Cinemorphosis

Tag: social-media

  • The Hidden Price of Digital Purity

    The Hidden Price of Digital Purity

    Digital Asceticism is the deliberate, selective refusal of digital environments that inflame attention, distort judgment, and reward compulsive performance—while remaining just online enough to function at work or school. It is not technophobia or a monkish retreat to the woods. It is targeted abstinence. A disciplined no to platforms that mainline adrenaline, monetize approval-seeking, and encourage cognitive excess. Digital asceticism treats restraint as hygiene: a mental detox that restores proportion, quiets the nervous system, and makes sustained thought possible again. In theory, it is an act of self-preservation. In practice, it is a social provocation.

    At some point, digital abstinence becomes less a lifestyle choice than a medical necessity. You don’t vanish entirely—emails still get answered, documents still get submitted—but you excise the worst offenders. You leave the sites engineered to spike adrenaline. You step away from social platforms that convert loneliness into performance. You stop leaning on AI machines because you know your weakness: once you start, you overwrite. The prose swells, flexes, and bulges like a bodybuilder juiced beyond structural integrity. The result is a brief but genuine cleansing. Attention returns. Language slims down. The mind exhales.

    Then comes the price. Digital abstinence is never perceived as neutral. Like a vegan arriving at a barbecue clutching a frozen vegetable patty, your refusal radiates judgment whether you intend it or not. Your silence implies their noise. Your absence throws their habits into relief. You didn’t say they were living falsely—but your departure suggests it. Resentment follows. So does envy. While you were gone, people were quietly happy for you, even as they resented you. You had done what they could not: stepped away, purified, escaped.

    The real shock comes when you try to return. The welcome is chilly. People are offended that you left, because leaving forced a verdict on their behavior—and the verdict wasn’t flattering. Worse, your return depresses them. Watching you re-enter the platforms feels like watching a recovering alcoholic wander back into the liquor store. Your relapse reassures them, but it also wounds them. Digital asceticism, it turns out, is not just a personal discipline but a social rupture. Enter it carefully. Once you leave the loop, nothing about going back is simple.

  • The Expiration Date of the Fitness Influencer

    The Expiration Date of the Fitness Influencer

    Parasocial Fatigue

    noun

    Parasocial Fatigue describes the emotional and cognitive exhaustion that sets in when an audience becomes overexposed to an influencer’s performative intimacy and relentless self-presentation. What begins as a one-sided relationship built on usefulness, inspiration, or trust curdles as the influencer’s need for attention, validation, and monetization becomes increasingly visible. The constant uploads, recycled insights, manufactured urgency, and naked thirst for engagement erode the illusion of authenticity that sustained the bond in the first place. Viewers no longer feel informed or inspired; they feel harvested. At that point, familiarity turns to irritation, admiration hardens into disdain, and the influencer’s presence in the feed triggers avoidance rather than curiosity—a quiet severing of a relationship that was never mutual to begin with.

    In the beginning, your favorite influencer feels like a gift. They offer sensible advice on nutrition, a workout routine that doesn’t insult your intelligence, a body that seems to testify to discipline rather than sorcery. You follow them in good faith. For a while, the content delivers. Then the expiration date quietly approaches. The useful insights thin out, replaced by a slurry of hype, urgency, and alarmist drivel—“You’re poisoning yourself unless you stop eating this one food today.” Clickbait metastasizes. The signal is buried under noise. What once felt like guidance now feels like a carnival barker shouting through a megaphone.

    Eventually you see the machinery. This isn’t a lone truth-teller sharing wisdom from a garage gym; it’s a small content factory with payroll to meet. Ideas are skimmed from journals, stripped of nuance, and polished with influencer saliva until they’re shiny enough to go viral. The real giveaway, though, isn’t the dubious science—it’s the thirst. You can see it in their eyes: the desperation to stay relevant, the exhaustion of feeding the algorithm daily, the hollow confidence of someone trapped in their own posting schedule. The charm collapses. When they appear in your feed now, it’s not curiosity you feel, but a reflexive flinch. Parasocial fatigue sets in, and disdain follows close behind.

