Screen Addiction Quotes

No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline.

Here though, there are no oppressors. No one's forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You're at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you're staring at a screen! Searching for strangers in... Dubai!

He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.

Be very careful of what you allow to infiltrate your consciousness and subconsciousness. When you watch too much television, you'll start to feel inferior from all the commercials hard selling the idea that you're not complete unless you buy their product [...] The ad agencies appeal to your fear of not being wanted or loved. It's the same with the local news. They get you to stay tuned with a constant stream of fear tactics [...] It's as if our culture is addicted to fear and the flat screen is our drug dealer. Don't allow that crap into your head!

The insane rush of endorphins that flooded my system the moment my phone vibrated and her name popped up on screen was worrying. I'd never been addicted to anything before, but I thought maybe this is what it felt like to be a junkie in desperate need of a hit. "Edward Cullen, you poor, miserable bastard," I said as I locked my phone screen and stared at the ceiling. "I should not have judged you so harshly.

No one wants to admit we’re addicted to music. That’s just not possible. No one’s addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can’t bear to be without it, but no, nobody’s addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted.

It’s as if our culture is addicted to fear and the flat screen is our drug dealer.

our everyday waking consciousness “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

I've been very lucky in my life in terms of people who are able to tolerate me.

From this point forth, find me nowhere, Socially unseen, Just on the back porch, without a care And without a screen

Movies, to him and the majority of the planet, are an enhancement to a life. The way a glass of wine complements a dinner. I’m the other way around. I’m the kind of person who eats a few bites of food so that my stomach can handle the full bottle of wine I’m about to drink.

Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping games, jerking off, streaming endless garbage-

You know you are a human when a beautiful image appearing on television/computer/smartphone/tab screen appears more alive than a living being. Basically, we are stupid.

The ringtone was a dead giveaway, emphasis on dead . . . creepy organ music. She didn’t even have to glance at the image of fanged bunny slippers on the screen to know who was calling. She just sighed, thumbed it on, and held it to her ear. “Claire! I need you here immediately. Something’s wrong with Bob.” Myrnin, her mad-scientist, blood-addicted boss, sounded actually shaken. “I can’t get him to eat his insects, and I used his favorites. He just sits there.” “Bob,” she repeated, looking at Shane in wide-eyed disbelief. “Bob the spider.” “Just because he’s a spider doesn’t mean he deserves any less concern! Claire, you have a way with him. He likes you.” Just what she needed. Bob the spider liked her. “You do realize that he’s a year old, at least. And spiders don’t live that long.” “You think he’s dead?” Myrnin sounded horrified. So wrong. “Is he curled up?” “No. He’s just quiet.” “Well, maybe he’s not hungry.” “Will you come?” Myrnin asked. He sounded calmer now, but also oddly needy. “It’s been very lonely here these past few days. I’d like your company, at least for a little while.” When she hesitated, he used the pity card. “Please, Claire.” “Fine,” she sighed. “I’m bringing Shane.” After a second of silence, he said, flatly, “Goody,” and hung up.

Beware of your kid's screen consumption time - it's a matter of life and death - of psychological life and psychological death. Raise them in a way that they do not lose their sense of community in the fake crowd of hashtags and emojis.

Trying their wings once more in hopeless flight: Blind moths against the wires of window screens. Anything. Anything for a fix of light. X. J. Kennedy, "Street Moths," The Lords of Misrule

He was on a wildly successful TV show on Disney for two years (playing a singing possum), before hitting the big screen, playing everything from Captain Marvel, to a schizophrenic, to Alexander the Great, to a college kid with a crystal meth addiction. I don't know if he's a great actor, but he's great looking, so who cares.

Imitation leads to exhilaration when you follow it back to its source.

But see, that's the thing about movies. Nothing is left to the imagination. You read a book, and you see a picture of the characters and the scenes in your mind. You don't have that with a movie. It's all either up there on the screen laid out for you, or it isn't there at all.

Take what you need from [films] and get out of the dark once in a while. You’re going to have more of the dark than you can handle, sooner than you think. The thing about the dark is it can never get enough of you.

10 ways to raise a wild child. Not everyone wants to raise wild, free thinking children. But for those of you who do, here's my tips: 1. Create safe space for them to be outside for a least an hour a day. Preferable barefoot & muddy. 2. Provide them with toys made of natural materials. Silks, wood, wool, etc...Toys that encourage them to use their imagination. If you're looking for ideas, Google: 'Waldorf Toys'. Avoid noisy plastic toys. Yea, maybe they'll learn their alphabet from the talking toys, but at the expense of their own unique thoughts. Plastic toys that talk and iPads in cribs should be illegal. Seriously! 3. Limit screen time. If you think you can manage video game time and your kids will be the rare ones that don't get addicted, then go for it. I'm not that good so we just avoid them completely. There's no cable in our house and no video games. The result is that my kids like being outside cause it's boring inside...hah! Best plan ever! No kid is going to remember that great day of video games or TV. Send them outside! 4. Feed them foods that support life. Fluoride free water, GMO free organic foods, snacks free of harsh preservatives and refined sugars. Good oils that support healthy brain development. Eat to live! 5. Don't helicopter parent. Stay connected and tuned into their needs and safety, but don't hover. Kids like adults need space to roam and explore without the constant voice of an adult telling them what to do. Give them freedom! 6. Read to them. Kids don't do what they are told, they do what they see. If you're on your phone all the time, they will likely be doing the same thing some day. If you're reading, writing and creating your art (painting, cooking...whatever your art is) they will likely want to join you. It's like Emilie Buchwald said, "Children become readers in the laps of their parents (or guardians)." - it's so true! 7. Let them speak their truth. Don't assume that because they are young that you know more than them. They were born into a different time than you. Give them room to respectfully speak their mind and not feel like you're going to attack them. You'll be surprised what you might learn. 8. Freedom to learn. I realize that not everyone can homeschool, but damn, if you can, do it! Our current schools system is far from the best ever. Our kids deserve better. We simply can't expect our children to all learn the same things in the same way. Not every kid is the same. The current system does not support the unique gifts of our children. How can they with so many kids in one classroom. It's no fault of the teachers, they are doing the best they can. Too many kids and not enough parent involvement. If you send your kids to school and expect they are getting all they need, you are sadly mistaken. Don't let the public school system raise your kids, it's not their job, it's yours! 9. Skip the fear based parenting tactics. It may work short term. But the long term results will be devastating to the child's ability to be open and truthful with you. Children need guidance, but scaring them into listening is just lazy. Find new ways to get through to your kids. Be creative! 10. There's no perfect way to be a parent, but there's a million ways to be a good one. Just because every other parent is doing it, doesn't mean it's right for you and your child. Don't let other people's opinions and judgments influence how you're going to treat your kid. Be brave enough to question everything until you find what works for you. Don't be lazy! Fight your urge to be passive about the things that matter. Don't give up on your kid. This is the most important work you'll ever do. Give it everything you have.

