The Biggest Thing I've Learned This Past Decade

Okay, so before you say anything -- yeah, I know, I was born in 1996, so the "biggest thing I've learned this past decade" is a thing I've basically learned from the age of 13 onward, which, in a human's life, often tends to be the period where you literally first grasp what life is actually about (unless you're real unlucky and stay completely immature in every single aspect of existence by the age of 23), it's not like there is some sort of a groundbreaking revelation I will magically make when I'm this young. I get that, you're absolutely correct. When you're 23, saying, "Hey, here is the biggest thing I've learned since the time I wrote Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy fanfiction on the internet" does not sound particularly cool, but here I am nonetheless because, shit- this lesson is a big one, especially for my generation, I feel like, so hopefully it is of some service to someone out there reading this post right now.

The biggest lesson of the past decade for me was:

You are not mentally ill. You just don't know how to interact with technology. (Because no one ever taught you to.)

To be honest, in this whole post I'm kinda cheating because I've only learned this lesson to its full extent yesterday (so, on January 5th 2020, technically after the new decade has already started). But for the longest time before that I suspected that passive online entertainment consumption and social media use make me majorly unhappy. And, as I am currently reading Cal Newport's eye-opening book "Digital Minimalism" and due to my recent personal circumstances (independent from my reading the book) which forced me to turn off my phone, stop using social media from my computer, and stop using Internet almost entirely during the day, I had these suspicions of mine confirmed. Constantly using social media (even just for chatting with friends) and mindlessly seeking online entertainment in the form of binge-watching Youtube videos, TV shows and Twitch streams made me miserable because deep down I knew these activities were not actually bringing me joy -- texting my friends or my partner wasn't fulfilling my need for human connection, and endlessly watching Dead by Daylight streams wasn't fulfilling my need for leisure either.

And there's more -- and that's where this lesson gets very deep. For the longest, longest, lllllongest time (I cannot emphasize this enough) I thought I was mentally ill. No joke. Since childhood I've been morbidly fascinated with death and somewhat curious about suicide, but on a purely intellectual level (I never had suicidal thoughts or tendencies myself). This, however, changed when I started my first year of university. I remember feeling very sad and lost in this new place around all these new people. This is the first time I remember feeling depressed and realizing that I might actually have real depression and I might actually be suicidal. I even remember thinking a few years later that "maybe I have a brain tumor or something". Because by the age of 20 I've become to erratic sometimes in my interaction with other people (mostly my romantic partners, but other people as well, I suspect) that I thought, "This is so weird it just cannot be as simple as some sort of a psychological problem, I must be mentally ill and physically have something wrong with my brain". This belief of mine was reinforced by the fact I've known during pretty much my entire life that one of my great-grandfathers allegedly committed suicide (and suicidal tendencies pass on genetically; also my mother said she herself had depression at the age of 21). So I settled on the conclusion that this was genetically meant to be -- I am mentally ill and there is nothing to be done. As recently as September 2019, a guy I was hooking up with told me I had BPD. And I believed him. (Side note: please don't listen to people you hook up with diagnosing you. They might not be right -- and I'm putting it mildly.)

You may have already guessed that my next move here is to say that, "Hey, I'm actually fine, I was just using shitloads of social media and making myself go crazy for years because of it". And you have guessed correctly. BUT! There is a huge "but". ("But", not "butt", you perv, I know you were thinking it too.) This is not meant to minimize that I objectively had some destabilizing circumstances in my life that have lead to me getting prescribed psychotherapy due to suicidal thoughts, having multiple nervous breakdowns throughout the past 5 years, and self-harming twice in a span of 4 months (among many other things which were not exactly pleasant experiences or displays of good mental health). Heck, I had a lot of things testing me as a human being, but nothing extraordinary, pretty much everything anyone goes though -- getting into a new environment when starting university, experiencing first romantic relationships and first heartbreaks, receiving rejections when applying for jobs or after going to exhausting interviews etc. All of these things are a part of being human, and have been that for quite some time. Yet historically the majority of people have gone through this (and worse) before -- without feeling like they were going insane, or like they wanted to commit suicide. These are regular life's hardships, is what I'm basically saying.

The only difference between me and those people before me, then, is: unlike those previous generations I, on top of experiencing all the "basic human suffering" (let's call it that) inflict even more artificial suffering on myself by overstimulating my nervous system and being constantly high on dopamine due to my social media and Internet usage habits.

To many using the Internet, social media, smartphones etc. may not seem like a big deal, but I've realized that the way I use these things have gotten out of control at some point in my life, and have been out of control for 5 years or possibly longer now. I don't just "chat" with my friends or my partner online -- oh no. Somehow for me psychologically online texting becomes an interaction in itself, even though it gives me literally no cues one would normally get during a normal conversation -- I can't hear the voice of whoever I'm speaking to, I can't hear their tone, can't see their gestures etc. etc. This turned out to be detrimental for my romantic relationships especially -- I cannot emphasize to you the amount of fights I started with my significant other (btw, I'm not just talkin' my current boyfriend, I'm talkin' my relationships in the past 5 years) because of a text they sent me that I didn't like. Like, girl... seriously? And if you don't think that this is dramatic enough ("It's fine, misunderstanding a text, whatever, happens to everyone" or "Girls will be girls"), a few years ago it has come to a point where I literally never fought offline with my boyfriends but did constantly fight with them online (and I was always the one starting the fight, of course -- while self-righteously thinking that they did, because "they texted something wrong" or whatever my bullshit reason was).

My head was a chaos container for a total of 5 years. My digital habits have ruined multiple of my relationships and some of my friendships. They have robbed me of happiness in the happiest of moments and it made me fuck up so many beautiful things in my life. They have made me question my own sanity -- rightfully so, though, because they were actually making me insane.

In "Digital Minimalism" Cal Newport sites a research done on the generation born after 1995: statistics show that anxiety, depression and suicide rates have skyrocketed when these children, who from a very young age were exposed to smartphones, became older. This is so important. I cannot stress enough how careful we need to be with the way we use technology -- there are so many neurobiological processes linked to this, and, mind you, smartphones and and the Internet are so new that our brains, which have been developing vvvvvery slowly for millennia are, naturally, not ready for them. We don't know how to handle the effect that the Internet, social media and smartphones have on us. And no one teaches us that, too -- again, because this is so new that we as a humanity are only beginning to grasp the effects these technologies have on us. We are painfully technologically uncivilized. And we need to come a long way before we are able to tame our unhealthy behaviour towards something we ourselves have created. But before then, I implore you -- do not make conclusions about yourself as radical as the ones I was making about myself. First try to change the way you interact with technology. And then see if it changes the way you interact with yourself and the world.