The Internet as Ephemeral Habitat

I grow tired of this place, these people.

The Internet is increasingly a boring place to be. How many times have you caught yourself opening your phone and scrolling looking for nothing in particular, half-consciously, rapidly intaking and discarding information, bored out of your mind?

I wouldn’t be the first to say it probably isn’t good for you. Maybe you, after making yourself conscious of this reality, to the point it becomes painful, recognize those tell-tale signs of addiction and compulsive use, search frenzied for self-help and what not. Bah… you know where this story goes… We are the same. It’s painful to recognize this dependence, to be subject to a rule against your will and your better judgement. It resembles a prison, but no one is really keeping you here or forcing you to stay. It’s your own whims that brought you here. You know this.

I think the worst of the allures of the online world and its mental-corrosion is just the sheer volume and novelty of it, again it plays a lot into the mechanics of human psychology, addiction, our reward system, if you know you know, there is no need to really explain in depth. It’s an exploit to the human mind that draws you in endlessly, like a dying fish spinning in the current of a tanks water filter or bubble column. Even the self-help or life guides or whatever, they end up as more fodder for this endless feedback loop of obsessive online life. Slowly the algorithms, learning and exploiting all your tastes and desires design a perfect, boring little digital cell for you to rot in forever. You are never challenged, and life just loses all incentive and meaning when pleasure becomes that easy.

People like us remain more poignantly aware of how slavish or entrapping this feels, No wonder our communities are all seeded by references to The Matrix, with it’s famous blue pill red pill scene. I’m sure you’ve also lost some trusted friends who just couldn’t handle living with the truth anymore and decided to the former, again, like the film. It’s sad to see anyone capitulate and surrender to the ever-changing digital labyrinth. To take the devil’s bargain and accept enslavement in exchange for mere pleasure. We are, all of us, lost here. At least those of us who see the internet depriving us of any real lives, like a malicious demiurge, trapping our souls in the suffering of reality. It’s not like the outside is great either.

I can’t make any false promise there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for those of us trapped. But the tastes I do get of living a real life are made so much sweeter knowing they are genuine. The hope that this internet nonsense is really only temporary, and I am starting to outgrow it, is comforting, as it becomes tangible.