by Cazzie David
It’s cliché to compare the addiction to drugs or nicotine, but the strength it sometimes takes to tear myself away from my phone feels comparable. You can at least enjoy the self-destructive experience of drugs or ripping a cigarette. The phone is an addiction you get zero pleasure from. I hate my phone like it’s a person made up of the same qualities: vapid, attention-seeking, narcissistic, codependent. I get so disappointed in myself for picking up my phone, it’s as if I just threw away years of sobriety. You stupid fucking cunt! I hate your guts! I can’t believe you! AN HOUR?! When I’m trying my absolute best to exit out of whatever app is sucking me in, I picture a version of myself on the phone finally freeing herself from its grip and tackling the version of myself that’s forcing me to keep checking every app on loop. Fortunately, the only people who know how much time you spend on your phone are you and the person whose Instagram stories you accidentally check after they’ve been up for only two seconds. But if they saw your name that fast, then they’re on it just as much, so you both have the same embarrassing little secret.
Our collective addiction seemingly comes from us turning to our phones to escape reality and our universal depression. It’s like the chicken and the egg. Which came first, modern depression or social media? I pick up my phone subconsciously hoping for something that will make me feel good, but that thing doesn’t exist. So I become depressed about whatever it is I saw on it, put it down, start feeling better, check it again, feel worse, want to die, do it again, try to go to sleep, am too affected to go to sleep, finally go to sleep, wake up, check it, rinse, repeat . . . repeat. The need for distraction from thinking about life or death is as old as time. People used to just go outside! And play with sticks! When you think about it, not much has changed since then, as I’m sure there’s an app where you can play with sticks. We’ve just evolved with how distracted we can possibly make ourselves, which is weird, considering the biggest distraction we’ve ever made is what we most need to be distracted from.
I’m fairly certain that in the future, they’ll talk about this era as an insane time where people had these things called phones. They would hold them constantly and look at them every second they weren’t doing anything else. They would sleep with them next to their heads at night. People would get in car accidents because they couldn’t stop looking at them and no one could form sentences and then they all went blind from staring into the evil screens all day and died off from radiation poisoning before society even fully collapsed. The end.
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In the midst of writing about this, I need a distraction. I go on my phone and end up checking Bella Hadid’s Instagram story—she’s in Europe and she’s wearing new glittery heels. I take solace in the fact that she was also obviously on her phone for a while in order to post multiple videos of her shoes. I refresh all of my apps one more time to see if anything new arose since I picked it up. Nothing there; didn’t miss anything. Except for another seven minutes of my life. The thought encourages me to put my phone down, but I secretly hope someone will text me so I have an excuse to pick it back up and not be alone with myself. My friend suddenly calls, and I grab for it. I put her on speaker so I can scroll while she talks, barely listening, like you do in class when you’re picking up only enough to be able repeat the last word the teacher said in case she calls on you to ask if you’ve been paying attention.
They say youth is wasted on the young. But how wasted is it now that we’ve spent the entirety of it on our phones? We’ll need a new adjective to describe it, it’s so far beyond wasted.
When I die, I imagine God playing my life back for me.
Now, let’s take a look at your life and the way you spent it . . .
Deceased me then gets comfortable on the couch, waiting to impress God with my good deeds. But those altruistic clips go by really fast, and then God’s projector shows a montage of twenty-five thousand days of me scrolling through my phone. It doesn’t even show the things I was looking at, it’s just embarrassing footage of me on my phone: in bed, brushing my teeth hunched over the sink, in lines, during class, at my mother’s future funeral.
The only thing scarier than spending my whole life checking my phone is not checking my phone. I have an irrational fear that I will miss something important, like an exposé written about me or my family that I need to see first so I can handle the situation. I have never felt the comfort of “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” I live every day thinking the racist tweets I never wrote will surface and that my nonexistent sex tape is about to drop.