  • Algorithmic Grooming and the Rise of the Instagram Face

    Algorithmic Grooming and the Rise of the Instagram Face

    Algorithmic Grooming

    noun

    Algorithmic Grooming refers to the slow, cumulative process by which digital platforms condition users’ tastes, attention, and behavior through repeated, curated exposure that feels personalized but is strategically engineered. Rather than directing users abruptly, the system nudges them incrementally—rewarding certain clicks, emotions, and patterns while starving others—until preferences begin to align with the platform’s commercial and engagement goals. The grooming is effective precisely because it feels voluntary and benign; users experience it as discovery, convenience, or self-expression. Yet over time, choice narrows, novelty fades, and autonomy erodes, as the algorithm trains the user to want what is most profitable to serve. What appears as personalization is, in practice, a quiet apprenticeship in predictability.

    ***

    In Filterworld, Kyle Chayka describes algorithmic recommendations with clinical clarity: systems that inhale mountains of user data, run it through equations, and exhale whatever best serves preset goals. Those goals are not yours. They belong to Google Search, Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, TikTok—the platforms that quietly choreograph your days. You tell yourself you’re shaping your feed, curating a digital self-portrait. In reality, the feed is shaping you back, sanding down your edges, rewarding certain impulses, discouraging others. What feels like mutual interdependence is a one-sided apprenticeship in predictability. The changes you undergo—your tastes, habits, even your sense of self—aren’t acts of self-authorship so much as behavior modification in service of attention capture and commerce. And crucially, this isn’t some neutral, machine-led drift. As Chayka points out, there are humans behind the curtain, tweaking the levers with intent. They pull the strings. You dance.

    The cultural fallout is flattening. When everyone is groomed by similar incentives, culture loses texture and people begin to resemble one another—algorithmically smoothed, aesthetically standardized. Chayka borrows Jia Tolentino’s example of the “Instagram face”: the ethnically ambiguous, surgically perfected, cat-like beauty that looks less human than rendered. It’s a face optimized for engagement, not expression. And it serves as a tidy metaphor for algorithmic grooming’s endgame. What begins as personalization ends in dehumanization. The algorithm doesn’t just recommend content; it quietly trains us to become the kind of people that content is easiest to sell to—interchangeable, compliant, and eerily smooth.

  • Screen Bilinguals and Screen Natives

    Screen Bilinguals and Screen Natives

    Screen Bilinguals

    noun

    Screen Bilinguals are those who remember Pre-Screen Life and Post-Screen Life and can mentally translate between the two. They know what it felt like to disappear into a book without notifications, to wander outdoors without documenting the evidence, and to experience friendship without performance. They may use screens constantly now, but they retain an embodied memory of undistracted attention and uncurated presence. That memory gives them perspective—and often a quiet grief.

    Screen Natives

    noun

    Screen Natives are those who never lived outside the Attention Economy. They have no experiential baseline for pre-digital reading, boredom, or intimacy. For them, screens are not tools but atmosphere. Experience arrives already framed, shareable, and optimizable. Connection is inseparable from capture, and attention has always been contested territory. What Screen Bilinguals experience as loss, Screen Natives experience as reality itself—neither chosen nor questioned, simply inherited.

    ***

    I am reasonably sure that some of the best memories of my pre-screen adolescence would not survive contact with smartphones and social media. They required a kind of reckless presence that today’s technology quietly sabotages. Every summer from 1975 to 1979, my family—along with ten others—made a pilgrimage to Point Reyes Beach, where the Johnsons’ oyster farm supplied what appeared to be bottomless truck beds of shellfish. From noon until sunset, hundreds of us devoured obscene quantities of barbecued oysters dripping with garlic butter and Tabasco, flanked by thousands of loaves of garlic bread and slabs of chocolate cake so moist they bordered on indecent. Ignoring cheerful warnings about nearby great white sightings, we periodically sprinted into the Pacific, then staggered back to the picnic tables, pecs gleaming with saltwater, to resume eating like mythological beings. In the summer of ’78, I told my parents to leave without me and caught a ride home in the bed of a stranger’s truck. Stuffed beyond reason, convinced I was some minor sea god, I lay under the stars with a gang of people I’d met hours earlier, trading delirious stories and watching the universe spin. No one documented a thing. We didn’t track calories, curate moments, or worry about time. Life simply happened to us, and that was enough.

