My life is extremely busy, and by that I mean not at all. My day to day necessities leave me with a lot of free time and that’s when I become truly busy. With my dual screen computer setup and my iPhone, I can play Hearthstone on one screen, watch a video on the other, and text and check Twitter on my phone. When I’m consuming media, I’m devouring it rather than letting it simmer on my taste buds. My internet intake is a means to an end to keep me occupied until the next day rolls around. I’m not truly enjoying anything I’m doing, it’s just what I do.

My drive for internet consumption goes beyond my free time as well. Since I’ve gotten in the habit of checking Twitter and Reddit whenever there is a dull moment, I’m on my phone constantly. When I’m at a red light, at work, or waiting for literally anything for more than 10 seconds, I pull out my phone to pacify me. The top few posts on Reddit are rarely worth my time, but it doesn’t matter because I see them all the time.

What I am describing is not a unique phenomenon, a lot of people around my age (19) and younger have similar tendencies. In Phillip Zimbardo’s 2011 Ted talk, “The Demise of Guys” he defines exactly what I’m describing as “Arousal Addiction”. In which the excessive use of video games, internet, and porn (check, check, check) diminish men’s social abilities. I enjoyed and related to Zimbardo’s Ted Talk, but already considered myself a lost cause, until recently when I decided to change my life habits.

It started with a Reddit post on r/minimalism, a page where I usually went to enjoy simplistic designs. Someone posted, telling the simple tale of deleting their Bob Dylan albums among other things off of their computer to reduce clutter. This inspired me to do the same and I trashed 28 gigabytes of software from my downloads folder alone (for the record I would never delete my Bob Dylan albums). The downloads purge was so satisfying that I then removed the clutter from my room, by cleaning it and storing anything that I didn’t need. With nothing to do, I logged back onto Reddit to realize that I subscribed to 40 something subreddits that I hadn’t visited in months, and promptly cut that down to the twelve that I most enjoyed. That day was a good day because I had found a different way to spend time to get to tomorrow, but I didn’t ascribe that day any meaning other than Friday.

The revelation came to me on Sunday, when I read the New York Times article named “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk” the article discusses a variety of topics centered around how phones are diminishing our humanistic qualities. Everyone is too focused on getting that quick burst of arousal from checking their phones to have real and meaningful conversations in person. The article practically begs the reader to try to uni-task (appropriately, a word I’d never heard until “Stop Googling”), instead of multitasking in conversations. According to the article, there is a 40 percent decline in empathy amongst college students mostly being after 2000 – when cell phones became very prevalent. The article reported that a study has shown people preferring a mild shock to being in solitude with nothing to do, which sounds insane; people would rather experience pain then being alone with their thoughts? But I would choose the shock as well, quite literally being an arousal addiction. I would go crazy sitting in that room without anything to stimulate my brain.

Being called an addiction is powerful in its own right, even if it’s not entirely true for me. I attend classes in school and never pull out my phone; It’s only a compulsion, but a powerful and destructive one nonetheless. The constant use of the internet is the most pervasive clutter in my life and the evidence keeps piling up showing its negative effects, anecdotal and scientific. In an interview on The Needle Drop, musical artist Clarence Clarity described his maximal, dense, and loud album No Now as a reflection of the internet as a whole. They both throw so much noise at you that it’s almost impossible to make sense of. I’ve realized that I don’t need that extra noise in my life and am actively trying to uni-task. I am now listening to albums like Clarence Clarity with my full attention to truly appreciate it. I’m not playing a video game and watching a YouTube video at the same time, not fully paying attention to either of them. I do one or the other, trying to embrace the less exciting moments in both, because the world as “Stop Googling” puts it, “doesn’t respond like an app, quickly and efficiently.” I want to stop seeing the quiet moments as boring, where I try to fill the void with whatever I can, and start appreciating each experience more. “If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely.” Uni-tasking is my first step to separate loneliness and solitude in my life. I will no longer overload my brain with as many forms of entertainment as possible, and finally give some room for myself to think. As the great Ron Swanson once said, “Don’t half ass two things, whole ass one thing.”

Article By Taylor Kalsey