Digital vegetables can be a healthy use of screens (researching a term paper), while digital candy (Minecraft, Candy Crush) are hyperarousing and dopamine-activating digital stimulants without any ostensible 'health benefit'.

I knew I had a problem when I found myself saying, to my reflection, in my laptop screen, 'What has two gigantic thumbs and needs to quit social media?' 'This guy'... before bursting into laughter, then tears, then song: the main three things a human can burst into. The fourth being flames. Also the song was the British National Anthem and I don't know why.

I am increasingly persuaded that our 24-7 addiction to screens and social media is perhaps our most destructive habit, not only to our ability to sleep but to our mental health in general. So I banish those from my evenings (or at least, I try to). Turn off the computer and put away your phone at least an hour before bedtime. Do NOT bring your laptop or phone into bed with you.

[Texting] discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting's hyperimmediacy. E-mails take some time to work their way through the Internet, through switches and routers and servers, and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you've got a recipe for addiction: You receive a text, and that activates your novelty centers. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you fifteen seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out "More! More! Give me more!

People are obsessed with spectacle. We live in the society of the spectacle. People are addicted to the spectacular. They want bigger and better spectacles. They need more and more to keep them stimulated. They crave entertainment. They crave more powerful simulations, more breathtaking special effects, more everything. No one wants POR – plain old reality. Simulation – hyperreality – the simulacrum – these are what the people desire. We all live in Disneyland now – an utter fantasy world. Our true God is Mickey Mouse. At least he’s a lot nicer than Yahweh.

The trap that many parents fall into is in believing that when their kids are hypnotically looking at a screen, they are demonstrating a profound ability to stay focused. after all, they maintain a laserlike attention on the screen, so how can there possibly be an attention problem?

Part of being in your twenties is not knowing an ally when you see one.

The man is clear in his mind. But his soul is mad.

Vincent van Gogh was a “tormented genius” the way Jimi Hendrix was a “guitar player.” I

That's right - a kid's brain on tech looks like a brain on drugs.

the problem isn’t that people lack willpower; it’s that “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.

Essentially, she realized that no one cared about her nebulous theories on this world of sellouts, this world of arrant morons addicted to electronic screens and slaughtered animals.

We live in a world of ghosts. We are all half present for most of our day. I constantly catch myself walking while looking at an iPhone. When I drive to work in the morning, I find myself lost in thought or needing the noise of the radio or an audiobook. We sit in a room of people that we love, while we all live in a half-present, hypnotized state of social media consciousness.

He had come home late with take-out Thai and slammed into the sofa and tried to watch a movie, but kept drifting from it to the screen of his laptop. This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing.

You’ve probably also noted the impacts of virtual distraction on your own and others’ behaviors: memory loss, inability to concentrate, being asked to repeat what you just said, miscommunication the norm, getting lost online and wasting time you don’t have, withdrawing from the real world. The list of what’s being lost is a description of our best human capacities—memory, meaning, relating, thinking, learning, caring. There is no denying the damage that’s been done to humans as technology took over—our own Progress Trap. The impact on children’s behavior is of greatest concern for its present and future implications. Dr. Nicolas Kardaras, a highly skilled physician in rehabilitation, is author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. He describes our children’s behavior in ways that I notice in my younger grandchildren: “We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices. Worse, we see children who become bored, apathetic, uninteresting and uninterested when not plugged in.”17 These very disturbing behaviors are not just emotional childish reactions. Our children are behaving as addicts deprived of their drug. Brain imaging studies show that technology stimulates brains just like cocaine does.

I urge all responsible citizens across the world to demand the parliament of your country to ban the use of any social media platform that doesn't have a health hazard warning on their welcome screen stating "excessive use of this platform can cause severe mental health problems".

Katie had gone through a phase where she tried to ban phones from their bedroom after she read some article about how the light was addictive. Messed up your brain waves somehow. He’d always assumed it was nonsense, but now his eyes burn in the screen’s glow and his brain feels scrambled.

The more screen-time you consume on your device, the more revenue can the big tech make. So, your health, your wellbeing, your sanity and serenity are nowhere closer to their priorities. That's why, your health is in your hands, your serenity is in your hands, your sanity is in your hands.

The cult that told me that I’m not enough, that I need to be famous to be of value, that I need to have money to live a worthwhile life, that I should affiliate, associate and identify on the basis of colour and class, that my role in life is to consume, that I was to live in a darkness only occasionally lit up by billboards and screens, always framing the smiling face of someone trying to sell me something. Sell me phones and food and prejudice, low cost and low values, low-frequency thinking. We are in a cult by default. We just can’t see it because its boundaries lie beyond our horizons.

If you really want a child to thrive and blossom, lose the screens for the first few years of their lives. During those key developmental periods, let them engaging creative play. Legos are always great, as they encourage creativity and the hand-eye coordination nurtures synaptic growth. Let them explore their surroundings and allow them opportunities to experience nature. . Activities like cooking and playing music also have been shown to help young children thrive developmentally. But most importantly, let them experience boredom; there is nothing healthier for a child then to learn how to use their own interior resources to work through the challenges of being bored. This then acts as the fertile ground for developing their powers of observation, cultivating patience and developing an active imagination-- the most developmentally and neurosynaptically important skill that they can learn.

One professor from MIT made the passionate plea that we must encourage children to develop the ability to think first, and then give them the computer. After that, the sky's the limit. But if you introduce the computer before the child's thought processes are worked out, then you have a disaster in the making

I'm in my room, consuming, cyber, and confused. I don't remember the last time I made something Besides blunts, cum, minimum wage, bad grades, a noose. Sometimes I know I'm just twiddling my thumbs in front of a screen, That the songs about the money make me fake feel rich too. That the porn gets weirder, life gets shorter, and I eat shit stew. That these unrealistic characters I play make me feel strong. That I'm screaming at plastic that did nothing wrong. That I'm hurting and escaping and yearning and breaking. That underneath this hole, I may actually have some flair. Sometimes I'd like to leave my room and go see what's out there. Would you like to go with me?

