Welcome to...

Reflections On a Chronically Online Adolescence

(or, The Consequences of Unrestricted Internet Access Since Age Ten)

an essay

*This is an early draft and will be continually revised and added to*

The Background

I was always a pretty shy kid growing up. Actually, that's kind of an understatement. I was a major loner for at least of half of elementary school. I would just walk around the playground myself instead of playing with the other kids. I was terrified of talking in class, and my worst nightmare was having to say something about myself, even the most meaningless crap like my favorite color or food. To this day I still get a bit of a sinking feeling whenever people ask me personal questions or start up a party game like two truths and a lie and the like. I was also nerdy as hell, being interested in old electronics and music from a pretty young age rather than watching movies and playing Xbox like most of the people in my class. I did have some friends at school starting around 3rd grade, but we never hung out outside of recess. We were never religious, I hated sports, and I wasn't in any groups like Boy Scouts, so I didn't have any friends outside school that I could play or hang out with, and didn't have a lot of positive older role models such as community-focused high schoolers to look up to. I never hosted birthday parties or had anyone over because I was scared to impress or worried they would show up and be bored, since I spent most of my time reading history and adventure books or trying to figure out how a tube TV works so there was nothing really 'cool' at our house. All this background is to say that I was kind of a loser as a kid, and was bored a lot of the time. My parents had a home computer and I got to use it to play things like flash games (RIP) on coolmath, and "educational" things like the classic Oregon Trail game. This was a pretty good time. I was only allowed on the computer for an hour and a half, max, each day.

The Introduction 10-12

My life changed radically during the middle of fifth grade. This was not a stereotypical turning point that many kids experience. My parents didn't get divorced, we didn't move to another city, and nobody in my life died. Rather, I opened up a box on Christmas morning, and inside was something that would prove to reshape my life for my teen years leading up to today. It was an ASUS eeePC netbook. You know, one of those crappy little laptops that ran stripped down versions of Windows which proliferated the low end laptop market from the mid-2000s to early 2010s. It was low-low spec and would probably be outperformed by even the iPhone 5 that was new at the time. But despite its shortcomings, that little computer with its Intel Atom, 1GB of RAM, and 10-inch screen would transform my life, eventually for the worse. But to ten-year old me, it was a Godsend. I could play (very basic) games, surf the web, which to me was youtube and random websites that gave me free PDFs of the graphic novels I liked to read. I got really into the "tech scene" of the early 2010s (for an elementary schooler, anyway). I would get home after school and spend my time reading articles on sites like CNET about what would prove to be the final phases of the "browser wars" that ended with Chrome taking over, tutorials on how to rice out Windows 7 Starter Edition, watching the Machinima ETC News youtube channel, and trying "coding" of crappy little batch scripts (one of which would eventually corrupt Windows). I was also allowed to create my own Gmail account, which proved to be a life changer. It served as the keys to many other websites that will be discussed later. The initial reasoning behind giving a ten year old his own laptop was the fact that my "gifted and talented" class (more on this experience to come in a separate work) was going to start introducing more technology in the classroom. The school announced a "BYOD" (Thank God this term has fallen out of favor) policy where students would be allowed to bring their own laptops to complete writing assignments, as the school had limited desktops and this was a few years before every school sold out to google and bought thousands of chromebooks. Why they thought it would be a good plan to promote a classroom full of already rather nerdy and socially stunted children each having their own computer is beyond me, but that's what happened. There was some (albeit temporary) good that came out of the computer. There were a couple other kids in the class that were into the same techy things I was and we bonded over a shared interest in gaming, Ubuntu, and tweaking Windows. Still full of childhood innocence, we saw the internet as a wonderland of opportunity to seek out our interests and explore anything we wanted. We would video chat over google hangouts after school, discuss which web browser was the best (it's Firefox), tried installing Ubuntu on my friend's laptop during class, which was fun at the time but made the teacher suspicious of anything we did. During the first period of my ownership of a computer, I was able to regulate my usage fairly well due to the low specs of my computer and general unawareness of just how much stuff there was on the internet - I hadn't yet discovered the "underworld".