    Those memories now trouble me. Were they the accidental privilege of being screen-bilingual—raised before devices trained us to perform our lives in public? Does being a screen native quietly thin experience itself by insisting everything be captured, filtered, and offered up for consumption? Free from the reflex to mediate, I could disappear into the moment without irony or self-surveillance. Had I grown up with screens, the day would have demanded angles, captions, and metrics. The magic would have curdled under the pressure to perform. The idea that every experience must double as content strikes me as a curse—a low-grade exile from real life, where spontaneity dies not from malice but from documentation.

  • Algovorous

    Algovorous

    Algovorous
    adjective

    Characterized by habitual consumption of algorithmically curated stimuli that prioritize engagement over nourishment. An algovorous person feeds continuously on feeds, prompts, and recommendations, mistaking stimulation for insight. Attention erodes, resilience weakens, and depth is displaced by endless, low-friction intake.

    ***

    You don’t know any other world because you were born inside the Attention Economy. There was no “before” for you—no baseline against which to compare the glow of screens to a quieter, unmonetized mental life. So let me tell you something grim about the system you’ve inherited: it runs on engagement at all costs. Not truth. Not wisdom. Not even pleasure in any deep sense. Just engagement. As Jaron Lanier warns in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now, the economy works best when it bypasses your higher faculties and plugs directly into the brain’s most primitive circuitry. This is not the part of you that reasons, imagines, or aspires. It’s the reptile brain—the swampy basement where jealousy, envy, FOMO, and schadenfreude slosh around, waiting to be poked with a stick. Stimulate that region long enough and you don’t become thoughtful or fulfilled. You become reactive, agitated, and strangely hungry for more of the same poison.

    The platforms know this. A successful YouTuber doesn’t need insight; he needs targets. Hence the booming genre of downfall porn: endless autopsies of other people’s collapses. Take bodybuilding YouTube, a carnival of oiled torsos and moral rot. Greg Doucette, with his two-and-a-half million subscribers, has perfected the form. His brand is not training wisdom so much as public execution. He thrives on predicting the imminent demise of rival influencers, especially Mike Israetel, whose Renaissance Periodization channel—approaching four million subscribers—shows no interest in collapsing on schedule. That hasn’t stopped Doucette from announcing the funeral. He does it in a tank top, veins bulging, traps flared, voice pitched to a squeaky fury, filleting his subjects like a caffeinated fishmonger. The performance is manic, theatrical, and wildly successful. Rage, it turns out, scales beautifully.

    I’m not a psychiatrist, but you don’t need a medical degree to recognize a toxic loop when you see one. Mental health professionals would likely agree: this is dopamine farming. The audience gets a chemical jolt from watching others stumble while doing nothing to improve their own lives. It’s adrenaline for the bored, envy with a subscription button. In the Attention Economy, toxicity isn’t a bug—it’s the feature. The viewer doesn’t flourish; the algorithm does. You sit there, immobilized, a butterfly pinned to corkboard entertainment, while someone else’s revenue graph climbs. That is the deal on offer: your attention in exchange for distraction from the harder work of becoming a person.

  • The Word of the Year Points to the Collective Loss of Our Minds

    The Word of the Year Points to the Collective Loss of Our Minds

    The Word of the Year is supposed to capture the moment we’re living in—our collective mood, our shared madness. As Amogh Dimri explains in “Rage Bait Is a Brilliant Word of the Year,” we’re no longer defined by reason or restraint but by whatever emotion the attention economy yanks out of us. Dimri reminds us that 2023 gave us rizz and 2024 bestowed brain rot. In other words, when our brains aren’t decomposing from endless scrolling, we’re wide awake and quivering with unhinged outrage. This may explain why I now hate driving more than folding laundry or going to the dentist. The roads are filled with people whose minds seem equal parts rotted and enraged—and the algorithms aren’t helping.

    Dimri cites the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of rage bait as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger” in order to goose traffic and juice engagement. An elegant description for something as crude as poking humanity’s collective bruise.

    Critics complain that Oxford’s online voting process indulges the very brain rot it warns us about, but I’m with Dimri. Oxford is right to acknowledge how digital speech shapes culture. Ignoring these terms would be like pretending smog doesn’t count as weather. Rage bait is influential because it packs the whole human condition—weakness, manipulation, and political dysfunction—into two syllables. And, as I’d add, it also produces drivers who treat the road like a demolition derby.