What’s more, an ever-increasing amount of clinical research correlates screen tech with psychiatric disorders like ADHD, addiction, anxiety, depression, increased aggression and even psychosis. Perhaps most shocking of all, recent brain-imaging studies conclusively show that excessive screen exposure can neurologically damage a young person’s developing brain in the same way that cocaine addiction can. That’s

I always imagined rape as this violent scene of a woman walking alone down a dark alley and getting mugged and beaten by some masked criminal. Rape was an angry man forcing himself inside a damsel in distress. I would not carry the trauma of a cliché rape victim. I would not shriek in the midst of my slumber with night terrors. I would not tremble at the sight of every dark haired man or the mention of Number 1’s name. I would not even harbor ill will towards him. My damage was like a cigarette addiction- subtle, seemingly innocent, but everlasting and inevitably detrimental. Number 1 never opened his screen door to furious crowds waving torches and baseball bats. Nobody punched him out in my honor. The Nightfall crowd never socially ostracized him. Even the ex-boyfriend who’d second handedly fused the entire fiasco continued to mingle with him in drug circles. Everybody continued with business as usual. And when I told my parents I lost my virginity against my will, unconscious on a bathroom floor, Carl did not erupt in fury and demand I give him all I knew about his whereabouts so he could greet him with a rifle. Mom blankly shrugged and mumbled, “Oh, that’s too bad,” and drifted into the kitchen as if I’d received a stubbed toe rather than a shredded hymen. Everyone in my life took my rape as lightly as a brief thunderstorm that might have been frightening when it happened, but was easy to forget about. I adopted that mentality as the foundation of my sex life. I would, time and time again, treat sex as flimsily as it started. I would give it away as if it was cheap, second hand junk, rather than a prize that deserved to be earned.

Brain-imaging research is showing that glowing screens - like those of iPads - are as stimulating to the brain's pleasure centre and as able to increase levels of dopamine (the primary feel-good neurotransmitter) as much as sex does. This brain-orgasm effect is what makes screen so addictive for adults, but even more so for children with still-developing brains that just aren't equipped to handle that level of stimulation

So does TV watching create inner space? Does it cause you to be present? Unfortunately, it does not. Although for long periods your mind may not be generating any thoughts, it has linked into the thought activity of the television show. It has linked up with the TV version of the collective mind, and is thinking its thoughts. Your mind is inactive only in the sense that it is not producing thoughts. It is, however, continuously absorbing thoughts and images that come through the TV screen. This induces a trancelike passive state of heightened susceptibility, not unlike hypnosis. That is why it lends itself to manipulation of “public opinion,” as politicians and special-interest groups as well as advertisers know and will pay millions of dollars to catch you in that state of receptive unawareness. They want their thoughts to become your thoughts, and usually they succeed. So when watching television, the tendency is for you to fall below thought, not rise above it. Television has this in common with alcohol and certain other drugs. While it provides some relief from your mind, you again pay a high price: loss of consciousness. Like those drugs, it too has a strong addictive quality. You reach for the remote control to switch off and instead find yourself going through all the channels.

had a television set until I sold it at the height of the Vietnam War. Those sanitized snippets of death—made distant by the camera’s lens—meant nothing to me. But I believe it meant something to these cattle which surround me. When the war and the nightly televised body counts ended, they demanded more, more, and the movie screens and streets of this sweet and dying nation have provided it in mediocre, mob abundance. It is an addiction I know well.

America today is in danger of drifting from its best traditions. We have allowed false prophets of selfishness to obscure our vision. We have grown numb to a creeping cynicism about progress and public life. We crave human connection yet hide behind walls. We worship the money chase yet decry the toll it exacts on us. We allow the market to dominate our lives, relationships, yearnings and aspirations. We indulge in nostalgia and irony and addictive entertainment, then purge from our hearts any true idealism or passion, any notion that being American should mean something more than "everyday low prices" or "every man for himself." In the midst of this dislocation and disorientation, so many Americans today yearn for higher purpose, for calling--for some assurance that life matters. We wish to believe there is more to our days than is revealed on our screens. Make no mistake: this is a spiritual crisis.

In almost every house we’ve been, We’ve watched them gaping at the screen. They sit and stare and stare and sit . . . Until they’re hypnotized by it, But did you ever stop to think, (What) This does to your beloved tot? it rots the senses in the head! it kills imagination dead! . . . it makes a child so dull and blind he cannot think he only sees! —Roald Dahl Excerpt from the Mike Teavee poem from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as sung by the Oompa–Loompas

Socrates did not think much of books and the written word; as a proponent of oral storytelling, he thought the written word would kill our memory skills and make us all bloody idiots: “[It] destroys memory [and] weakens the mind, relieving it of . . . work that makes it strong. [It] is an inhuman thing.”5 In addition to memory atrophy, Socrates was also concerned that books would allow information to be communicated without the author or teacher being personally present.

Dan went on to describe his WoW-playing experiences. He was so addicted to WoW that he’d play straight through the night and wouldn’t eat, sleep or go to the bathroom; when nature called, he’d simply pee in a mason jar next to his computer. I would eventually find out that peeing in jars isn’t uncommon for World of Warcraft enthusiasts; the addictive gravitational pull of the game is so powerful that they’ve been known to wear diapers, like deep-space astronauts or long-haul truckers, so as to not miss a moment’s playing time.

Most people are shocked to hear that a video game can actually be more potent than morphine. While this is a phenomenal advance in pain-management medicine and treatment of burn victims, it begs the question: just what effect is this digital drug—which is more powerful than morphine—having on the brains and nervous systems of seven-year-olds—or fourteen year-olds—who are ingesting very similar digital drugs via their glowing screens? And, further, if stimulating screens are indeed more powerful than morphine, can they be just as addicting?