Checking my phone is something I have to do but don’t want to do, like driving. Similarly, I get overly angry at people’s social media presences in a way that mirrors road rage. On a single drive, there are tons of people to be annoyed by on the road, and in your own hurry to get where you’re going, you’re oblivious to their problems and shortcomings and why they suck at driving on this particular day. Well, there are even more people to be annoyed by online, and they impede your vision and mental state more than any obnoxious Range Rover cutting in front of you ever could. You are SURROUNDED by people online, people none of us were ever meant to know about or see, and now you see them all the fucking time, achieving their dreams, as you live out your nightmare. Yes, some I seek out, but most are just there, waiting for me to hate them: the lifestyle bloggers talking about what was in the smoothie they made for breakfast, the “screenwriter” who posts stories of his final draft script open on his laptop, the European model who’s all bones and long dresses eating one bite of spaghetti (the bite is documented), the Botoxed mom who thinks she knows how Instagram humor works, the people who talk about their every emotion, the bikini influencers, the guy who looks like a Chainsmoker (the musical duo, not Jessica Lange playing an angry Southern mom), the performative activist, the notes application poet, the girl whisper-singing one sentence in her bedroom pretending it’s a full song, the famous person with a social media manager running their account, the famous person you wish had a social media manager running their account, the Facetuners who blur their faces until they look like impressionist paintings, the person who is “so lucky,” the actress who posts a photo of herself on set with the caption Meet Sky or Your New Best Friends, the nightclubber holding a massive bottle of Grey Goose. It’s like the Myers-Briggs personality types; there are only sixteen Instagram personalities. I don’t know any of their real-life struggles, and they’ve never done anything to me, but I will still metaphorically roll down my window and flip them off as I pass them by, usually in the form of an impassioned speech to my friends about why this person who I do not know is inauthentic. I can even become upset by some of my friends’ posts, because everyone on social media is a fraud trying to get someone to see a particular quality in them. Everyone must find a way to display every single one of their physical characteristics, and all aspects of their complex but appealing personalities. It’s all thirst traps next to ironic street signs to show hot and funny simultaneously, and childhood pics that scream I have always been good-looking. Selfies to prove she has the face of a little tiny baby on the body of a porn star. Our intentions are so obvious we might as well make them the captions—come to think of it, I’ve actually seen that done and it just comes off as wanting to be seen as quirky. And under no circumstances can you sync up a sensitive real-life personality with an authentic sensitive online persona without sounding like a whiny bitch: “My heart/watery eyes emoji.” The only things the internet accepts are beauty, sensationalism, and irony.
It’s impossible for a hypersensitive person, let alone a normal person, not to be affected by the people we’re subjected to online. Particularly those who are rewarded for their exhibitionism, consumerism, and stupidity with the accumulation of capital and, thus, power. They’re called influencers for a reason. Their existence hinges on their ability to infect others with their logic of superficiality. Unsurprisingly, these people also tend to be the most insensitive among us: narcissists, basics, an
d bullies.
Narcissists and basics succeed online because they are willing to subjugate their personalities to this technological social hegemony via groupthink and trend following. The internet is an enormous pressure cooker for conformity. Everyone uses the same memes, trendy filters, captions, and aesthetics; everyone makes the same TikToks and wears the same clothes. Innovation is basically dead these days. And if it’s not, you don’t know where a good idea came from. A thought-provoking concept that would normally take time, nurturing, and years of effort is copy-and-pasted into one post, zooming past the entire artistic process. Chances are what you are looking at is not the original but one of the many thousand copies that float the internet, and no one cares that they’re looking at an imitation of an imitation. We’re okay with that reality, accept it as such. Social media was able to normalize something as abnormal as changing the appearance of your face in less than two years. All it took was one hot girl posting one hot selfie where her lips looked huge, and boom, we woke up one day and everyone had lip injections. That girl was an innovator herself! So sad. We don’t even know who she was. (It’s Kylie Jenner.)
Bullies are particularly well positioned to succeed in this era, as they are in all periods of human history, because they prioritize their own success and survival above any moral imperatives, and now they can use the herd-like nature of social media to their advantage, ganging up on their victims by the thousands, if not millions. The bullies of the internet strike quickly and with massive swords, bringing “receipts” to their loyal army of minions and leading them to destroy their enemies with unfollows or complete cancellations.
Everyone has one story, if not many, of being bullied when they were younger, even the insensies. You never forget the name of the person, or their face, or the awful thing they said to you. Getting insulted is for life, like a tattoo. Middle school was a hell for every one of us, and luckily the internet has made it so we can feel exactly how we did then every day, forever.
When I was in seventh grade and people in tech were still figuring out the most effective way for everyone to cyberbully each other, we had this app on Facebook called Honesty Box. On it, you could anonymously write anything to anyone you wanted. It was a psychotic feature that our susceptible generation was somehow allowed to have. Someone once wrote to me that I looked like Olive Oyl from Popeye. I looked Olive Oyl up, and it stunned me how accurate this was. It has stuck with me ever since, to the point where it’s still the first thing I make sure I don’t look like before posting a photo.
A few years later, Honesty Box was replaced with Formspring, a website where, if you decided to take part, people could post anonymous questions to you. Instead of it being private among you, the anonymous cyberbully, and your memory, like Honesty Box was, Formspring questions and answers were placed on a public wall, cataloged so everyone could see all of the horrible things people wanted to ask or tell you. Someone was kind enough to write on my wall that my boyfriend at the time cheated on me. If you’re reading this, I guess thanks for telling me?
Today, we consistently hear offensive and unwanted personal judgments from strangers, but they are no longer anonymous. People don’t need anonymity because no one gives a shit about anything anymore. And they don’t need to. Making heinous comments on the internet is all in the line of duty for the dopamine rush. It’s like cheating on your girlfriend or quitting a bad job. You know there’s a risk, but the reward could be worth it. And as long as your comments fall within the realm of popular opinion, the risk is minimized, and the reward is maximized.
