Distraction, the Drug.

Perhaps you have not yet realized your addiction. You have only a vague dread of loneliness, a slight anxiety of solitude—but these are only faint and faraway, drowned in the (poorly) engineered antidotes of our digital age. From your place of sleep to your place of work, and every place in between, you are surrounded by gadgets and gizmos designed to address this anxiety of loneliness. But these fail to assuage it. At best they merely distract you from the symptoms—no real cure—while ever inside you the ache of loneliness bloats and spreads, and you become dependent on the complacency offered in distraction. As you sit behind your computer screen, as you wait for one more email (one more email!), and wake your phone for one more text message, and check your Facebook for one more notification, you are duped into believing that you are operating in a society and are very much not alone. But your behavior is less like social interaction, and more akin to the compulsive behavior of a drug addict.

When you close your computer screen you may feel as if a dimension, as if part of the world, vanishes, may feel everything around you become small and claustrophobically 2D. So maybe you flip open the screen again, and maybe check for new messages or notifications, and keep checking and clicking and clicking and checking and refreshing for one more distraction.

It becomes a neutral state, digital homeostasis, and after a while it becomes your life. It is how you breathe, when you’re not doing unfortunately other things. Yet, underneath it all is a gnawing hunger for something… something more. Perhaps you try and cure it by clicking on a new site, or the next video, or status, or update, but these only distract you from the loneliness, the throbbing of a distant ache, so that for a time you don’t feel it, for a time you are benumbed and benign. Yet all the while it bores a bigger, deeper emptiness inside you.

Shutting off the distraction is painful, the beginning of your digital detoxification. Picking up a book and spending a horrible, solitary moment staring at a page so appallingly one-dimensional that you realize, now, the ache of the emptiness in full symptom of its throb. You become aware that you are, indeed, alone, and then everything goes quiet, and the soundbites divide and vanish, and you can feel nothing but the emptiness. You know, all the while, that the sweet complacency of distraction will numb your mind of it, if only you return to your precious gadgets—and your body and your mind craves it.

You feel drawn, violently, back to the neutral state. You can’t bear the pain any longer, cannot endure the haunting consciousness of your empty life. You need a quick fix. Perhaps it’s your phone, perhaps your TV, perhaps your laptop. You need to forget the pain, ignore the emptiness, shroud the loneliness in the shadows of mock company. Maybe you check your email, or watch a viral video, or maybe you click on a blog post—whichever is closest, you just need to be distracted. So you keep clicking, and clicking, and clicking, to ignore the pain, to avoid solitude, to distract yourself from the ache of loneliness, and never think once about a possible cure.