I once read the most widely understood word in the whole world is ‘OK’, followed by ‘Coke’, as in cola. I think they should do the survey again, this time checking for ‘Game Over’. Game Over is my favorite thing about playing video games. Actually, I should qualify that. It’s the split second before Game Over that’s my favorite thing. Streetfighter II - an oldie but goldie - with Leo controlling Ryu. Ryu’s his best character because he’s a good all-rounder - great defensive moves, pretty quick, and once he’s on an offensive roll, he’s unstoppable. Theo’s controlling Blanka. Blanka’s faster than Ryu, but he’s really only good on attack. The way to win with Blanka is to get in the other player’s face and just never let up. Flying kick, leg-sweep, spin attack, head-bite. Daze them into submission. Both players are down to the end of their energy bars. One more hit and they’re down, so they’re both being cagey. They’re hanging back at opposite ends of the screen, waiting for the other guy to make the first move. Leo takes the initiative. He sends off a fireball to force Theo into blocking, then jumps in with a flying kick to knock Blanka’s green head off. But as he’s moving through the air he hears a soft tapping. Theo’s tapping the punch button on his control pad. He’s charging up an electricity defense so when Ryu’s foot makes contact with Blanka’s head it’s going to be Ryu who gets KO’d with 10,000 volts charging through his system. This is the split second before Game Over. Leo’s heard the noise. He knows he’s fucked. He has time to blurt ‘I’m toast’ before Ryu is lit up and thrown backwards across the screen, flashing like a Christmas tree, a charred skeleton. Toast. The split second is the moment you comprehend you’re just about to die. Different people react to it in different ways. Some swear and rage. Some sigh or gasp. Some scream. I’ve heard a lot of screams over the twelve years I’ve been addicted to video games. I’m sure that this moment provides a rare insight into the way people react just before they really do die. The game taps into something pure and beyond affectations. As Leo hears the tapping he blurts, ‘I’m toast.’ He says it quickly, with resignation and understanding. If he were driving down the M1 and saw a car spinning into his path I think he’d in react the same way. Personally, I’m a rager. I fling my joypad across the floor, eyes clenched shut, head thrown back, a torrent of abuse pouring from my lips. A couple of years ago I had a game called Alien 3. It had a great feature. When you ran out of lives you’d get a photo-realistic picture of the Alien with saliva dripping from its jaws, and a digitized voice would bleat, ‘Game over, man!’ I really used to love that.

But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable emphasise his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasise his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past. My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness; but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity. Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of the hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity. The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue. ‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries). Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveller walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.

Yet, ironically, the most tech-cautious parents are the people who invented our iCulture. People are shocked to find out that tech god Steve Jobs was a low-tech parent; in 2010, when a reporter suggested that his children must love the just-released iPad, he replied: “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” In a September, 10, 2014, New York Times article, his biographer Walter Isaacson revealed: “Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things. No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer.” Years earlier, in an interview for Wired magazine, Jobs expressed a very clear anti-tech-in-the-classroom opinion as well—after having once believed that technology was the educational panacea: “I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody on the planet. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.”34 Education

Publishing a book, Watching its ways Force me to look At a screen for days "Be still, be still", My heart screams for life But I must check its sales, It's reviews, its likes. Another Instagram poet Who's dying And doesn't know it, Untying an underlying Knot of desire To be liked and admired For people to love what transpires From my mind, but I'm tired Of the social machine Producing my insecurity Hoping someone will follow me And like all my poetry From this point forth, find me nowhere, Socially unseen, Just on the back porch, without a care And without a screen

As I worked with hundreds of gamers, it became apparent to me that many of these kids were looking for some sort of deeper connection and a sense of purpose. Alienated and adrift in soulless and institutional high schools, the meaning-starved kid finds purpose in a digital fantasy realm of adventure where there are monsters to slay, competitors to vanquish and prizes to attain; there is a soul-satisfying sense of purpose—and, if the games are played with others, a shared sense of purpose. As I treated and talked to my various young clients, another dynamic also revealed itself: escape.

Unfortunately, it seems that we, as a society, have entered into a Faustian deal. Yes, we have these amazing handheld marvels of the digital age - tablets and smartphones - miraculous glowing devices that connect people throughout the globe and can literally access the sum of all human knowledge in the palm of our hand. But what is the price of all this future tech? The psyche and soul of an entire generation. The sad truth is that for the oh-so-satisfying ease, comfort and titillation of these jewels of the modern age, we've unwittingly thrown an entire generation under the virtual bus.

Apparently, the draw of the screen is just too much for most people; the cell phone is like a slot machine. With every ding, a variable reward, either good or bad, is in store for the user—the ultimate dopamine rush. As Robert Kolker wrote in the New York Times Magazine, “Distraction is the devil in your ear—not always the result of an attention deficit, but borne of our own desires.” We are distracted because we want to be. Because it’s fun and obfuscates real life. Why else would they sell so many smartphones? My wife says that I’m addicted to my e-mail, and I know looking at it doesn’t improve my mood.

I sat there on that Wednesday evening in my pokey fucking living room, looked at myself on the TV screen being a massive, odious cunt, and realised that nothing has really changed. Deep down, like most of us, still now at the age of thirty-eight, I have this empty, black hole inside of me that nothing and no one seems capable of filling. I say like most of us because, well, look around you. Our society, our businesses, our social constructs, habits, pastimes, addictions and distractions are predicated on vast, endemic levels of emptiness and dissatisfaction. I call it self-hatred. I hate who I was, am and have become and, as we are taught to, I constantly chastise myself for the things I do and say. And such are the global levels of intolerance, greed, entitlement and dysfunction it is evidently not just confined to a small, wounded section of society. We are all in a world of pain. If it was ever any different way back in the past, it has, by now, most certainly become normalised. And I am as angry about that as I am about my own past. There is an anger that runs underneath everything, that fuels my life and feeds the animal inside me. And it is an anger that always, always prevents me, despite my best efforts, from becoming a better version of myself. My goddamn head seems to have a life of its own, quite beyond my control, incapable of reason, compassion or bargaining. It shouts at me from deep inside. As a kid the words didn’t make sense. As an adult it’s waiting at the end of my bed and starts talking an hour or two before I wake up so that when my eyes open it is in full-on rage mode, blaring this shit at me about how glad it is I’m finally awake, how fucked I am today, how there won’t be enough time, I’ll fuck everything up, my friends are plotting against me, trust no one, I must try as hard as I can to salvage everything in my life while knowing it’s already a lost cause. I’m exhausted all the time. It’s a kind of toxic ME – corrosive, pervasive, penetrative, negative, all the bad -ives.

