More Digital Poison Isn’t The Antidote

How much more of your soul are you going to feed to the machine?

Our days are spent stacking the immaterial. There is no sweat from the brow, no blood to circle the drain. All of our toil in the digital realm amounts to abstraction. Both within and without.

My words themselves are abstraction. No more than hypothesis, as I live firmly within this surrogate world with you, quelling my desire with that which is fitted cleanly and neatly into the 6-by-3-inch box I call a phone. This 6-by-3-inch monolith contains a doorway to the entire known world. An electronic talisman that turns desire into faux conquest.

We can confidently say that it is faux conquest because despite the unprecedented access to knowledge and connection, by nearly every metric, we are dumber and lonelier than ever.

We willfully stepped onto this dopaminergic hamster wheel. Or, another way to imagine the digital landscape is one akin to an amusement park model. We walked through those gates, but boy did they slam shut hard behind us.

There is novelty everywhere. Exciting choices that we make, things we anticipate and react to. Attractions that make us feel an unnamed, illusory something. But that something is hollow and devoid of any psychological nutrient.

We retain less than zero. Nothing is transformative. Nothing is applied. Very little, if anything, is ever embodied and carried forward in a fully satisfactory manner from our digital consumption.

Perhaps this is because the real goal, most truthfully, is not transformation on our part. Perhaps it is not information or conquest we seek, as much as it is our gratification with its apparent arrival. And if gratification is the real object, then perhaps we should stop treating this failure as merely a failure of will.

What is going on is deeper than us consuming information poorly. We are stuck in a system that has taught us to make consumption itself feel like an accomplishment. The small rush of having seen, read, checked, discovered, responded, and moved on can stand in for the far harder work of actually changing. And there are powerful interests that have learned exactly how profitable that mistake can be.

This is not happening on neutral ground. You’ve left the battlefield of the mind. You have a real enemy lurking in the digital grass. We are the product. We are being bought and sold. Our infinite appetites are being made ravenous by those who are designing this digital amusement park to become akin to a labyrinth with no manageable escape.

We grow tired, our spirits grow evermore fatigued. A part deep within us screams for respite. It begs to know why life feels so empty, so flat. It needs to know what to do.

Look no further. Your phone has the video you are looking for. Here is the life-hack, the product, the podcast, the app, the essay. The answer is one click away. Just scroll a bit further, my friend.

Our scrolling becomes a desperate sprint on that dopaminergic hamster wheel. And we are getting tired. We are thirsting for that something to make us feel alive. We long to feel within ourselves once more.

The enemy loves this. It loves this because it builds an inelasticity of demand. Just look at how much higher and higher the price of Netflix continues to rise. Yet, we are still buying. We cannot leave it behind. The thought brings forth a dark foreboding cloud.

A world without the phone, without Netflix, or Instagram, Substack, you name it... a world with limited escape would back us into a corner and demand we confront our feverish souls. The one we have let the machine chew on for years.

Calm and quiet can be brought upon that untamed beast within. At first it will thrash and buck and beg to be released back into that amusement park, but with determination you can bit and bridle yourself. You can stop replacing what you need with what you want, and in the totality of this decision you will find a fuller more vibrant version of your life.

I have said nothing new here. Nothing wise. The only profundity will come when you take action.

Stop expecting the cage to teach you how to be free. You won’t find dry land walking in the current. The poison isn’t the antidote. You get it? Yes, you get it. Will you act on it? This is the real question.

I discuss concepts like this and more on my YouTube channel L.S. Author. Check it out here.

These two videos would make a good follow-up to this piece. But don’t watch them. Honestly, save them for later, but get off the phone.