The people who chose to have Formspring were, in essence, asking for criticism, just by virtue of having it. But even the most sensitive among us can’t opt out of social media (without sacrificing socialization). There’s no other way to prove you exist. Truthfully, though, everyone hates social media. Everyone complains about it, everyone thinks they get bullied on it, and everyone participates in it. The internet makes us all feel like pieces of garbage floating in a virtual garbage world. It is a place that confirms our collective lack of integrity, sedates our critical mind, and weakens our ability to make good art because making something meaningful requires time and standing against mass culture.
When it first arose, social media seemed like a path to a better world; freedom of speech could spread to all parts of the globe, we could create movements that will change the world (this was true), and no one will use it to sway an election, we naively thought. But as it turns out, it was just the nail in the coffin of decency, democracy, and innovation. The powers that be have always wanted human beings to think like sheep, to be unfazed by or blind to destruction and evil so others can continue to accumulate even more power and money while destroying the planet and entrenching people in poverty. The internet exacerbates the worst instincts of the dominant people in society and makes mindless drones out of the submissives, with the convenient result that we may all be too red-eyed and hunchbacked to face up to the great injustices that are happening all around us.
The only alternative is to be a real radical, which entails understanding the game, being unwilling to play the game, and condemning the game. It takes an extremely strong-willed person to do that, which I clearly am not. No one wants to be alone. We all want a community, which is how our virtual one got so big in the first place. Social media won’t have a true challenger until a counterculture emerges, one where productive and fruitful people can join and belong. The movement will of course need a leader. A new dictatorship of sorts, led by a benevolent ruler, a self-care tyrant who takes social media away and leaves us alone with ourselves.
Any volunteers? Because I’m too busy checking my phone.
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Ex Dysmorphia (Insecurity When You’re the Ex-Girlfriend)
Cazzie’s self-esteem is extremely low, and she is confused and uncertain about her identity. She is unusually introspective and tends to focus on her negative qualities, which may precipitate guilty rumination and contribute to depression.
—Excerpt from neuropsychological evaluation of Cazzie David, 2007
The insecurity you experience when an ex-boyfriend or long-term fling is with someone new feels kind of like taking acid. Everything you once felt about yourself has shifted. Your arms suddenly look different, your eyes, your hair, your nose, your jokes, your body, your voice, your day-to-day life, your family, your skin. Every detail you find out about this new girl changes everything you once knew about yourself. The things you liked about yourself you now question, and the things you thought you hated in other people you’re no longer sure you do. You acquire a newfound nonchemical imbalance where you no longer know who you are or what is what.
When a guy I had been seeing on and off for years—one of those situations where you think the timing hasn’t been right because it’s a “long game” that will maybe end in marriage—got a new girlfriend, I began to tell myself the same tale I always do when I become obsessively insecure. The story goes like this: “This person prefers every quality this girl has over the ones you have, or he would be with you and not her.” And why wouldn’t I think that? He is with her and not me! People will say, “Cazzie, you can’t compare yourself to other people!!!” To which I say: “Watch me.” And then watch how fucking insane I am when I do it. I will compare every follicle on our heads until we both become unrecognizable beings defined only by our extreme polarities. She is put on a pedestal, exactly where I imagine she is in his mind, except the pedestal in my mind is much higher than it is in his. And where am I now, the girl he used to be with? Well, I’m nowhere in his mind, which is still a better place to be than where I am now in my own mind: morphed into a scary, decaying Disney witch, a caricature with bulging eyes, a giant nose, and huge ears like a Nazi propaganda image. Until something or someone pulls me out of it, I possess the face of Dobby and the personality of Squidward. Or the face of Squidward and the personality of Dobby.
The girl my pseudo ex is now with is blond; obviously, I reasoned,
this was something he must have always preferred. He was just trying out dark hair, seeing if he could grow to appreciate it. I generally liked my hair, at least when it was done—until I saw hers. This girl’s hair is like a Pantene commercial. When she throws her hair up in an effortless bun, it looks like wedding-hair inspiration on Pinterest. I asked myself, Would you rather be in a pitch-black room or on a sunny island? As that is the stark difference between our hair and, most likely, our personalities.
This girl emanates brightness and joy. On her birthday, her friends write things like You are a ray of sunshine. Every time you enter a room it gets brighter. When I enter a room, people feel like a negative spirit is lingering, but then they see it’s me and they’re like, “Oh, thank God, it’s just Cazzie.” I’m pretty sure people sage their homes after I leave.
Another aspect of her sunshine-y energy is her perfect smile. Her smile makes others smile—except for me; it definitely does not make me smile. You can tell from her smile that she’s silly and cute and that he once said to her, “You know what my favorite thing about you is?”
“What?” she said, smiling.