I started by collecting copies of all the novels and short stories featuring him and piled them up beside my bed. I wanted to get to the very heart of what Dame Agatha thought of him and what he was really like, and to do that, I had to read every word his creator had ever written about him. I didn’t want my Poirot to be a caricature, something made up in a film or television studio, I wanted him to be real, as real as he was in the books, as real as I could possibly make him. The first thing I realised was that I was a slightly too young to play him. He was a retired police detective in his sixties when he first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, while I was in my early forties. Not only that, he was also described as a good deal fatter than I was. There was going to have to be some considerable padding, not to mention very careful make-up and costume, if I was going to convince the world that I was the great Hercule Poirot. Even more important, the more I read about him, the more convinced I became that he was a character that demanded to be taken seriously. He wasn’t a silly little man with a funny accent, any more than Sherlock Holmes was just a morphine addict with a taste for playing the violin. There was a depth and quality to the Poirot that Dame Agatha had created – and that was what I desperately wanted to bring to the screen.

We watch on as a young woman passes us by, her eyes glued to the screen of her phone. She almost walks into a cyclist, looks up for a split-second and then eyes back onto the screen and walks on, unbothered, like nothing has happened. It is clear to us, the world’s center of attention had shifted in the last few years, its center was now in our hands, its currency was measured in likes and shares. Information these days swirls in an endless, never-ending tornado of tweets, news feeds and viral sensations, each single word, no every single letter actually, fighting for our attention, fighting for a moment in the spotlight before fading into the depths of digital oblivion, to be forgotten forever.

Tech helped to create this economy, and tech is what keeps it stable by giving us the greatest bread and circuses of all time. Casino owners discovered in the late 1980s that people who gambled on screens became addicted three to four times faster than those who gambled at tables. The rest of America had learned that lesson by 1992, when a third of homes had Nintendo systems. Men without jobs have video games the way men without girlfriends have pornography, and growing numbers of men are finding the substitute good enough to be going on with, declining to pursue either permanent employment or marriage. The historian David Courtwright calls this “limbic capitalism,” the redirection of America’s productive energies into inducing and servicing addictions.

What stuck with me was the way you describe your addiction to work. I’ve been so used to hearing of depression as something that forces you to do absolutely nothing. But pushing my limits became my drug. It was essentially a form of masochism. 18 years old and I found myself working nonstop for 20 hours a day. I didn’t socialize. I major in computer engineering and spent my day in front of a laptop. I wear glasses now from staring at screens so much. Getting things done let me avoid taking care of myself. I was just “too busy.” 96% of the things you focused on relating to your struggles have caused me to think, “Oh my gosh, it’s not just me!” Frankly, you helped me realize working so hard was a side effect of my depression, a source of control, and not just something other people who didn’t know what was up admired me for.

They sit and stare and stare and sit Until they're hypnoti[z]ed by it, Until they're absolutely drunk With all that shocking ghastly junk. Oh yes, we know it keep them still, They don't climb out the window sill, They never fight or kick or punch, They leave you free to cook the lunch And wash the dishes in the sink- But did you ever stop to think, To wonder just exactly what This does to your beloved tot? It rots the senses in the head! It kills imagination dead! It clogs and clutters up the mind! It makes a child so dull and blind He can no longer understand A fantasy, a fairyland! His brain becomes as soft as cheese! His powers of thinking rust and freeze! He cannot think-he only sees! 'All right' you'll cry. 'All right' you'll say, 'But if we take the set away, What shall we do to entertain Our darling children? Please explain!' We'll answer this by asking you, 'How used they keep themselves contented Before this monster was invented?' Have you forgotten? Don't you know? We'll say it very loud and slow: They... used ... to... read! They'd read and read, And read and read, and then proceed To read some more, Great Scott! Gadzooks! One half their lives was reading books!... Oh books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall... ...They'll now begin to feel the need Of having something good to read. And once they start-oh boy, oh boy! You watch the slowly growing joy That fills their hearts. They'll grow so keen They'll wonder what they'd ever seen In that ridiculous machine, That nauseating, foul, unclean, Repulsive television screen! And later, each and every kid Will love you more for what you did...

I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them.

And the lights are everywhere. They are so pervasive in modern life we’ve stopped seeing them. In turning them off, it’s hard to know where to begin. There are house lights and garage lights, fluorescent lights and halogen lights. There are streetlights and stoplights, headlights, taillights, dashboard lights, and billboard lights. There are night-lights to stand sentinel against the dark of our rooms and hallways, and reading lights for feeding our addiction to words and images and information, even in the middle of the night. There are warning lights and safety lights, and the lights of our cell phones and televisions and computer screens. No wonder our larger towns and cities are so bright you can see them from space. Nor does that urban and suburban light stay put. It seeps into the nearby plains and hills and mountains, casting shadows from trees and telephone poles. It throws off the rhythms of insects and animals and confuses the migrations of birds.

The fearful began to instantly see the entire humanity of an individual in a cheeky, offensive tweet and were outraged; people were attacked and unfriended for backing the “wrong” candidate or having the “wrong” opinion or for simply stating the “wrong” belief. It was as if no one could differentiate between a living person and a string of words hastily typed out on a black sapphire screen. The culture at large seemed to encourage discourse but social media had become a trap, and what it really wanted to do was shut down the individual. What often activated my stress was that other people were always angry about everything, presenting themselves as enraged by opinions that I believed in and liked or thought were simply innocuous. My pushback against all of this forced me to confront a degraded fantasy of myself—an actor, as someone I never thought existed—and this, in turn, became a constant reminder of my failings. And what was worse: this anger could become addictive to the point where I just gave up and sat there exhausted, mute with stress. But ultimately silence and submission were what the machine wanted.

Maybe you can imagine this in your own life. We no longer look at the sun but at our phones to see what kind of time has passed. We don't look out of our cells but at our cell, flipping to a social media stream and scrolling through what our friends are doing. While we scroll, we develop a resentment that our lives are less fun and fulfilling than the lives of our friends. The here and now, the people who are around and present, pale in front of the manicured and curated versions of another person's life. We begin to wonder, like Evagrius, if we have lost the love of our friends, and we begin to believe that there is "none to comfort" us. So we fill our evenings with overeating, because it feels comforting, or binge-watching our favorite show, because we are so tired that we just need to "relax." We split our attention between the screen of the television and the screen of our phones. Indeed, one of the most effective ways to avoid the gnawing questions of meaning is by staying busy enough to avoid them. A constant flow of information and distraction turns the mind and the heart away from the abyss of asking why. Why do we worry about tomorrow? Why do we toil and reap? What is the treasure of great price that all our lives are working toward? When we do pause between activities, we try to fill the void. We forget that we are more than our work or the things that we produce. Our busyness represents a profound loss of freedom, and one that occurs through a gradual winnowing away of what it means to be human. We replace that it means to be a person with a shallowness of activity

The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.” This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts—“I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” —eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt. Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which often means with violence.

