April 27, 2025
Adolescents used to get bummed out for feeling like a nobody, like there wasn’t anyone who knew they even existed. Then one day, some lonely soul rubbed a magic iLamp, and the next thing you know we all got personal hand-computers and now everyone knows exactly who everyone is (or at least sees it)…and shit is so much worse.
Once upon a time, boredom allowed these kids to process their emotions and rely on real, personal relationships to help them move forward. Today their closest confidant is typically just the online version of themselves, armed to the teeth with fancy filters, reels and icons they can use to manipulate their images and identities into perfection. And then confusion, mainly as to just who exactly they are.
Billy Boy
The effects of technology are not exclusive to the younger generation that is being raised by it. I would argue that giving a bored, elderly person access to a social media account can be as detrimental as letting your 13 year-old son have one, especially once Grandma realizes her little Billy Boy is on there; “the webs” that is.
There are indeed a myriad of reasons for this widespread addiction to our tech devices, although it’s likely the popular opinion is that it is now simply a way of life rather than a harmful dependence. They might even regard it as a “necessity”, as if citizens of the past never stood a chance for survival without Tik Tok or Youtube.
But let’s at least consider the fact that there are those that might not subscribe to Twitter because they can’t sum up what’s on their mind in 250 characters or that it’s okay to not succumb to the need to have an Instagram account because they can’t photographically paraphrase their weekend getaway. Even with a collage of photos which will never do that memory the justice it deserves, and despite the fact that it’s been filtered, enhanced and littered with reel captions, was I somewhere else when we changed the meaning of the term “getaway”?
We want to explore places and see things and experience life and that is flipping fantastic, but technology has aided us in developing an incessant need for sharing these things with other people on the internet; that is, when we’re not doomscrolling. First of all, millions of people have seen and done what we just did. And while we may establish connections here and there, it is often not worth the efforts of hubristic energy and the actual time we spend on captions and hashtags.
Secondly, nobody really, actually cares because people are clicking on junk all the time, habitually. Seriously, we’re becoming a society of zapped out, click zombies. While that may suck (unless you’re a successful social media influencer, a billionaire or, ehem, blogger), it would be beneficial to stop imagining ourselves in other people’s thoughts and conversations. And lastly, does it make the experiences we’ve just had feel more or less significant when 13 people “Liked” it on social media (so far)?
No Vaping Either
This fixation seems harmless and elusive to criticism because, of course, everyone is doing it – sort of like smoking was, all the way into the 1990’s. I always tense up when I see “No Smoking” signs on an airplane. Regardless of whether or not that little indicator is lit up and despite the fact that I lived through a time when it was once acceptable to light up mid-flight, I’m more concerned with the fact that these modern aircrafts are starting to feel less…modern.
I become quite uneasy when I’m already hovering around 30,000 feet, asking myself questions like, “If those tiny little signs are still on some of these planes, what else is still on this old death trap that should have been replaced or removed?” And I would respond to myself, “Probably some of these disgruntled passengers or the rude flight attendant.” But I digress.
During the time when smoking cigarettes in a restaurant, on a game show or in an aircraft was socially acceptable, it wasn’t as much that people were saying, “I don’t want to breathe that into my secondhand lungs” (there were some), as the leading public health research and empirical data nailed down the cold, hard facts, which revealed that smoking will kill us so much faster than if we simply didn’t do it.
In other words, a lot of people had to suffer from this thing for us to compile enough evidence and legislation to confirm that it was bad for our health and should be avoided. But now we’re dealing with an insurmountable mental health crisis, which just so happens to coincide with a surging increase of exposure to technology, along with the information it contains and controls; that includes us.
Good, Clean Dopamine
There are undoubtedly scores of contributing factors when it comes to our declining state of mental wellness as a society: tainted food and water systems, financial disparity, inflation, overpopulation, lack of access to resources and proper care, no exercise, physical ailments, dietary options and choices, human rights infringement, medical treatments with unknown long-term effects, political corruption/legislation, an overall broken system, just to name a few.
Ironically, on our little screens this information is smeared across every technological platform we use. We are surrounding ourselves with it and rather than allowing it to inform us, it absorbs us. Whether we’re paralyzed from its sheer omnipotence or simply moving on to the next “story”, there seem to be few who are physically participating in positive change and are not represented on our daily thumb-tour; sadly, the ones the mass media let us hear about are storming capital buildings and shooting up churches.
There are a lot of people doing good in the world today, but we don’t hear about it (or “view” it) nearly as often as violent and divisive behavior, because the good-doers are rarely doing good with the ultimate intention of advertising their actions to the digital public. They act upon their benevolence to simply help somebody out and they often affect progress and change on an extraordinarily local level- a much smaller scale, but in terms of actual significance, miles above the hurricane of devastating global headlines that are fiercely funded to always be toward the front of the line.
These opinions may seem to be rooted in declinism, a longing for the good ole’ days; but I assure you that progress is what I’m after. It just seems that so many of us have launched ourselves into the orbit of technology without realizing just how far it has pulled us off of our own axis.
Recent history has taught us that in the future they will develop some sort of treatment, procedure, pill or a shot for this affliction, but by then it will be too late for many users, especially those who have already had their devices surgically attached to their bodies. And we thought AI would be weird.
The media has a saying, “If it bleeds, it leads”. As dark as that sounds, doomscrolling puts people in a constant state of stress, but just like a horrific car accident, we can’t seem to look away as we creep by, gawking at the wreckage instead of the road in front of us. Socially, we are repeatedly crashing into each other because we can’t stop gawking at everyone crashing into each other.
The release of chemicals in our brains have us internally vibrating and craving more sources of this negative stimulation, but there is no reward for these incessant distractions we gaze upon day in and day out. Nobody likes feeling like a nobody, but we can be somebody who learns to listen and love, in reality. Let us take time to breathe, to go outside and look at actual beaches or birds instead of pictures of them, and let’s try to keep our eyes on the road.