Lurk

ancestral discontentment

Yesterday I spent a total of 1 hour and 38 minutes on Instagram. That number is both startling and unsurprising. Of the17 or so hours I was awake, 9.6% was spent staring at my phone and scrolling on Instagram - roughly a tenth of my time. It’s disheartening to see that number written out, especially since I consider myself to be social media moderate. I don’t think I use it that much. However, the data says otherwise.

Another point worth noting is that I never spent more than 15 minutes on the app at any one time. That hour and 38 minutes was comprised of tiny bite-sized bits sprinkled throughout the day. Those 98 Instagram minutes began accumulating before 6 a.m. and didn’t stop until after 10 p.m. It was one of the most consistent and constant things in my life yesterday. I did it more than pissing but slightly less than blinking.

It’s a guarantee that I spent more time on Instagram than I did cleaning my house, cooking food for myself, working out, writing, being outdoors, meditating, calling friends, volunteering, making art, or daydreaming. I spent more time on that app than I did chasing my dreams, selling a TV show, generating ideas, or generating money. If I happen to be around people while on the app, I wasn’t with them. I wasn’t engaging. It also wasn’t the restoration that comes from quiet solitude. It’s too noisy for that. It’s visual screaming with frantic kinetic movement and the rapid shoveling of humanity’s detritus into my brain. Being on the app is neither communal nor solitary. It’s a no man’s land of existence, a not-really-there way of being.

While I’m certainly not the prototype for the whole human race, I can’t help but think that this is making us sick because it’s certainly making me sick. This constant barrage of images from the carefully crafted projections of other people’s lives makes me feel unsuccessful, poor, ugly, boring, out of shape, unfuckable, uncreative, and on the whole broken. The great irony here is that I would probably struggle with these feelings even without the app! But gasoline makes a fire burn hotter.

This problem is particularly novel for humans. Throughout the vast majority of human history, your problems looked a lot like your parents' problems. How do we feed ourselves? How do we shelter ourselves? Oh shit, is that a lion?

From generation to generation, these remained relatively unchanging. If Homo sapiens are about 315,000 years old, then we have hundreds of thousands of years of survival skills woven into our DNA. Humans had a long time to get good at the whole food-shelter-lion thing. And, by and large, we did get good.

However…

Facebook is not even 20 years old. YouTube is about 18. Twitter is around 16. Instagram is barely 12. Snapchat is 11. TikTok is only 6.

These means of communicating, sharing, entertaining, educating, numbing, projecting, and existing are brand spanking new in the course of human history. They have had widespread implications for the way we spend our time, what we give our attention to, how we know the world, and how we know ourselves. Gen Z is the very first generation to have access to these starting at birth. And, alas, I’m older than Gen Z.

This way of existing is not how our parents existed. The accompanying problems were not our parents’ problems or their parents or their parents or their parents. We have technology that has completely transformed our lives, that can touch every nook and cranny of a 17-hour day. Meanwhile our DNA is programmed to assess whether something is a lion. We’re bringing a blunt rock to an A.I. fight.

To be fair, I’m sure some held this observation at the invention of the printing press, the phonograph, and the Ford Model T. Each new thing created a new life to go along with it. New can be scary. New can be good or bad or both. New, by definition, is at the expense of the old. And the little one said roll over.

The question for me, as a lone human in 2023, who exists in a single body with a single brain, a tiny dot within the broad stroke of human evolution, is whether that’s an expense I want to pay. Is scrolling on my phone a worthy substitute for cooking and communing, daydreaming and dreamchasing? Am I okay with a tombstone that reads, Patrick Donohue - beloved friend and loyal Instagram user? Can I accept that a platform that’s made billionaires out of a select few people has infiltrated a whopping 1/10th of my waking hours, from morning until night?

Truth be told, some days the answer is yes.

But that primordial part of me, the part that is wild and connected to the earth, the byproduct of DNA that’s roamed the earth for hundreds of thousands of years, screams out a resounding NO! That part of me that’s the end point of an ancestral line many epochs in the making looks at social media, all the apps, the phone itself, and just sees another lion lurking under the brush.