Have no anxiety about anything,' Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet. Or maybe it is more like telling a wino to lay off the booze or a compulsive gambler to stay away from the track. Is anxiety a disease or an addiction? Perhaps it is something of both. Partly, perhaps, because you can't help it, and partly because for some dark reason you choose not to help it, you torment yourself with detailed visions of the worst that can possibly happen. The nagging headache turns out to be a malignant brain tumor. When your teenage son fails to get off the plane you've gone to meet, you see his picture being tacked up in the post office among the missing and his disappearance never accounted for. As the latest mid-East crisis boils, you wait for the TV game show to be interrupted by a special bulletin to the effect that major cities all over the country are being evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear attack. If Woody Allen were to play your part on the screen, you would roll in the aisles with the rest of them, but you're not so much as cracking a smile at the screen inside your own head. Does the terrible fear of disaster conceal an even more terrible hankering for it? Do the accelerated pulse and the knot in the stomach mean that, beneath whatever their immediate cause, you are acting out some ancient and unresolved drama of childhood? Since the worst things that happen are apt to be the things you don't see coming, do you think there is a kind of magic whereby, if you only can see them coming, you will be able somehow to prevent them from happening? Who knows the answer? In addition to Novocain and indoor plumbing, one of the few advantages of living in the twentieth century is the existence of psychotherapists, and if you can locate a good one, maybe one day you will manage to dig up an answer that helps. But answer or no answer, the worst things will happen at last even so. 'All life is suffering' says the first and truest of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, by which he means that sorrow, loss, death await us all and everybody we love. Yet "the Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything," Paul writes, who was evidently in prison at the time and with good reason to be anxious about everything, 'but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.' He does not deny that the worst things will happen finally to all of us, as indeed he must have had a strong suspicion they were soon to happen to him. He does not try to minimize them. He does not try to explain them away as God's will or God's judgment or God's method of testing our spiritual fiber. He simply tells the Philippians that in spite of them—even in the thick of them—they are to keep in constant touch with the One who unimaginably transcends the worst things as he also unimaginably transcends the best. 'In everything,' Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come Hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that 'the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.' The worst things will surely happen no matter what—that is to be understood—but beyond all our power to understand, he writes, we will have peace both in heart and in mind. We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be "in Christ," as he puts it. Ultimately not even sorrow, loss, death can get at us there. That is the sense in which he dares say without risk of occasioning ironic laughter, "Have no anxiety about anything." Or, as he puts it a few lines earlier, 'Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say, Rejoice!

Pick one item, keep it in your hand then leave your house. Then “Quit to Title” and go back to the game again. Place the item anywhere and then go to your device’s home screen. Close the app. Now start it again. You will realize you have duplicated the item now!

Our world seems to be addicted to the easy way of things. Unfortunately, what seems easy at first almost always ends up causing pain, suffering, and loss. Why do I get fat and sick when I eat tasty junk food? Why must I perform painful exercise to stay healthy and in shape? How come I have to sacrifice so much of my time and money studying in order to get a good paying job? These are the types of questions that no school teaches us. The answer is simple; it doesn’t matter why. That’s just the way it is. If you want to breathe air, then you can’t lay on the bottom of a pond. If you desire wealth, you can’t sit in front of your television screen and expect it to find you. If you want to learn how to play a musical instrument, you must pick it up and spend thousands of hours practicing with it. Entitlement is a problem both inside and outside of the Game… all of our lives would be better if we stopped expecting the world to hand us it’s treasures simply because we asked for them…” Promotional message from “We Can Be Better” featuring Brandon Strayne

Not unlike alcoholism, the cycle of OCD continues in solitude and isolation … Even in therapy it never occurred to me to talk about plucking out my eyelashes and eyebrows. Not once did I bring it up – not once did it occur to me bring it up, the shame was so deep and ingrained. Fortunately, over the years alcoholism has gotten more and more screen time and does not carry quite the cloak of shame it once did. You won’t necessarily find us shouting it from the rooftops, but then again there are support groups in high schools these days. Hopefully OCD will one day find a similar degree of understanding in the general audience, because that understanding and dialogue are what we need to break not necessarily the cycle of repetitive behavior - because sometimes we can and sometimes we can’t - but to break the cycle of shame. Because I can tell you from experience . . . the shame is a killer.

Professor Peter Cohen, a friend of Bruce’s, writes that we should stop using the word “addiction” altogether and shift to a new word: “bonding.”28 Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively. One recovering heroin and crack addict on the Downtown Eastside, Dean Wilson, put it to me simply. “Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.

Federal law currently prohibits landlords from discriminating against prospective tenants who have had a felony conviction for drug use. Why? Because drug or alcohol abuse is considered a disability. According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): “An individual with a disability is any person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. The term physical or mental impairment may include, but is not limited to, conditions such as visual or hearing impairment, mobility impairment, HIV infection, mental retardation, drug addiction (except current illegal use of or addiction to drugs), or mental illness.”[ii]

…some of us had built whole careers - pointing out how unfair and whimsical and chaotic the entertainment business was, how it rarely rewarded the truly talented. None of us could see how it never rewarded the inert

The information on the page is scant, with most of the content restricted to the user’s friends. The only information visible confirms this Cameron Gail is studying chemistry at Oxford University.  Perplexed, I stare at the screen. On closer inspection I'm sure it's the same young man, but how does anyone go from being a student at one of the world's greatest universities to the life of a drug addict,

Jamie stared at the file open on her screen, at the names of his parents. Kevin and Margaret Hammond.  The address was in the good part of Brentwood. An expensive area.  You’d have to be well-off to live there. A picture was forming in her head. Hard-working parents neglect their son for their careers. He rebels, lashes out, resents the private schooling, the luxury of his life. Starts mixing with the wrong crowd. Wouldn’t mum and dad just hate it if I got a tattoo? If I went out with this girl? If I tried heroin.  She was gripping her phone hard, seeing it play out in her head.  She knew it was possible. Easy even. Her own father had been an addict her whole life and she’d not known until she was in her early teens. Until then, she thought her dad was superman. Catching bad guys by day, devoted father and husband by night. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The World has been replaced by the Screen. The more people look at the screen rather than at the world, the more they are in hyperreality. If you are glued to your smartphone – addicted to it – you have turned your back on the reality principle.

