This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Griffin Gooch
I kept pushing my spine back into place and fidgeting with my hair, but my hands were clammy with sweat and I wondered whether it would act as a strange hair gel. When I get nervous, I slouch—which is apparently some primal defense mechanism; when we detect fear, our natural reaction is to cover our torso’s vital organs. My social anxiety kicked this into high gear.
I’d been living the past three or four months online. The only people I’d seen face-to-face were my parents. I was starting to realize that online life was easier; I could reduce interaction down to an algorithmic equation of inputs and outputs, which gave me a sense of control and predictability. Months of total lockdown had caused my social skills to retrograde. And even with the mask mandate, I still wished I had something more substantial to hide behind. I’d never been the biggest online gamer or social media addict, but for the first time in my life, I started using my virtual life in the same way a tortoise uses a shell.
Around that time, I read a Guardian article that profiled Marshall Carpenter, who was only slightly older than I was at the time and fighting online addiction:
I was playing video games 14 or 15 hours a day, I had Netflix on a loop in the background, and any time there was the tiniest break in any of that, I would be playing a game on my phone or sending lonely texts to ex-girlfriends.
Marshall’s father had to physically break down his apartment door just to unplug him. With his family’s encouragement, Marshall became one of the early admissions to reSTART, an internet addiction rehab clinic based in Redmond, Washington.
reSTART opened its doors in 2016 in response to the rapid onset of tech addictions that swept across the Western world. Since then, they’ve treated over 200 young men (women receive treatment as well, just far fewer). Their mission, in simplest terms, is to unplug people from their simulated, online lives, and help them reacclimatize to their real ones.
Hilarie Cash, a psychotherapist and chief clinical officer at reSTART, estimates that 20% of young adults (or “digital natives”—those who’ve only known a world of simple, easy access to the internet and smart devices) have internet addictions. Surprisingly, the majority of patients’ DOC (drug of choice) isn’t pornography or social media or YouTube rabbit trails, but multiplayer role-playing video games like World of Warcraft or League of Legends. Females aren’t immune; their addictions just look a little different. Whereas males like to embark on story-driven, world-conquering simulations that provide a sense of accomplishment and power, females are more likely to invest copious time and energy into building aesthetic shrines on platforms like Instagram, VSCO, and TikTok.
Regardless of the direction our online fixations take, there’s a huge impetus for moderns to find and craft their identities on the internet rather than in real life. And, as the public spheres become more and more void of unified stories to live within—which, for most of history, were stories that centered on religion, politics, or familial identity—generations are desperate for purpose-providing narrative. These online platforms, from World of Warcraft to VSCO, give the impression that we’re part of a meaningful, engaging story.
Humans are storytelling animals, and it seems many are opting to live in simulated stories rather than the unfiltered “non-story” of regular life. There’s a desire in each of us to feel like the unblemished hero, the main character of life’s story—which is simply much easier to believe in a reality that’s simulated.
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