The Addiction Begins 12-14

By the time I was twelve and going into junior high, it was decided that I needed a better laptop. The eeePC was barely capable of loading a web browser and trying to use any heavy web apps like google docs was totally out of the question. I probably could have gotten away without a laptop at all by this point since the junior high school didn't encourage students to bring their own computers as the elementary had, but nevertheless I had a desire for "bigger better faster" so I nagged my parents all summer asking for a new computer. Finally, they relented and I became the proud owner of a Toshiba Satellite. It wasn't much but was a serious improvement over the netbook. It had a 15-inch screen and enough power to watch videos and play games. I googled for a list of "the best free games" which turned ugly fast. Being interested in military technology and history, I picked from the list the wonderful game known as World of Tanks, which quickly became my life's passion. I was constantly grinding to get the dopamine hit of unlocking the next set of pixels that looked like a tank and leveling up to get rewards. If you have never played "WoT", know that it is one of the most grindy games ever developed, which is of course an attempt to get you to spend real money. It is designed to be extremely addictive, and my undeveloped pre-teen mind bought it hook, line, and sinker. I still remember the electric feeling of anticipation I experienced before each battle, waiting For several months, nearly every moment I spent awake was devoted to the game. My schedule for much of 7th grade was as follows:

7AM Wake up
8AM-3PM Go to School
3PM-9PM Get home and play WoT, with a short break do some homework and eat
9PM Go to Bed

For most of the time I was in class, I was daydreaming not about girls, or hanging out, or lunch, but about being able to hurry home and hop on the game so I could get the rush of unlocking a tank. Every day, it was the same schedule, and I would be infuriated if anything kept me from playing. Actually, I got infuriated while playing too. For the amount of time I spent on that damn game, I was embarrassingly bad at it. My K/D was terrible even after thousands of battles. I became an unpleasant person, always mad at anyone that would interrupt or delay my gaming. Every weekend and school break became a gaming marathon, coming and going in the blink of an eye because I spent the whole time staring at a screen. I passed up chances to go to cool events and spend valuable time with my family because I used it playing video games. I did my homework and still got good grades, but I had no real motivation to go to school, because it sucked. I was still a loser, but now I got picked on and was so sheltered that I didn't even know how to defend myself. Looking back, it's not surprising that I was picked on, because I was quiet most of the time, to the point of fading into the background of the classroom. When I did open my mouth, most of the time it was just annoying. I had a group chat with a couple of friends but we didn't really hang out in person outside of school and our common interests consisted mostly of liking gaming and shock humor. The gaming proved to be a rather temporary phase, however. I got sick of sucking at World of Tanks and finally uninstalled the damn thing. What replaced it wasn't much better, though. I started browsing the "normie" subs of reddit after discovering the site during a google search. You know, Askreddit, AITA, TIFU, Funny, Dankmemes, all that crap. Hang around reddit long enough, and you'll eventually find enough references and links to find some, uh, interesting subcultures. At this point I was still in my "edgy is funny" phase, which consisted mostly of being racist on the internet. When you're being "ironically racist", it's not exactly hard to find people who are doing it unironically and heading down some dark rabbit holes. Most of my previous gaming time was replaced with shitposting on reddit or seriously posting on tech forums. In the back of my mind, I always knew that this was all a waste of time but I had nothing better to do so I just sat on the couch scrolling all day long. I made absolutely nothing and just consumed content. Deep down, I knew this was an utter waste of my life, but I was so addicted to always knowing the latest developments on the internet that I refused to be pulled away and would become seriously annoyed and quick to lash out if I had to spend more than a few hours away from the internet - part of this may have been classic teen angst, but looking back they appear more like early symptoms of withdrawal from an addiction in my mind.

Doing Absolutely Nothing 14-18

High school rolled around and I came out of my shell a little bit. My friend group grew and I became more known around school. One of those kids that everyone knows exists but isn't necessarily friends with. I had my core group of friends and got closer with some of the guys from junior high. We had all matured a little and started getting more focused on school and less on gaming. I was still maintaining a similar schedule with massive amounts of time dedicated to just scrolling and wasting time online. Entire summers were flushed down the drain gaming and browsing reddit, youtube, and forums. I was logging a solid 12 hours of screen time a day for most of my summers from 13-18. Every day and month blurred together and I have only a vague memory of any of it. Imagine all the stuff I could have done instead. Improving my athletic skills, getting into gardening, or even just getting a job besides mowing lawns (how I justified my laziness to my parents) would have really helped me gain skills that I could actually use for things besides wasting time with nothing to show for it. By my (admittedly very very estimated) calculations, I've spent at minimum 1.5 out of the last 8 years online, with most of that time being squandered on garbage I can't even remember, let alone learn from.