But the research doesn’t bear that out. In fact, there is not one credible research study that shows that a child exposed to more technology earlier in life has better educational outcomes than a tech-free kid; while there is some evidence that screen-exposed kids may have some increased pattern-recognition abilities, there just isn’t any research that shows that they become better students or better learners.

Meanwhile, China has identified Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) as its number-one health crisis, with more than 20 million Internet-addicted teens, and South Korea has opened 400 tech addiction rehab facilities and given every student, teacher and parent a handbook warning them of the potential dangers of screens and technology.

Behind every screen on your phone, there are literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting,

It’’s very hard to know who is going to commit an act of violence. But... prevention does not require prediction. It does require, however, that we increase overall access to brain health interventions. ... A... tiered system is already working in some schools. At the tier-one level, everyone should have access to brain health screenings and first aid, to conflict resolution programs, and to suicide prevention education. Peer intervention programs teach kids to seek help from trained adults for friends they’re worried about without fear of repercussion. A second tier of attention is trained on kids going through a hard time—a student grieving a lost parent, one who has suffered teasing or bullying, or those in known high-risk populations. For instance, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender kids are at disproportionate risk for bullying, so special efforts might be made to connect those kids to resources. The third level of intervention comes into play when a child has emerged as a particular concern. Perhaps he or she has an ongoing emotional disorder, has talked about suicide, or—as Dylan did— has turned in a paper with violent or disturbing subject matter. The student is then referred to a team of specially trained teachers and other professionals who will interview him or her, look at the student's social media and other evidence, and speak to friends, parents, local law enforcement, counselors, and teachers. The real beauty of these measures is not that they catch potential school shooters, but how effectively they help schools to identify teens struggling with all different kinds of issues: bullying, eating disorders, cutting, undiagnosed learning disorders, addiction, abuse at home, and partner violence — just to name a few. In rare cases, a team may discover that the student has made a concrete plan to hurt himself or others, at which point law enforcement may become involved. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, though, simply getting a kid help is enough.

Education psychologist and author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds, Dr. Jane Healy, spent years doing research into computer use in schools and, like Jobs, had expected to find that computers in the classroom would be wonderful for learning. Yet she found exactly the opposite and was dismayed by the lack of research indicating any benefit

The same indifference to content, the same obsessional and operational, performative and interminable aspects, also characterize the present-day use of computers: people no more think at a computer than they run when jogging. They have their brain function in the first activity much as they have their body run in the second. Here too the operation is virtually endless: a head-to-head confrontation with a computer has no more reason to come to an end than the physical effort that jogging demands. And the kind of hypnotic pleasure involved, the ecstatic absorption or resorption of energy - bodily energy in one case, cerebral in the other - is identical. On the one hand, the static electricity of skin and muscles - on the other, the static electricity of the screen. Jogging and working at a computer may be looked upon as drugs, as narcotics, to the extent that all drugs are directly governed by the dominant performance principle: they get us to take pleasure, get us to dream, get us to feel. Drugs are not artificial in the sense of inducing a secondary state distinct from a natural state of the body; they are artificial, however, in that they constitute a chemical prosthesis, a mental surgery of performance, a plastic surgery of perception. It is hardly surprising that the suspicion of systematic drug use hangs over sport today. Different forms of obeisance to the performance principle can easily set up house together. Not only muscles and nerves but also neurons and cells must be made to perform. (Even bacteria will soon have an operational role.) Throwing, running, swimming and jumping have had their day: the point now is to send a satellite called 'the body' into artificial orbit. The athlete's body has become both launcher and satellite; no longer governed by an individual will gauging the effort expended with a view to self-transcendence, it is controlled by an internal microcomputer working by calculation alone.

When I lose sight of her, when I reach for an iPhone first thing in the morning instead of her hand; When I look at screens before I see her face, I put the screens away, resuming my morning meditations on the miracle of waking up beside her.

I'd remained the subject of a TV boycott by the executives in the industry, though why they felt I was to be shrouded from the general public is still unclear. No doubt they felt that all sexual realities (other than exaggerated bust lines), should remain concealed, though they seem to have had no such hesitation about showing violence, murder, dope addiction, and infidelity on the home screens.

People tell you the computer is just a handier, more complex kind of typewriter. But that isn't true. The typewriter is an entirely external object. The page floats free, and so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank or written page with my eyes - something I cannot do with the screen. The computer is a prosthesis. I have a tactile, intersensory relation to it. I become, myself, an ectoplasm of the screen. And this, no doubt, explains, in this incubation of the virtual image and the brain, the malfunctions which afflict computers, and which are like the failings of one's own body. On the other hand, the fact that priority belongs to the network and not to individuals implies the possibility of hiding, of disappearing into the intangible space of the Virtual, so that you cannot be pinned down anywhere, which resolves all problems of identity, not to mention those of alterity. So, the attraction of all these virtual machines no doubt derives not so much from the thirst for information and knowledge as from the desire to disappear, and the possibility of dissolving oneself into a phantom conviviality. A kind of 'high' that takes the place of happiness. But virtuality comes close to happiness only because it surreptitiously removes all reference from it. It gives you everything, but it subtly deprives you of everything at the same time. The subject is, in a sense, realized to perfection, but when realized to perfection, it automatically becomes object, and panic sets in.

Super Mario Bros. hooks newcomers because there are no barriers to playing the game. You can know absolutely nothing about the Nintendo console and still enjoy yourself from the very first minute. There's no need to read motivation-sapping manuals or grind through educational tutorials before you begin. Instead, your avatar, Mario appears on the left-hand side of an almost empty screen. Because the screen is empty, you can push the Nintendo controller's buttons randomly and harmlessly, learning which ones make Mario jump and which ones make him move left and right. You can't move any further left, so you quickly learn to move right. And you aren't reading a guide that tells you which keys are which--instead, you're learning by doing, and enjoying the sense of mastery comes from acquiring knowledge through experience. The first few seconds of gameplay are brilliantly designed to simultaneously do two very difficult things: teach, and preserve the illusion that nothing is being taught at all.

