How the Online World Devours Our Meaning Making
When reality is too much to bear
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.
The philosopher Robert Nozick had a fascinating prediction about how humans would behave if they realized they were living in an “experience machine.” This experience machine is analogous to Neo’s slumber in the 1999 blockbuster The Matrix. In the film, Neo lives an undisturbed life as a computer hacker, spending his days following one pleasure after another, living on autopilot. As the story unfolds, the viewer finds Neo’s real body is in a sleep state, and his “waking life” is actually a simulated reality designed to keep his consciousness busy. When he’s woken from his cozy fake life and brought into reality, he’s given the choice to either stay awake and help save the world (taking the red pill) or fall right back to sleep as if nothing ever happened (taking the blue pill).
Nozick’s experience machine is Neo’s simulated reality: an alternate consciousness of perpetual pleasure and ease. He predicted that the majority of humans would reject the machine in favor of living a life of free will, imagination, and connection to other human beings. Philosophers decided to put his theory to the test and run an experiment with college students: imagine you wake up one day and find that your whole life has been spent in the experience machine, and now you have the choice of staying awake (the red pill) or going back to sleep (the blue pill). Only 46% of students wanted the red pill. Then they posed another question: what if you took the red pill and found you had the life of a millionaire artist in Monaco? This time, 54% said they’d like to wake up, while the rest chose a life of comfortable, familiar simulation, as reported by Adam Grant in Think Again.
These days, I find I often filter my relationship with online personality through John, the protagonist of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The novel depicts a future in which society is rendered totally passive through the conduit of pleasure. It’s a dystopian world governed by the “excess of positivity,” controlling citizens through the opposite of restraint and surveillance: perpetual euphoria. They’ve turned life into a capitalistic, adult-oriented playground. People have the choice to take a drug called soma, which is basically pharmaceutical escapism.
John, the “hero” of the novel, is a savage who was raised on a reservation void of society’s dystopian pleasures. Acting as the quasi-sacrificial figure of the novel, he’s brought into the metropolis where he’s treated like a circus act. Disturbed by the hedonism and burned out by the attention the gawkers pay him, John decides to become an ascetic, retreating to a hillside lighthouse where he can be free from the violence of positivity.
When Lenina, John’s muse to whom he struggles to suppress attraction, shows up at his lighthouse, he takes a whip and lashes at her in a frenzy to scare her off, until he turns the whip on himself and self-flagellates. First John tries to drive the wickedness out of Lenina; realizing its impossibility, John turns the whip, exhaustedly attempting to drive evil out of himself.
John could’ve just taken the soma, lived in the experience machine, but he chose reality over the spectacle; his most heroic act is simply resisting the ease of unplugging. But unlike where we find ourselves—as David Kinnaman calls our “digital Babylon”—the crowds in John’s world wouldn’t afford him the space to unplug, ultimately pushing him toward his own self-demise.
For whatever reason, our dystopian imaginations drift always toward philosophizing experience machines, with similar ideas popping up in stories from David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, and many others. Even the PASIV device in Christopher Nolan’s Inception was inspired by Nozick’s experience machine. A fictional trope this popular must have some basis in actual human desire: to shut the mind off, ease the burden, undo our realness. As T.S. Eliot intuited, “Humankind can only bear so much reality.”
When I first started entering masked rooms after the COVID lockdown partially lifted, I hit way more reality than I was comfortable bearing. I didn’t have an elongated timeframe to think through my responses as I did when texting, and my body language muscles had atrophied. Crowded rooms caused a punishing heartbeat that still hasn’t totally gone away. It was disturbing that even though I was well aware of the necessity for Christians to participate in face-to-face community, it was a fact that I preferred digitized interactions.
To deny the narcissism in this level of self-preservation would be narcissistic. Coming out from behind the online persona brought out a visceral rush of self-consciousness that— at least, for me—was rooted in self-obsession. Isolation made me so obsessed with myself that anything that opposed my comfortable bubble felt wrong—even though I had gifts to offer my community, I’d grown to prefer hiding them under a basket.
It would’ve been easier to stay home, to keep sending out Instagram updates, and cloister behind the comfort of the iMessage avatar but the discomfort of the red pill was necessary. I didn’t need to rush off a hillside lighthouse, whip in hand. But I did need some digital asceticism. A few screentime limits, a few days off screens altogether.
Another month later, I went on a date with someone I’d only met through Instagram during the lockdown, and even though all the nervous back-cracking and hair-wiping were present, it paid off. We had a human interaction. We endured the burden of living. We connected. We got married 11 months later.
Statistically, it seems more people would rather take the blue pill. But I don’t think they’d feel satisfied for very long. I think they’d get tired, restless, nudged by a sense of guilt that something more is out there and that they have a duty to move toward it, out of the machine and into reality. Paradise stops being paradise once you wake up there every day, and getting exactly what you want all the time isn’t the means to happiness—in some cases, it’s the means to psychosis.
Several social science studies attest to the fact that when humans discuss “goodness” or “virtue,” the concept they’re really describing is “selflessness.” And, despite the never-ending laundry list of human failures, we know that humans do see themselves as the “hero” of the narrative of their lives. At the very least, knowing that selflessness is the “good” thing to do leads me to guess that humans will, by and large, and in the long run, choose reality.
Reality isn’t always easy to bear. But dealing with it is part of what it means to be human. This is why the psychologist M. Scott Peck made the first of his four marks of mental health “Dedication to reality at all costs.” Whether we like it or not, reality won’t adjust itself to our illusions, and sooner or later it catches up to us.
My nervous social ticks haven’t gone away, but they’re more under control. Fragility slowly turns into character the longer it’s exposed to the quotidian sufferings of life. The single best thing that we can do for ourselves is to accept reality as it comes to us each morning when our eyes open and we breathe in creation; and before going to our phones or exercising or grinding on a project, just sit and be human, fully alive and fully God’s.
Griffin Gooch
Writer & Student
Griffin is a follower of Jesus based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and is finishing up his Master’s at Fuller Theological Seminary. He’s written one book, titled Do Not Lose Heart, and is currently working on a variety of other writing projects surrounding spirituality, psychology, and culture. Griffin and his wife Tiffany attend Radiant Church in Richland, Michigan.
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Things we’re excited about at Ekstasis
Reading for the Love of the World by Sara Kyoungah White at Christianity Today: “Reading the classics is one way we can thus benefit from books. But is there also an advantage to reading new books? What spiritual value can we gain from the latest Pulitzer or Booker Prize winner or the works of the year’s Nobel laureate? Coming in too late to a conversation is one way to miss out. But so also is choosing to hear only the first part of the conversation.”
Treasures from the ether
This strange, unique publishing model was recently brought to our attention. Created by the payment processing company, Stripe, in their words, “Stripe partners with millions of the world’s most innovative businesses. These businesses are the result of many different inputs. Perhaps the most important ingredient is ‘ideas.’ Stripe Press highlights ideas that we think can be broadly useful. Some books contain entirely new material, some are collections of existing work reimagined, and others are republications of previous works that have remained relevant over time or have renewed relevance today.
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Insightful. I've always wondered what online addiction felt like. Thanks also for showing us how you stepped out of the online world into the real world of IRL human relationships.
Thanks, Griffin. Fascinating read. Have discovered something similar about Eden. The garden’s a little like the tortoise shell. Now just an infantilising dream of safety. Still attractive, though! Props for breaking the dream bubble.