    As for predecessors, rage bait didn’t appear out of thin air. Vince McMahon practically drafted its blueprint decades ago. His wrestling empire ran on kayfabe, where performers wore the mask of rage so long they eventually believed it. Something similar has infected our online discourse. The performance swallowed the performer, and here we are—furious, fragmented, and algorithmically herded into traffic.

  • Today I Gave My Students a Lesson on Real and Fake Engagement

    Today I Gave My Students a Lesson on Real and Fake Engagement

    I teach the student athletes at my college, and right now we’re exploring a question that cuts to the bone of modern life: Why are we so morally apathetic toward companies that feed our addictions, glamorize eating disorders, and employ CEOs who behave like cult leaders or predators?

    We’ve watched three documentaries to anchor our research: Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion (Max), Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel (Max), and White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch (Netflix). Each one dissects a different brand, but the pathology beneath them is the same—companies built not on fabric, but fantasy. For four weeks, I lectured about this moral rot. My students listened politely. Eyes glazed. Interest flatlined. It was clear: they didn’t care about fashion.

    So today, I tried something different. I told them to forget about the clothes. The essay, I explained, isn’t really about fashion—it’s about selling illusion. These brands were never peddling T-shirts or jeans; they were peddling a fantasy of beauty, popularity, and belonging. And they did it through something I called fake engagement—a kind of fever swamp where people mistake addiction for connection, and attention for meaning.

    Fake engagement is the psychological engine of our times. It’s the dopamine loop of social media and the endless scroll. People feed their insecurities into it and get rewarded with the mirage of significance: likes, follows, attention. It’s an addictive system built on FOMO and self-erasure. Fake engagement is a demon. The more you feed it, the hungrier it gets. You buy things, post things, watch things, all to feel visible—and yet every click deepens the void.

    This pathology is not confined to consumer brands. The entire economy now depends on it. Influencers sell fake authenticity. YouTubers stage “relatable” chaos. Politicians farm outrage to harvest donations. Every sphere of life—from entertainment to governance—has been infected by the logic of the algorithm: engagement above truth, virality above virtue.

    I told my students they weren’t hearing anything new. The technologist Jaron Lanier has been warning us for over a decade that digital platforms are rewiring our brains, turning us into unpaid content providers for an economy of distraction. But then I reminded them that as athletes, they actually hold a kind of immunity to this epidemic.

    Athletes can’t survive on fake engagement. They can’t pretend to win a game. They can’t filter a sprint or Photoshop a jump shot. Their work depends on real engagement—trust, discipline, and honest feedback. Their coaches demand evidence, not illusion. That’s what separates a competitor from a content creator. One lives in the real world; the other edits it out.

    In sports, there’s no algorithm to flatter you. Reality is merciless and fair. You either make the shot or you don’t. You either train or you coast. You either improve or you plateau. The scoreboard has no patience for your self-image.

    I contrasted this grounded reality with the digital circus we’ve come to call culture. Mukbang YouTubers stuff themselves with 10,000 calories on camera for likes. Watch obsessives blow through their savings chasing luxury dopamine. Influencers curate their “personal brand” as if selfhood were a marketing campaign. They call this engagement. I call it pathology. They’re chasing the same empty high that the fast-fashion industry monetized years ago: the belief that buying something—or becoming something online—can fill the hole of disconnection.

    This is the epistemic crisis of our time: a collective break from reality. People no longer ask whether something is true or good; they ask whether it’s viral. We’re a civilization medicated by attention, high on engagement, and bankrupt in meaning.

    That’s why I tell my athletes their essay isn’t about fashion—it’s about truth. About how human beings become spiritually and mentally sick when they lose their relationship to reality. You can’t heal what you refuse to see. And you can’t see anything clearly when your mind is hijacked by dopamine economics.

    The world doesn’t need more influencers. It needs coaches—people who ground others in trust, expertise, and evidence. Coaches model a form of mentorship that Silicon Valley can’t replicate. They give feedback that isn’t gamified. They remind players that mastery requires patience, and that progress is measured in skill, not clicks.

    When you think about it, the word coach itself has moral weight. It implies guidance, not manipulation. Accountability, not performance. A coach is the opposite of an influencer: they aren’t trying to be adored; they’re trying to make you better. They aren’t feeding your addiction to attention; they’re training your focus on reality.

