“How strange…. they attempt to escape suffering while ignoring why they suffer.” - A hermit passing through a city

In the week leading up to my Chrismation, marking my entrance in the fullness of the Orthodox Faith, I set a personal resolution to stay off the internet outside of work and solely focus on reading scripture and prayer. Those evenings seemed to drag on forever, as if God was testing my commitment by placing extra grains of sand into the cosmic hourglass. My mind grappled with boredom up until my eyes shut for the final time each night. I succeeded in keeping my resolution, but for what?

A few months later, my health began to deteriorate; foggy clouds filled my mind; uncontrollable tempests of emotions raged inside me over the course of the days. My willpower strained, doing all it could to hold my life together and continue the disciplined habits I had built up over the past year, but after a few weeks of struggle, my strength failed and I found myself glued to dim blue digital light. Scrolling… scrolling… scrolling… as the days vanished into the ether.

I have made many attempts made to break my addiction to the internet: Clearing my web history, installing browser plugins that blocked web pages, setting my phone color to gray-scale, resolving to only use the internet between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., using a phone application that forced a 12 second-pause before opening the web browser, turning my phone on to airplane mode. There are more I’m sure.

Not only were all of these methods a great inconvenience, all of them ultimately failed to draw my mind away from urge to aimlessly check an empty email box, scroll through group chats, and visit news sites and social media feeds to fill my mind with the trivia of the day. The urge was overpowering and wasn’t going to be tamed by slight inconveniences.

Reflecting on these failures, I realize that information addiction, the aimless scrolling and checking of my phone, are symptoms of a deeper problem. The attempts I made through behavioral modification are akin to how the corporate medical-complex hawks an endless formulary of pharmaceuticals to manage surface level symptoms, while the actual cause of the ailment remains untreated. Willing my way to break this addiction is futile, because brute attempts to alter my behavior don’t change my internal state. The scrolling, the aimless checking of apps, are only symptoms of an inner feeling of disconnection from the world around me.

Disconnection from the world around me. What does this phrase mean?

As I sit in my home there are dozens of things I could do to make my environment more beautiful, more homely; I could tidy up the stray objects; I could simmer some apple-cinnamon potpourri and fill the room with a sweet earthy aroma. Of course, there’s always general cleaning tasks. But for me to choose to doing these things presupposes that I care about my living space, that I see this dwelling as something that I’m connected to and invested in.

Or take the example of the child scrolling on his phone at a restaurant, ignoring his parents. By choosing the digital drip over the sights, sounds, and sensation of the dining experience and his family, he’s making an unconscious calculation that whatever trivia or stimulus he’s presented with on his phone is more meaningful than the experience he’s having with his family. There’s a dearth of connection, and so there’s no little or no emotional drive to interact with those around him.

Another example: when I walk through the grocery store and unconsciously open my phone to check my email for the 15th time today, I’ve made the decision that I don’t care about my journey through the aisles of packaged food. I’m dissociated from myself in that moment, and unable to feel my connection to the greater “grocery store community” around me.

These mundane examples point to a subtle, underlying sense of disconnection with one’s surroundings and relations that drives the resultant behavior. There’s simply no emotional charge being generated from these interactions, and the phone and internet are overjoyed to fill the resultant emotional vacuum.

Crude, willpower-fueled, attempts as mechanistic behavioral change will always eventually fail when faced off with the inner feeling of disconnection. Not only is the root cause missed, but attempts at arbitrary self-deprivation will splinter the self and create an internal antagonism between the conscious, goal-striving mind, and the emotional body seeking to fill the bleeding void it feels. Turning minutes of internet time into a forbidden fruit only makes the relapses all the more sickly sweet. Furthermore, an unnecessary expenditure of energy and willpower is focused inwards on this behavioral modification. Learn from my failings; you can only “will” yourself for so long. Willpower is meant to help us overcome intermittent external challenges. Perpetual reliance on willpower is a doomed strategy that will lead to exhaustion and burnout.

So then, what does it take to move beyond the symptomology, roll up our sleeves, and take a trowel to the roots of the disconnected feelings within us?

First and foremost, the health of the physical body is paramount. I mentioned that I relapsed into the scrolling addiction soon after my health declined. Why? The health issues I was experiencing interfered with my ability to feel the emotions of connection. The neural pathways in my brain governing empathy probably weren’t functioning. My hormones were skewed out of wack, starving my mind of necessary neurotransmitters, and placing it in the proverbial ICU. If the body is not in a state of health, it is likely not able to support the mental and emotional faculties needed to connect with the world.

I cannot stress this enough from my own experience. I was essentially being poisoned by toxic food additives and other pathogens to the point I was physiologically incapable of feeling connection. In the toxic world we live in, probabilities are that I’m not the only one. It’s no shock that the amount of time I spend aimlessly scrolling has declined as I detoxified my body and gradually gained more mental clarity and emotionally stability.

But simply improving physical health isn’t enough to eliminate the behavior. The psychological wounds need to be be treated, and feelings of connection with the world don’t spring out of thin air. The next step is to rehabilitate a sense of worth and intrinsic value. To connect with the world, one first needs to connect with the one’s self.

This is where practices such as prayer, meditation, and journaling come into play. Writing for this blog also serves the same aim. These acts only require small bursts of willpower a few times per day and can be sustained over time. The goal is to connect with one’s inner desires, explore the feelings, develop mental faculties facilitating greater connection, and hopefully find a firm grounding in a sense of self-worth -as a man made in the image of God.

If you value yourself, then any situation you find yourself in, will always have something of value, and even the most mundane occurrences of life will generate an emotional charge.

With diligent practice we hopefully come to see that within we all have something to offer, and begin to genuinely want a better life, a life free of these behaviors. We are affecting inner change from a foundation of love and self-acceptance.

The final component is choosing to invest in the world. The more time, energy, and attention poured into a person, place, or thing, the more meaning is going to be associated with that. If I’ve spent time decorating my dwelling and making it cozy and comfortable, I’m going to want to be present in it and appreciate the fruits of my labors. If I truly care about and have invested in another person, I’m going to be intently listening to them and won’t even think of checking my phone. It’s about creating an emotional charge with the objects and people in the surroundings that effortlessly directs one’s attention to the present moment.

Then, the desire to scroll recedes all on it’s own. I’ve seen the time I spend browsing the internet and checking apps on my phone slowly diminish with little direct effort. I’ve done nothing to restrict my internet usage, I’ve simply started connecting with things I care about more, and valuing my attention as something precious that shouldn’t be frivolously spent on digital junk-food. Of course, I will be required to maintain these changes. I must sharpen the saw, and continuously invest my time and energy into the world around me; lest I begin to take my surroundings for granted and drift into disconnection once more. This is life; these bad habits can only occupy a void, and we must strive to fill ourselves with the good in order to stave off the entropic decay and drifting inherent in this world.

Digital technology was designed to be addictive by callous -and even evil- people, and the struggles of information addiction, compulsive phone checking, and doom-scrolling are unique to our time. However, we are called to face this problem and transcend it through personal growth. From one perspective, it’s a beautiful opportunity. We don’t have to live rigid and austere lives or become luddites shunning all technology to beat this addiction. For when you are feeling connected to the beautiful creation that God has made for us and the wonderful people in your life, the digital world becomes flat and oppressively boring. Then the scrolling stops.