Who

Who is an Addict?

Most of us do not have to think twice about this question—we know. Our whole life and thinking was centered around our technology and the escape it brought. Very simply, an addict is someone whose life is controlled by their use of technology.

Old relationships became strained, or new ones failed to form as we spent less and less time interacting with people. We began alienating friends and family while simultaneously becoming increasingly desperate to have greater depth in our relationships. Unable to tear ourselves away from one screen activity or another, we failed to get back to people or barely participated when we did get together in person. Even when we saw that our addictive behavior was causing these problems, we didn't change. The world marched on without us when we disengaged with our friends or communities, and we felt guilty and ashamed at the mess we made of our lives. The worse we felt, the more we sought relief. We found ourselves wasting time on things we didn’t enjoy. Anything that kept us swiping, tapping, clicking, seeking, reading, or playing allowed us to escape for a time.

Physically, we found our health declining as our technology use interfered with our sleep, and kept us in the same position or in bed far too long. Our eyes and necks were strained from staring at our screens. Many of us failed to exercise because we couldn’t tear ourselves away from being online. Some of us grew obese while others forgot to eat altogether. What we all experienced was that the more our technology use grew, the worse we treated our bodies.

We tried to manage our addiction in various ways. We sought help through apps and articles, and saw our search for the solution become another part of the problem. Nothing we tried worked for long, and we then sought more, or abandoned the search altogether. We acquired scores of apps, including many that purported to help us manage our lives and our addiction. Periodically we would purge our phones of some of the apps that we saw our addiction most active within, but always found that any improvement was temporary--we persisted in finding ways to distract ourselves from ourselves again and again.

We sought help through medicine, religion, and psychiatry. Though we may have found some relief for a time, eventually we hit a point of complete desperation.

We played games far longer than we intended. We read news we didn’t care about. We shopped for things we didn’t need and hardly wanted.

We shopped. For us, online retail was perilous. Even if we didn’t overspend, we browsed too often, too long. Some of us spent hours reading reviews and comparing prices for things that were of little consequence or value. At times we saw clearly that we were more interested in being online than we were with whatever we were buying. Our purchases arrived at our homes with great frequency, and our trash and recycling bins overflowed with cardboard boxes and packing material. We grew ashamed of ourselves and feared our neighbors would judge our conspicuous consumption. These purchases caused unmanageability in our lives, but when we reduced or stopped our buying we hardly reduced our time online. It became clear that our addiction was more to the use of the technology that enabled the purchase than it was to whatever we ordered.

Our use of social media was obsessive. We told ourselves that we were networking, and sometimes we were. But even when we did not actually need to market ourselves, we expanded our social networks far and wide. We had hundreds or thousands of professional contacts, though we rarely or never used them for anything. We checked status updates constantly, yet found ourselves having less and less face to face interactions with friends and family. When we did meet with people, we found it difficult to attend to them and our screens at the same time.

Our attention eroded. Some of us sought professional help and were told we had attention disorders.

Those of us with children felt guilty about the example we were setting. We gave our kids screen time so we could have our own. As the whole family became addicted, our lives grew increasingly chaotic. Our kids were late for school because we or they didn't end our screen time on time. Our children grew used to disappointment, as we failed to recall something that was important to them, failed to listen to them, or didn't make eye contact while responding to their attempts to engage.

At work, we only half-participated. Some of us found ourselves constantly drifting from our internet-based work into meaningless browsing. As our productivity declined, so did our pride in and enthusiasm for our work. We became less competitive for promotions or new jobs, and when we failed to get them either became dejected and blamed ourselves as we acknowledged our mediocrity, or we grew angry, blaming other people. Our careers stalled or never started. Some of us lived in constant fear that we would be fired if our employers knew what or how much we were doing online.