    I told my students that if society is going to survive this digital delirium, we’ll need millions of new coaches—mentors, teachers, parents, and friends who can anchor us in truth when everything around us is optimized for illusion. The fast-fashion brands we study are just one symptom of a larger disease: the worship of surface.

    But reality, like sport, eventually wins. The body knows when it’s neglected. The mind knows when it’s being used. Truth has a way of breaking through even the loudest feed.

    The good news is that after four weeks of blank stares, something finally broke through. When I reframed the essay—not as a takedown of fashion, but as a diagnosis of fake engagement—the room changed. My athletes sat up straighter. They started nodding. Their eyes lit up. For the first time all semester, they were engaged.

    The irony wasn’t lost on me. The essay about fake engagement had just produced the real kind.

  • The Eight Ages of –ification

    The Eight Ages of –ification

    From Conformification to Enshittification: how every decade found a fresh way to ruin itself.

    The Age of Decline, Accelerated

    In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow argues that our decline isn’t gradual—it’s accelerating. Everything is turning to crap simultaneously, like civilization performing a synchronized swan dive into the sewer.

    The book’s subtitle, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, suggests that degradation is now both universal and, somehow, fixable.

    Doctorow isn’t the first prophet to glimpse the digital abyss. Jaron Lanier, Jonathan Haidt, and other cultural Cassandras have long warned about the stupidification that comes from living inside the algorithmic aquarium. We swim in the same recycled sludge of dopamine and outrage, growing ever duller while congratulating ourselves on being “connected.”

    This numbness—the ethical anesthesia of the online age—makes us tolerate more crappiness from our corporate overlords. As the platforms enshittify, we invent our own little coping rituals. Some of us chant words with –ion suffixes as if they were incantations, linguistic ASMR to soothe our digital despair.

    When I saw Ozempic and ChatGPT promising frictionless perfection—weight loss without effort, prose without struggle—I coined Ozempification: the blissful surrender of self-agency to the cult of convenience.

    Now there’s an entire liturgy of –ifications, each describing a new layer of rot:

    • Enshittification — Doctorow’s coinage for the systematic decay of platforms that once worked.
    • Crapification / Encrappification — The transformation of quality into garbage in the name of efficiency.
    • Gamification — Turning life into a perpetual contest of meaningless points and dopamine rewards.
    • Attentionification — Reducing every act of expression to a plea for clicks.
    • Misinformationfication — When truth becomes a casualty of virality.
    • Ozempification — Replacing effort with optimization until we resemble our own avatars.
    • Stupidification — The great numbing: scrolling ourselves into idiocy while our neurons beg for mercy.

    But the crown jewel of this lexicon remains Enshittification—Doctorow’s diagnosis so precise that the American Dialect Society crowned it Word of the Year for 2023.

    Still, I’d like to push back on Doctorow’s suggestion that our current malaise is unique. Yes, technology accelerates decay, but each era has had its own pathology—its signature form of cultural rot. We’ve been creatively self-destructing for decades.

    So, let’s place Enshittification in historical context. Behold The Eight Ages of –ification: a timeline of civilization’s greatest hits in decline.

    1950s — Conformification

    The age of white fences and beige minds. America sold sameness as safety. Individuality was ironed flat, and television became the nation’s priest. Conformification is the fantasy that security comes from imitation—a tranquilized suburbia of identical dreams in identical ranch homes.

    1960s — Psychedelification

    When rebellion became transcendence through chemistry. Psychedelification was the belief that consciousness expansion could topple empires, if only the colors were bright enough. The result: self-absorption in tie-dye and the illusion that enlightenment could be mass-produced.

    1970s — Lustification

    A Freudian carnival of polyester and pelvic thrusts. From Deep Throat to Studio 54, desire was liberation and the body was both altar and marketplace. Lustification crowned pleasure as the last remaining ideology.

    1980s — Greedification

    When morality was replaced by market share. The decade baptized ambition in champagne and cocaine. Greedification is the conviction that money cleanses sin and that a Rolex can double as a rosary.

    1990s — Ironification

    The decade of smirks. Sincerity was cringe; irony was armor. Ironification made detachment the new intelligence: nothing believed, everything quoted, and feelings outsourced to sarcasm.