Time of Writing, May 2022

With a year of college in the books I feel like I've learned a lot about myself and what I want to do. I have decided to make the internet work for me and become a positive force in my life. This site, newly created, is a part of this plan. I will work on cutting social media out of my life to the maximum, using my accounts for only people I really know rather than memes and political garbage. I have some projects coming down the pipe which should be pretty cool. The goal is to cut reddit and the like out of my life entirely as they serve as a significant source of controversy and annoyance. I was worried about being cut off from the internet and up to the minute current events, but I've decided it will be healthier for me to stop knowing what just happened thirty seconds ago. It's actually pretty relaxing once you try it out. For now, my main goal is to spend lots of time knocking out my reading list and going outside to start making up for all the years I've wasted on the couch not allowing my mind to expand.

Update, April 2, 2023

So the above paragraph turned out to be a lot more difficult than anticipated. I did unfollow a lot of accounts on instagram and got the app off my phone - now I just use the awful desktop site that makes me want to get off after five minutes. I kind of want to delete my account entirely but I still use it to keep up with a few people so it's staying for now. I did delete my reddit account, which did pretty much nothing. That site has proven the most difficult to kick for me. It's always my go-to "I'm bored" click. I have a kindle so I could be reading books and whatnot, but instead here I am reading about garbage such as "eceleb" drama and people's surprisingly heated opinions on web browsers (this was typed using Seamonkey browser if you were wondering). This adds approximately zero value to my life and doesn't give me anything to talk about with people I'm friends with in real life - there is no way I would ever admit to reading about youtube drama in the year 2023. I've been on reddit since about age 12/13, nearly constantly except for a period of a few months in ~2018 when I kicked it. It's just so hard to successfully stay off, but the journey continues. Same goes for all the other garbage message boards and forums in the reddit/chan orbit. The constant feed of new content keeps me coming back over and over. I think the key to staying off is to replace it with another form of engaging reading material during times of boredom. I did knock a few things off the reading list over the last 11 months, which felt good. Maybe I'll go back to reading a magazine or the back of a shampoo bottle or something in the bathroom. I'll probably drop another update on this page in another year or so, until then I'll be posting rants and airing my opinions over on the blog page, and keep a look out for any longer stuff that comes out.

The Danger of Mindless Scrolling

The internet can provide incredible value if used correctly. That's the key. Not having a purpose opens the doors for hours and hours of mindless scrolling that you will most likely not remember the next day, let alone in weeks or months. Every time you get on the computer, have a purpose. Use the internet as a tool, don't let it use you. Online, you exist mostly to provide eyes to look at advertising and provide data that can be scraped and sold off. Take back your life and the future by choosing to restrict your access and stopping mindless scrolling on social media especially. If you do use social media, stay away from the explore feeds and follow only people you know or organizations that can play an active role in your life. This can significantly improve your mental health and encourage you to do more memorable things. If you don't believe me, answer these two questions:

1. What benefits does social media and scrolling give you?
2. What was the most memorable thing you saw or did on social media a year ago?

Conclusions

This got kind of long-winded. If there's one important point to take away from this mess of words, it's this: Don't let your kids have unrestricted access to the internet before they're in high school. Only give them a flip phone and tell them why. They'll give you shit for it, almost guaranteed, but trust me, they'll thank you later. Even make them read this if you have to. The problem with the internet and phones in the hands of kids and teens is that they're a Pandora's Box. You can only grant your child open access to the internet once - after they get the taste of freedom, you'll have a hell of a time trying to reign it in. At least wait until their mind is more developed and they have some semblance of impulse control before letting them loose onto the hellscape that is modern technology. Most of the people I know in real life who would generally be considered "normal" were not browsing reddit constantly and getting involved in 4chan culture at age 15. That stuff rots your mind, slowly but surely. My Gen X parents never had the knowledge to know what kinds of things are really out there util it was too late, so they let me run wild online with no awareness of what I was doing. If you're on this site, you're proably pretty deep into "the internet" and are probably the target audience for this piece. Think about your own experience and consider whether free access to the internet at a young age is really a good thing.

-A.P. May 2022