Are You Addicted To The Internet?

You’re All Alone, Like Everyone Else

There is not enough battery life on your phone to keep you from realizing how empty your life really is.

I was walking down the street this morning when I heard someone shouting “I’m stupid! I’m stupid! I’m stupid!” This piqued my interest, since it is the main theme of the conversation I have with myself in my head all the time, but as I got closer I noticed it was an older gentleman, yelling into his phone. Finally I heard him scream, “I’m stupid, I need a human,” and it occurred to me that he was talking to one of those automated voice response systems that so frequently make you want to smash whatever is close to hand with whatever else is close to hand, and this was his way of expressing the natural frustrations we all feel after spending several fruitless minutes attempting to obtain a solution to our simple problems.

It was hard not to see the metaphor for the way we interact with technology in general: We are all that old man, showing the world how simple we are while begging for any kind of personal connection. We tell ourselves that our devices make our lives easier but mostly what they do is distract us, dumb us down and alienate us from the human interaction we so desperately need to keep ourselves together. We have never been more alone and we have never had more ways to isolate ourselves from other people while allowing the illusion that we are members of a community. We give all our attention to something designed to minimize face-to-face contact and then we wonder why we feel so tired and lonely at the end of the day.

In any event, “Is your social media use deeply integrated into your daily life? Do you need to spend more time to get a ‘buzz’ from social media? Do you get nervous when you are not on social media?” These are questions you should ask yourself to determine if you have some kind of “social media addiction.” If you answered yes to any of them — or even if you have wondered about the possibility that you might be dependent on social media to divert you from facing just how horrible and lacking your connected existence actually is — don’t feel too bad about it: There are plenty of other people with the exact same problem. Too bad you’ll never talk to them about it outside of a like-and-share situation.