    2000s — Digitification

    Humanity uploaded itself. Digitification was the mass migration to the screen—the decade of Facebook envy, email anxiety, and dopamine disguised as connection. We stopped remembering and started refreshing.

    2010s — Influencification

    When everyone became a brand. Influencification turned authenticity into a business model and experience into content. The self became a product to be optimized for engagement.

    2020s — Enshittification

    Doctorow’s masterstroke: the final form of digital decay. Enshittification is what happens when every system optimizes for extraction—when user, worker, and platform all drown in the same algorithmic tar pit. It’s the exhaustion of meaning itself, disguised as progress.

    Epilogue: The 2030s — Reification

    If trends continue, we’ll soon enter Reification: a desperate attempt to make the unreal feel real again. After decades of filters, feeds, and frictionless fakery, we’ll long for something tangible—until, inevitably, we commodify that too.

    History repeats itself—only this time with better Wi-Fi.

  • What If the Cranky Old Man on the Lawn Has a Point?

    What If the Cranky Old Man on the Lawn Has a Point?

    I’ve kept in touch with one of my former colleagues who retired from the college where she taught French for thirty years. She is close to eighty now. She told me she was already starting to feel a lack of engagement in her classroom at the end of her teaching days in 2016. Even though phones had to be turned to silent and be stowed away during class, she felt that the kids were just waiting until class was over to get back to their phones and social media. Their brains had changed, their attention spans had been truncated, and they needed to be constantly entertained.

    “Edutainment” was already influencing the way we teach, but the situation grew worse. Now, the addiction to screens has sucked the students into a black hole. Without their phones, they are detached, disengaged, and sullen. 

    It is a cliche that old people are annoying as hell because they are prone to reminisce about a golden age while lecturing the modern world for its recently acquired pathologies. They wax nostalgic for some mythical past that was full of grotesque prejudices, ignorance, and chicanery. To be a scold telling the world that you came from a better place is to be a pompous ass and a bore. I will concede all of that. But objectively speaking as someone who has taught over five decades, I can say there was a Before Times when life in the analog world wasn’t in competition with the digital world. Objectively speaking, something gets lost when we vacillate between the analog and the digital worlds. Public intellectuals such as Sam Harris and Jaron Lanier have made it clear that the digital landscape has become about commerce, addiction, loss of privacy, surveillance, fragmentation, and outrage. In other words, the Internet has had dehumanizing effects on us. 

    Parents who saw their children lying in bed scrolling over TikTok videos during the pandemic can tell you their children have been damaged, and that nothing makes them happier than to see their children hanging out with other kids–without their phones–and hanging out at the park, playing sports, taking walks at the beach, and finding respite from their screen existence. Parents wept with relief. 

    I enjoyed my youth without screens and curating my life on social media. Every summer between 1975 and 1979 when I was a high school teen, my family and ten other families and friends made the sojourn to Pt. Reyes Beach where the Johnson’s Oyster farm provided us with what seemed like bottomless truck beds of oysters. From noon to sunset, hundreds of us ate an infinite amount of barbecued oysters served with garlic butter and Tabasco sauce, thousands of loaves of garlic bread, and colossal slices of moist chocolate cake. Ignoring warnings of nearby great white shark sightings, we’d punctuate our feasting with forays into the waves before emerging from the ocean. Our muscular pecs shiny with rivulets of salt water, we returned to the picnic tables and had another serving of barbecued oysters. In the summer of 78, I opted to have my parents drive home without me. I got a ride home in the back of a truck with a bunch of random people I had met that day. Full from a day of feasting and feeling like King Neptune, we stared into the stars with our glazed lizard eyes and entertained each other with crazy stories. We had a healthy disregard for chronicling our experiences on social media, for monitoring the enormous food we consumed, and for time itself. Those were happy days indeed and pointed to an era gone and lost forever. 

    I would not have had that memory had I lived such a life with a smartphone. My memories would have been filtered through a prism of digital curation and a rewired brain that needs to filter my experience in such a way. We don’t grasp the depth of our brain’s rewiring because, like fish, we don’t know we are wet when all we know is the ocean around us. We have been rewired for this new oceanic environment.

