This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.

The wild elephants turn back to salute the men who have saved their baby elephant from the ditch. They raise their trunks aloft with wondrous grace in a moment between man and beast. I don’t blink, hardly twitch. Lit by the glow of the laptop screen, my face shows no flicker of emotion. The video finishes and the next one begins to load. “Electrocuted squirrel gets CPR by kind man.”

Unbeknownst to me, the daylight has faded across to the other side of the Earth, and I am in darkness. I am lying on my bed in the fetal position, as I have been for three hours straight… watching YouTube.

I don’t know exactly how long I’ve had a YouTube problem.

The first chapters of addiction are often written in the pen of innocence. Mine started in the same way all others must—with a joy unforeseen. A music video with a new friend behind the sofa at some party one unending summer night. An email in my inbox linking a highlight reel of Messi’s greatest dribbles, coming in off the right wing, scything through tackles like water.

Every addiction balances on the fulcrum of denial.

If I’m scrupulous, I admit it started long before that, in the time before the internet. My parents didn’t let us watch much television as kids. My answer to this deprivation was to flick through the channels like a drone whenever they were away, hoping to land on something that gripped my attention for longer than the split second it took me to glean, ignore, and plough onward. Alone, I never watched anything for longer than two minutes.

Years later, an interview with the writer David Foster Wallace struck me deeply.

Wallace fought a depression for most of his adult life that he succumbed to in 2008, at 46. He suffered with different types of addictions, but said his primary addiction, as unsexy as it sounded, was television. He said he was so afraid of watching it, he couldn’t have a TV in his house. Hearing this for the first time opened my mind to the idea that the YouTube thing, as it moved silently along the forest floor of my impulses like a fox on his feet of silk, demanded a seriousness I was unwilling to give it.

Every addiction balances on the fulcrum of denial. The decline before the fall is colored by a lake of awareness. I was unaware the habits I was slowly slipping into weren’t okay. At first it was just weekends. I was single and lived alone; if I woke up hungover, it was easy to turn my back on anything productive or social. One weekend I became fascinated by the internal politicking of the WTA tennis tour. Another weekend it was American high school track and field. A man in Pennsylvania fashioned knives out of rusted wrenches. I was in.

Screenshot: YouTube

There were times I wouldn’t communicate with anyone all day. It was isolationist and repetitive and hypnotic. I would sit entranced, swelling my command of thoroughly useless information as YouTube gently weaved its spell on me, drawing me deeper and deeper into its pixelated underworld. As one video finished, another one on a similar topic loaded, sucking me in for another five or 10 minutes. Half hours became hours became half days. And outside my window, the world whizzed on.