I'm addicted to my phone
and we're all becoming psychopaths
Hi everyone! If you’re new, welcome to Ethics Club. Every week, I choose a topic to debate, but mostly just try to find clarity on prevalent topics in pop culture.
So…the headline. Where to begin?
Best said by Bo Burnham in this interview for the Eighth Grade press tour that I’m ironically linking through a TikTok here:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRHTnqSU/
After the clip, please remember to return to this page and finish reading. Try your best not to get sucked down the rabbit hole of social media with suggested videos. If you do get lost, don’t feel bad- it’s designed that way. This blog will be waiting for you to come back, eventually.
So here’s the ultimate phenomenon: I truly could not care less about the majority of content I consume. The algorithm of social media is designed to produce the same reward system in our brains that we get from the lottery. We are mindlessly scrolling thinking maybe I’ll enjoy the next video, even though the odds are highly unlikely, just like winning the jackpot. I promise if you pause your scrolling and try to deeply think about the subject of the last five videos or pictures you saw, there’s a chance you wouldn’t remember half of them. So then why is it so difficult to unplug, or why is it so easy to keep scrolling if you’re not enjoying it? The system has evolved beyond monetizing our time and labor to monetizing our attention every second of every day.
It’s hard to even think about things to do that exist outside of the online abyss. Most of the hobbies or activities that I participate aren’t tangible in the outside world. I like learning French, but I do it on an app alone in my room, never speaking French with another living human. I play solitaire on my phone or on the plane headrest when it’s a physical game with a deck of cards, which I have sitting in a desk drawer. Even this blog is a “hobby” of sorts, but it just involves me typing furiously in the dark from my bed.
Sometimes, I pick up my phone with the intention of setting a morning alarm, and find myself looking at someone’s Instagram highlights from 158 weeks ago, and I won’t realize I haven’t set the alarm until I’ve browsed through three or four different apps and tried to set my phone down again. There are roughly 15 people in my social bubble that I earnestly communicate with on a weekly basis. Beyond that, everyone else is just acquaintances. Or would be just acquaintances if we existed in any time period besides this one. Now, I have access to every thought and action and concert and dinner and movie-night and depressive episode of just about everyone I’ve ever met. Life isn’t supposed to be this way.
In a post-modern world, people can only conceive of themselves by describing the commodities they surround themselves with. In American Pyscho, Patrick Bateman (spoiler alert: this is my Halloween costume) narrates his daily routine, which eventually devolves into listing the things in his home and the products he uses.
My name is Patrick Bateman. I’m 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself, and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I’ll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower I use a water activated gel cleanser, then a honey almond body scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I apply an herb-mint facial masque which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an after shave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion. There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me. Only an entity. Something illusory.
Much like how girls who strive to be a certain aesthetic - clean girl, no make-up make-up, Charlotte Tilbury concealer, iced vanilla oat milk latte, Pinterest, claw clip, Pilates, Olaplex no. 8 - create a vision of what we imagine a person to be like. We’ve created a culture that solely exists on the scale of performance. At what point do we consider perceived intelligence to be real intelligence? Does posting pictures with books or quotes or political awareness Instagram stories (guilty) or being the type of person seen reading on the subway (guilty again) mean that you’re truly smart? Or just good at performing it? How can we tell if someone is cool or interesting besides what they perform with the intentions of being cool and interesting online? The “it-girl” is dead without followers. She can’t exist in a world that doesn’t celebrate every outfit with likes and comments. The perception of her can only exist through the facade of online celebrity. Even highly successful actors or singers struggle with the world’s perception of them outside of their talent. People like Jennifer Lawrence and Kendall Jenner have been accused of pandering to try and be perceived as “cool girl”. I’m not defending them and their uniqueness being a hot girl that likes pizza (click the link please), but I understand they struggle with feeling like their true self is in constant opposition to the way society perceives them. I too would be crushed if anyone suggested I seem like the kind of person that did anything I would consider to be outside of my self-perception.
Let me rephrase that. If someone told me that I looked like I liked DJ Khaled’s music, I would be distraught with an air of misrepresentation. I hate the thought that someone could perceive me so differently than I do myself. But, maybe I only feel that way because so much of my life is spent performing a version of myself. I doubt that 23 year olds even just a mere decade ago felt this much pressure to curate a specific lifestyle or existence for themselves. It even feels wrong to admit certain true things about myself on social media, because I know how people might receive it. Saying that I believe in astrology or write in a journal or hate cookies that are too crunchy could be spun and turned into me trying to be quirky or different when it’s just my preference. In the same way that girls who liked HydroFlasks and scrunchies and “Save the Turtles” became a meme population we ridiculed for six months until we were bored of it. Everyone feels the impact of this in a different way. Maybe it’s the innate need to prove you liked something before it was popular, or that you actually like books or movies or music that a celebrity you’re also a fan of recommended. If you meet someone and follow each other on social media, what their feed looks like could be off-putting or different, or not align with what the ideal people you want to hang out with’s social media looks like, even if you liked them in person. The idea of showing a guy to your friends and he only has pictures holding fish on a boat in his feed is humiliating. Why?
As someone pursuing a career in creating media, this is something I grapple with on an daily basis. Is it wrong that I want to produce new television shows or YouTube skits or anything to add to the sea of content that just plugs people in? I think there has to be a ground zero for everything. If the content that’s being created serves a purpose or sends a message that is productive and useful, then maybe its existence is okay? But how do we define what’s productive to society? I hope that the artistic intention could be measurable, but comedy wouldn’t necessarily fall under that category either. The thing about comedy that I find solace in is that it’s a distraction from the chaos of the world, which might be part of the problem. We have enough distractions as it is.
See you next week.