There's a real waning of human contact and increasing alienation. The more friends you have on Facebook, the more alone you are. And the more people like you on Facebook, the less loveable you feel you are. Because the things people like you for on Facebook are simply images that you have posted on a screen. A very concocted and artificially constructed self-image. Now, people may like that, but that same question: would they really like me if they knew me for who I really am? It magnifies itself. So actually the media is terribly addictive and alienating, for the most part. It doesn't have to be that way, but that's how it functions.

That there is no consequence to massacring foreigners, our criminal rulers have long known, but they also know that when Pentagon guns are turned on Americans, a good portion of the world will break out in cheers, just as we've whooped and hollered as our tax-paid munitions splattered their loved ones. When blood darkens our streets, our victims will dance in theirs, no doubt, so why are our transfat asses still parked at this sad cul-de-sac as that day of reckoning looms? When you're broke, though, it's hard to move a mile, much less out of the country, so many of us will simply escape into our private universe, inside our various screens, and ignore, as best we can, an increasingly ugly reality. Moreover, some still believe there is no serious decline, while others that a unified fight is possible. For the most hopeless, there is always suicide. This month, a thirty-year-old Bensalem man and his fifty-nine-year-old mother attempted, it appears, a suicide pact by breathing toxic fumes from a borrowed generator. Only she died, however, so now he's charged with her murder. Neighbors said they had fallen on hard times and "had nothing left". Not that long ago, it was highly unusual to have young adults living with their parents, but not anymore. As this trend continues, many Americans will know exactly one house their whole lives, but at least they'll still have a home. Should you be homeless in greater Philadelphia, there is one place you can have a private bed and bathroom for a few hours, at minimal cost. Keep this information in mind, for you might need it. At Bensalem's Neshaminy Inn, you'll only have to cough up $34, including tax, if you check in after 7 a.m. and leave by 4 p.m. This will give you plenty of time to refresh yourself or even have sex, with or without a (paid) partner, many of whom routinely patrol the hallways. Dozing before dark will also spare you from the worst of the bedbugs, and don't even think of complaining about heroin addicts' bloodstains on the walls, no sheet on your bed or used condoms beneath it. You didn't pay much, OK?

While some blame our collective tech addiction on personal failings, like weak willpower, Harris points a finger at the software itself. That itch to glance at our phone is a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to get us scrolling as frequently as possible. The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” “You could say that it’s my responsibility” to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, “but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.” In short, we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us.

Freedom from Uncontrolled Thinking A big habit I’m working on is trying to turn off my “monkey mind.” When we’re children, we’re pretty blank slates. We live very much in the moment. We essentially just react to our environment through our instincts. We live in what I would call the “real world.” Puberty is the onset of desire—the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning. You start thinking a lot, building an identity and an ego to get what you want. If you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They’re constantly judging everything they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality. That can be good when you do long-range planning. It can be good when you solve problems. It’s good for us as survival-and-replication machines. I think it’s actually very bad for your happiness. To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7. I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard. [4] A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time. There is no endpoint to self-awareness and self-discovery. It’s a lifelong process you hopefully keep getting better and better at. There is no one meaningful answer, and no one is going to fully solve it unless you’re one of these enlightened characters. Maybe some of us will get there, but I’m not likely to, given how involved I am in the rat race. The best case is I’m a rat who might be able to look up at the clouds once in a while. I think just being aware you’re a rat in a race is about as far as most of us are going to get. [8] The modern struggle: Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising… Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.

Screen addiction alone hasn’t caused the time famine. Another trap driving us into time poverty is the cultural obsession with work and making money.

This good thing happened. For my brother. And when I found out, I was so fucking high... and I was happy, but it was a different kind of happy. A tinted happy. A happy with one of those fiberglass screen doors covering it. I’ll never hear his news for the first time again. I lost out on a full moment forever.

There’s no official checklist, but here’s what we suggest: Take email off your phone. Take all social media off your phone, transfer it to a desktop, and schedule set times to check it each day or, ideally, each week. Disable your web browser. I’m a bit lenient on this one since I hate surfing the web on my phone and use this only when people send me links. But this is typically a key facet of a dumbphone. Delete all notifications, including those for texts. I set my phone so I have to (1) unlock it and (2) click on the text message box to (3) even see if I have any text messages. This was a game changer. Ditch news apps or at least news alerts. They are the devil. Delete every single app you don’t need or that doesn’t make your life seriously easier. And keep all the wonder apps that do make life so much easier—maps, calculator, Alaska Airlines, etc. What Knapp put in one box and labeled “The Future.” Consolidate said apps into a few simple boxes so your home screen is free and clear. Finally, set your phone to grayscale mode. This does something neurobiologically that I’m not smart enough to explain, something to do with decreasing dopamine addiction. Google

she knew part of what made Facebook—and the internet, really—addicting was simultaneously indulging your own obsessions while mocking (deriding, denouncing even) the obsessions of others from the safety of your screen.

When Chase was a freshman in high school, I asked him to take a walk with me. As we made our way down our driveway and to the sidewalk, I turned to my bright, beautiful boy and said, “I make a lot of mistakes parenting you. But I only know they are mistakes in retrospect. I’ve never made a decision for you that I know, in real time, is wrong for you. Until now. I know I’m not doing right by you—letting you keep that phone in your life. I know that if I took it away, you’d be more content again. You’d be present. You might have less contact with all your peers, but you’d have more real connection with your friends. You’d probably start reading again, and you’d live inside that beautiful brain and heart of yours instead of the cyberworld. We’d waste less of our precious time together. “I know this. I know what I need to do for you, and I’m not doing it. I think it’s because all of your friends have phones and I don’t want you to have to be different. The ‘But everybody’s doing it’ reason. But then I think about how it’s not all that unusual for everybody to be doing something that we later find out is addictive and deadly. Like smoking; everybody was doing that a couple decades ago.” Chase was quiet for a while. We kept walking. Then he said, “I read this thing that said that kids are getting more depressed and stressed than ever because of phones. It also said we can’t talk to each other as well. I notice those things about myself sometimes lately. I also read that Ed Sheeran gave up his phone.” “Why do you imagine he did that?” “He said he wants to create things instead of looking at things other people create, and he wants to see the world through his own eyes instead of through a screen. I think I’d probably be happier without my phone. Sometimes I feel like I have to check it, like it controls me. It’s like a job I don’t want or get paid for or anything. It feels stressful sometimes.