    The screen has rewired the brains of young people. They don’t read. Many college instructors don’t assign books, or if they do, the books are on the short side. In the place of books, instructors assign short essays. When it comes to writing assignments, some high schools and colleges don’t assign essays anymore. They have the students hand-write paragraphs in class. 

    Of course, as you get older, you don’t want to be a bore and lecture the world on the way things were during Before Times. At the same time, if you taught in the 1980s to the 2020s and have seen the way technology has affected the human brain, self-esteem, addiction, reading comprehension, and critical thinking skills, you may have a lot to offer by contrasting the Screen Brain with the Pre-Screen Brain. You can can write academic books about this subject full of graphs and statistics, or you can give anecdotal narrative accounts, or some combination of the two, but it would be absurd to keep your mouth shut because you feared being reduced to the grumpy old person on the lawn arms akimbo screaming that the world is going to hell. Better to risk sounding like a crank than to watch silently as an entire generation scroll itself into oblivion.

  • Dopamine Nation: Self-Help Without the Fairy Dust

    Dopamine Nation: Self-Help Without the Fairy Dust

    I’ve never trusted the mythology of self-help books—the fairy tale that you identify Problem X, buy a book, read a few hundred pages, and Problem X vanishes. What I do believe is that a self-help book, at best, can make you stare harder at your demon, dull its sharper edges, and maybe hand you a strategy or two to keep it from devouring you whole.

    That’s why Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence punched me in the gut. Her blunt lesson: dopamine addiction—whether through scrolling, swiping, shopping, or vaping—doesn’t lead to pleasure but to misery, pain, and the hollowing-out of your agency. Reading her, I shuddered at the years I wasted feeding my brain with Internet sugar highs.

    Lembke makes no bones about the world we live in: a digital carnival of “overwhelming abundance.” She puts it starkly: “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you.” Pleasure and pain, she reminds us, are processed in the same brain circuitry—and the more dopamine that flows, the stickier the addiction.

    The horror story isn’t abstract. Her case studies peel the skin off addiction’s double life: secret compulsions, corrosive shame, shattered relationships. Some people are more vulnerable—those with addictive parents, those with mental illness in the family—but Lembke insists access is the true accelerant. The Internet puts a casino in our pocket; supply breeds demand. Worse, social media monetizes outrage until we mistake 24/7 hair-on-fire hysteria for “normal.”

    Lembke’s most grotesque example is Jacob, a sex addict who literally builds himself a “Masturbation Machine.” She confesses she feels horror, compassion—and dread that she herself is not immune. Her verdict is bleak: “Not unlike Jacob, we are all at risk of titillating ourselves to death.” Seventy percent of global deaths, she notes, stem from modifiable behaviors like smoking, gluttony, and sloth. Addiction, in short, is a slow suicide dressed up as entertainment.

    Part of the problem is philosophical. As Philip Rieff noted in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” We’ve traded the pursuit of goodness for the pursuit of good feelings. Jeffrey Rosen put it more bluntly: classical wisdom insists we should aim to be good, not simply to feel good. Instead, we’re anesthetizing ourselves with meds, therapy-lite, dopamine drip-feeds, and hedonism. And as Lembke observes, hedonism curdles into its opposite: anhedonia, the inability to enjoy anything at all.

    Her prescription? The brutal reset of a “dopamine fast.” Four weeks off your drug of choice to force your brain back to balance. She offers a framework—DOPAMINE (data, objectives, problems, abstinence, mindfulness, insight, next steps, experiment). It’s clever, but the hard truth runs underneath: most addicts, myself included, are not “moderators.” We’re all-or-nothing. For me, the Internet isn’t moderation-friendly; it’s a rabbit hole with no bottom.

    Lembke knows willpower is not enough. She prescribes “self-binding”: physical, chronological, and categorical walls between you and your poison. But in the digital economy—where work and addiction ride on the same Internet rails—such barriers are fragile. Moderation may be the fantasy; abstinence the only real survival strategy.

    So yes, I’m glad I read Dopamine Nation. It clarified the trap, exposed the double life, and framed the fight as both biological and spiritual. But let’s not be naïve. Like all self-help, it’s not a magic pill. At best, it’s a mirror, a warning flare, and a rough map out of the dopamine swamp. The walking out is still on you.