It is always tempting, when faced with a hard problem, or a boring one—or, really, anything involving active participation at all—to just… stop. To take a break. To go over to the browser, open a new tab, and take a look at all those little icons, beckoning you to go and investigate what is new. What's happened in the last five minutes? Have you missed anything groundbreaking? If you don't check now, what wisdom will you forever miss out on? After all, it's so much easier to read what someone else is tweeting than it is to solve that boring code problem. It's so much easier to browse YouTube to see if you've missed a debate between people who aren't morons than it is to stumble over your own words trying to write a blog post. It's so much easier to upvote cute, funny, or inspiring pictures on reddit than it is to learn something new.

It's so much easier to be passive.

When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, the Internet was my lifeline. Struck down by illness and unable to attend school and form close social bonds, learn, and partake in normal life, I had been able to turn to games, forums, and IRC. I had met people from far and wide, of different ages. People who were incredibly smart; people who were training at famous universities to become doctors; people who had health issues, mental issues, or otherwise. Even people who were just plain idiots. A wide variety of ideas and perspectives and talents were presented to me unassumingly, on the same level as me, from across the world. I had been inspired to try out all sorts of things by the people I could talk to and learn from. Things ranging from photoshop, to writing, to creating comics, to drawing, to a bit of programming, to trying not to be bad at videogames. It was all there, in different communities. People of all different ages and life experiences were there to temper my teenage hubris. There were adults to learn from and gain the respect of, and people my own age to engage with and do stupid things with. Few of us ever knew real names, or faces. It was all anonymous. But it felt very real.

Now, things feel different. Small communities like the ones I had joined seem to have disappeared or become completely subsumed by Facebook, or Discord. Platforms like Twitter present people to you not as peers to engage with but superiors to gain the attention of. Blue-checked elites publicly converse—or, worse, imply more important private conversations—and the rest of us clamber to be the loudest person who might get some notice from the big, important people. Small groups might exist and create bonds and connections, but always lower than those at the top, who network openly and smugly with anyone more important than us. Rather than an engagement with all sorts of people, of all different kinds, you end up engaging—if you engage at all—only with people just like you. For the most part, anything you say is completely ignored. You tend to be either immensely popular and respected or totally worthless, as far as the platform is concerned. There is very little to say about the in-between. Those who are successful on the platform are wildly so. The rest are impoverished and desperate. Perhaps more importantly, the whole thing feels more personal somehow. Even if you choose to ignore the pressures of supplying your real identity to it, there's something about it that sucks your self-worth and tells you that you're nothing if you don't have followers and likes.

The inevitable result, to people like me at least, is a total disengagement. But that disengagement isn't just about online social interactions, it ends up seeping into the rest of my attitude. Rather than talking to someone as a peer and producing something and sharing, I instead see people who are producers of “content” and me, a consumer of it. The idea of even writing this post seems insane and pointless because, honestly, who is going to engage with it? Nobody. Since losing a social network of people to talk to and gaining one of people to follow, my attitude towards myself and my own ability to output anything has gone from being equal to others to inferior. And if I am inferior to others, what is the point of me outputting anything at all?

As a result, trying to do anything actively—trying to produce—becomes increasingly hard. I always feel like what I'm doing isn't quite right. I always feel like, if I just stop trying to make something, and instead go and look for the output of someone better than me—someone more famous, with more engagement, or whatever else—that I will gain more. I end up spending evenings mindlessly browsing YouTube videos in the vain hope that I will find something that pushes me forward, because pushing myself forward is too hard. I take motivation to write code, to write books, to write blog posts, or to learn music, or to learn art, and I funnel it instead into meaningless tumbling through infinite feeds in utterly frustrated search of something, anything, that feels worthwhile.

The happiest, most productive and most lived parts of my life in recent years have been those weeks that I've managed to totally remove myself from all of this. To block YouTube and reddit and Twitter, and just exist in the world as it is. To read a real book, produce my own code, writing, art. To engage with the real people around me. And yet I always end up back, because it is completely true that there are a lot of things that are worthwhile in that happy and productive life that exist because I did find them on those toxic and destructive platforms. There really are ways that I see the world and am more confident in myself that stem, ultimately, from a stumbling across something truly useful while staying up too late scrolling past the mass of nonsense.

But it's misleading.

For all the good things that have come into my life through use of these platforms, an almost infinite amount of bad has come about on the other side. To say to myself that I should engage with Twitter again, having blocked it, because there really are some smart peole on there who I could learn something from, is to lie to myself; to dive back into a pool in which I just melt and become nothing. To run back to reddit because, you know, what's the harm in seeing cute pictures on a daily basis, is to throw away any hope of being a real person.

It's those brief moments that really did make a difference, in between the all-consuming mass of moments where I was desperately hoping to gain just a morsel of wisdom to make the whole wasted day worth it, that keep me telling myself to go back and see what I'm missing. But it is just that: it is a lie. There is no reason to think that I could not have gained any of what I have gained through other means. There is certainly no reason to think that I have not been damaged more by trying to exist in these soul-sucking voids than I have gained.

I cannot sincerely argue that nobody has got more out of the existence of Facebook than they've lost. But I reckon that there are a good number of people, like me, who really are just losing out on life. And all I can say is: it's not worth it. That call you hear telling you to go back is the siren song of self-destruction. Block it all, live with the boredom and restlessness for a while, and ultimately find yourself fulfilled, happy, productive and, most importantly: human.