Illustration by Iain Duffus
On a cold November night nearly 10 years ago, I was slumped in the passenger seat of my mother’s car, plunging down a dark highway in Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles from home. I was emaciated, bitter and tired, uncaring as to what lay beside me, behind me or in front of me.
Words I had not dared utter, even within the chambers of my own mind, pushed forward with firm insistence:
Addict. Alcoholic.
That was Nov. 11, 2012, and I was on my way to an in-patient treatment center, having finally accepted that I had a drinking problem. It still stands as my sobriety date.
Alcohol was a solution to all my problems: I drank to escape, I drank to feel at home in my own skin, I drank to feel more alive. On my final bleak night with the bottle, I had a moment of clarity. I saw that everything I loved and cared for had slipped away, that I had willingly handed it over to King Alcohol in exchange for his succor.
I do not think I am abusing the concept of such lucidity by applying it to another realm of my life. As someone with firsthand knowledge of the subject, I know addiction when I see it.
I am addicted to social media.
The more I drank, the less engaged I was with my life and the less habitable my world became. Living in such a condition, I was invariably forced to engage with the most effective solution on hand — the whiskey bottle. But when one drinks to excess, penalties and costs arise — problems that require more drinking in order to escape. This repeats itself endlessly in a vicious cycle.
And so, too, with social media. The more I engage with social media, the less I enjoy other pursuits, the less inclined I am to participate in life. “Why read a book or finish that project,” my frontal lobe seems to say, “when you can feel good right away, with minimal effort, scrolling though Instagram?” One begins to crave this flight from the temporal.
Why am I giving myself away to these online distractions? Does the time spent on social media enhance my life? Am I happier due to its presence?
Save for a dormant Facebook account on my desktop computer that I kept for contacting far-flung relatives, I quit social media on Sept. 5, 2021.
At first, I found myself reaching for the phone constantly, and I began to take note of when this urge would strike. I noticed that I wanted to get online not only when I was bored or had an urge to check in on friends, but at any time where I felt in any way uncomfortable in the present moment, which, strikingly, I realized was rather often. When had this started? I had clearly developed a longing for some kind of pacification, diversion and comfort. From what was I trying to escape?
The content I was creating was reducing the better moments of my life to a spectacle, causing me to partake in the act of living through a performative lens.
The following week, on a day trip to Sandbridge Beach, further insight was revealed to me. Sitting in a colorful chair, root beer in hand, an urge came to post a picture of my sandy legs, ocean waves parenthesized by my splayed feet, a book of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry between them. In other words, excellent fodder for Instagram.
But devoid of any outlet for this imagined photo, questions about the purpose of social media content were illuminated. Who was I creating this for, and why? Did it matter that I was reading Ginsberg on the beach? Why would anyone need to know? Most importantly, why would I interrupt such a sublime pursuit to broadcast it?
I realized social media was not making my life better. The content I was creating was reducing the finer moments of my life to a spectacle, causing me to partake in the act of living through a performative lens.
When I quit drinking, life did not immediately get better. I had to rediscover the things drinking had supplanted or prevented me from ever having found in the first place. With social media, the fallout has been less steep; the primary consequence was that I was not paying full attention to the life I was living. Instead, I was feeding off small dopamine hits the way a pet hamster might suckle his water straw — a caged life.
I never blamed alcohol for where life took me in my mid-20s, when I hit rock bottom. In that same vein, social media is not entirely to blame for my spending multiple hours a day using it. However, for me, social media precipitated a disengagement from the true bounty of living, while cheaply repurposing some of life’s most beautiful moments into online content.
I want better for myself. I do not wish to distract myself from life. I do not profess to have all the answers, only what works for me. I know that what I am looking for, the true quality in life, doesn’t reside in the bottom of a bottle or the glass of a phone screen.
Matt Crane is a freelance writer and photographer who has lived in Richmond since 2013. A former professional bicycle racer who was a member of the U.S. National Cycling Team from 2004-06, he currently works in the technology sector.
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