’t change. Our tools change and we delude ourselves into thinking these tools – and the shadows they cast on the walls of our caves – are anything more.
But one can go mad staring at the flickering cave images and I fear that no human is immune to drowning in their senselessness.
I think that the more hyperbolic of the people I have cited and linked to are taking the digital world too seriously. But perhaps even I – by writing this essay – have fallen into the same trap. I am not immune to the unreality of the digital abyss. Which is why I take precautions and rarely stray from the well-trod paths (podcasts, Substack, the websites of various news and opinion organizations, Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube and Amazon, email, etc.).
When I do gaze at the weirder corners of the abyss, like Perseus using his shield as a mirror to observe the Medusa, I look only at reflections (articles such as the ones I’ve shared) and turn away quickly. Above all, I live my life in the physical world. The real world. The one that matters. I suggest you do the same: read physical books, go outside, exercise, spend time in the presence of other people (meaning in-person relationships, not online ones).
I have gone too long and I wish to turn from this topic. When I write about technology again, I will focus on more pleasant subjects. The darkness and strangeness of the internet can be intoxicating, but never satisfying.
In summary, we shouldn’t need a meme to remind us what’s real and what’s fake. And we shouldn’t need reactionaryism to remind us that reality still exists.
Some people will argue that the rise in anxiety and depression is due to prior underreporting (because the stigma was so strong in the dark, fundamentalist, blinkered, repressive days of 2006 or whatever). I find this claim unscientific, tendentious, and highly dubious – it cannot be falsified, because it relies upon the theory that large numbers of people were lying in past decades, something that can neither be proven nor disproven. In other words, the premises exclude the possibility of finding contradictory evidence.
In general, the internet seems to lend itself (at least for a certain personality type) towards grandiosity, in that there is greater ability to construct elaborate narratives and find (or falsify) evidence that supports such narratives (whether or not that evidence is real). Furthermore, there is greater opportunity to find people who will readily confirm either your best or worst suspicions about your own importance (fueling grandiosity).
No, your muscles are not falling apart. Nor is your stomach acid doing anything at all to the sides of your stomach. It just feels like that, but the discomfort isn’t reflective of anything physiological.
If by chance you’re unsure of how real the physical world actually is, getting heat exhaustion on a run in the summer will clear up all doubt in extremely short order. The fact that your online avatar isn’t experiencing any suffering won’t be much consolation.
In case I haven’t made myself clear: it feels to the person as though something has changed about reality, but nothing has changed about reality and only their perception has changed. It should go without saying that our perceptions aren’t reality, but it must be said.
That feeling is a natural reaction, in the same way that if you eat too much, you feel overly full or even sick.