Can't Just Stop

by Sharon Begley

  A character in the 2014 New York City production of Laura Eason’s play Sex with Strangers says upon learning there’s no cell phone service at a bed-and-breakfast, “People will think I’m dead.” People don’t like feeling dead. A 2010 study by the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda at the University of Maryland showed how profound an existential dread engulfs people cut off from the online world. The researchers asked two-hundred students at the school’s College Park campus to abstain from using their phones and computers (and all other media) for twenty-four hours, after which they were asked to describe their experiences. Those descriptions, in which the students said they felt disconnected and anxious that they were missing out on something or were out of the loop, were full of terms evoking compulsion. Frantically craving. Very anxious. Extremely antsy. Miserable. Jittery. Crazy.

  It’s worth reading some of them:

  “Texting and IM’ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort . . . the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”

  “I feel so disconnected from all the people who I think are calling me, but really they aren’t half the time.”

  “I got back from class around 5, frantically craving some technology . . . I couldn’t take it anymore being in my room . . . alone . . . with nothing to occupy my mind so I gave up.”

  That speaks to an itchiness on the part of twenty-first-century denizens, to our inability to be alone with our thoughts now that we and our telecom toys have become joined at the palm. Watch solitary diners at an outdoor cafe some summer afternoon. Time was, they would do some people watching, maybe some reading. Now they scroll through their inbox, check constantly for incoming texts, and click away desperately at website after website to be sure they’re on the right one.

  It’s not only being deprived of those variable-interval rewards that makes ditching their smartphone unthinkable for many people. Because it has become our main connection to other people and the world at large, the anxiety that comes from not being able to check it arises, too, from the feeling of being cut off, from missing something, as if the entire population (well, at least your friends and colleagues) is plugged in, connected, on top of things, and you aren’t. How does the online world manage to reach into our cortex and make us feel on edge, anxious, jumpy if we’re not connected? For starters, by extending its tentacles into virtually every aspect of life, from shopping to dating, from keeping in touch with friends to just plain feeling like you’re in the loop. “There are people who feel, If I’m not there, if I’m not on that site, I’m missing something—something about my friends, or my health, or anything else,” psychiatrist Dr. David Reiss, who practices in San Diego, told me. “It’s driven by anxiety over the risk of missing something if they don’t check a site every five minutes.” In other words, the Internet exploits FoMO, or Fear of Missing Out.

  Coined in the mid-2000s (its first entry on UrbanDictionary.com is from 2006), FoMO is defined as “pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent,” psychologists led by Andrew Przybylski and Valerie Gladwell of England’s University of Essex wrote in a 2013 paper in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. It “is characterized by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing.” FoMO studies in 2011 and 2012 had found that some three-quarters of the young adults polled agreed that they at least occasionally had “the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you’re missing out, that your peers are doing, in the know about, or in possession of more or something better than you.” For some people that desire is compulsive in the sense I’ve used it throughout this book: thinking you might miss an opportunity to meet up with friends (or simply know that others are meeting up), to know what “everyone” knows, or to be aware of someone’s status updates on Facebook triggers an itchy, twitchy, edgy anxiety. Being disconnected is synonymous with missing out.

  It certainly felt that way to Cynthia Thompson. In 2010, when she had her first child and started working from home, the London-based writer began finding the pull of the online world irresistible. “It was my way of finding out what’s happening,” she said. Feeling cut off from the world of work, she went online nearly around the clock, checking her phone to find out what she was missing and feeling uneasy if her phone ran out of battery power. “We’re so used to that instant culture, that an hour later, or two hours later, it would be too late. I do feel a bit anxious if I can’t get to the phone straightaway.” Her constant online checking stems from the omnipresent need to reassure herself that she hasn’t missed an emergency message from her son’s school or a work-related email.

  In their research, the University of Essex team had 1,031 volunteers aged eighteen to sixty-two from the United States, Britain, India, Australia, and Canada—all recruited online (confounding alert!)—answer how well thirty-two statements described their everyday experience. From that, they identified ten statements (which people answered on a five-point scale from “not at all true” about them to “extremely true”) that best picked up on individual differences in FoMO:

  1. I sometimes fear others have more rewarding experiences than me.

  2. I fear my friends have more rewarding experiences than me.

  3. I get worried when I find out my friends are having fun without me.

  4. I get anxious when I don’t know what my friends are up to.

  5. It is important that I understand my friends’ “in jokes.”

  6. Sometimes, I wonder if I spend too much time keeping up with what is going on.

  7. It bothers me when I miss an opportunity to meet up with friends.

  8. When I have a good time it is important for me to share the details online (e.g. updating status).

  9. When I miss out on a planned get-together it bothers me.

  10. When I go on vacation, I continue to keep tabs on what my friends are doing.

  They called it the Fear of Missing Out scale, and it was the first attempt to define the concept in a way that would allow researchers to measure it. Younger men had a greater FoMO than younger women, and younger people a greater FoMO than older ones. Then the researchers matched up FoMO scores on a standard assessment of how well people felt they were meeting three core psychological needs—relatedness, or feeling close or connected to others; autonomy, the notion that we are the authors of our own lives; and competence, the sense that we can exert an effect on and in the world. Conclusion: people who most felt they were falling short in these three were most likely to fear missing out. People high on the FoMO scale were also more likely to feel more unhappy and dissatisfied with life in general. And—the key finding—they were also most likely to use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other sites that allow us to not only proclaim that we exist but also to keep tabs on others and stay in the loop, assuaging at least temporarily the angst triggered by the thought that something is going on that we’re not a part of. “Fear of missing out,” the researchers concluded, “played a key and robust role in explaining social media engagement over and above” factors such as age, gender, or even psychological factors such as mood. “Those with low levels of satisfaction of the fundamental needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness tend towards higher levels of fear of missing out as do those with lower levels of general mood and overall life satisfaction.”

  And if we do miss out? If we’re not connected? “It struck me that part of the reason we always stay jacked in,” wrote New York Times media columnist David Carr in 2014, shortly before his untimely death the next year, “is that we want everyone—at the other end of the phone, on Facebook and Twitter, on the web, on email—to know that we are part of the now. If we look away, we worry we will disappear.” If existence is defined by an online presence, then not being online is not to exist. Human history knows no greater motivation for action than the existential one of raging against the dying of the light, of fighting mortality by leaving a bit
of ourselves behind through the children we bear or the works we create or the tiny nudge with which we try to bend ever-so-slightly the arc of human history. Indeed, reality television would not exist absent the deep and powerful human motivation to stand up and say, See, I exist! When we are not online, when we are not connected, when we miss out, we do not exist, and that causes the most unbearable and existential anxiety there is.

  It is not Internet use per se, nor specifically social media use, that is compulsive. Instead, the compulsion is to avoid feeling lonely, bored, or out of the loop. What many researchers (who, by the way, are usually decades older than the Internet users they study) treat as aberrant is instead a new way of living, playing, socializing, communicating, and working “for which researchers currently have only pathological interpretations,” as Daniel Kardefelt-Winther of the London School of Economics and Political Science put it in a 2014 paper in Computers in Human Behavior. “To suggest that this is a mental disorder seems to be a stretch.”

  Compulsive Internet use, then, is best understood as the result of nearly ubiquitous psychological traits. The need to feel connected, which existed long before Facebook was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, anxiety over “missing out,” responses to variable intermittent rewards, a primal drive to have our existence recognized by friends and strangers—all of these can drive us to go online compulsively. Like gaming, compulsive Internet use is better understood as, at worst, a coping strategy—and all of us need a little help coping occasionally. Just as in other compulsive behaviors, feeling driven by anxiety to constantly check the online world via smartphone or any other device is the result of normal, useful, adaptive, near-universal ways the mind works. That is how we should understand the digital compulsion: not as a pathology, but as the result of the online world’s ability to tap into something deep in the human psyche and make many of us digital casualties.

  * * *

  I. You can see Goldberg’s original post at http://www.urz.uni-heidelberg.de/Netzdienste/anleitung/wwwtips/8/addict.html.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Compulsions Past

  WHEN JOHN WAS BUT A teenager in the mid-sixth century A.D., he renounced the study of the arts and sciences—in which he was so proficient he earned the honorific “the Scholastic”—for a monastic life in the Sinai Desert, a bleak locale that for centuries had drawn holy men, reputed to be the place where God had given Moses the Ten Commandments. Fearing “the danger of dissipation and relaxation,”I John spurned the great monastery on the summit of Mount Sinai in favor of a modest hermitage on its slopes. There, he “assiduously read the holy scriptures and fathers, and was one of the most learned doctors of the church,” and was known for his self-denial, humility, obedience, and devout prayer.

  Devotion alone would not have sufficed to bring John to the attention of historians of mental disorders. That required Climax; or, the Ladder of Divine Ascent (whence he became known as John Climacus), which he began writing at age seventy-five, when he was the abbot of the monastery of Catherine on Mount Sinai. The rules by which souls might achieve Christian perfection happen to include the oldest known account of an OCD-like compulsion: being compelled to think blasphemous thoughts by an “atrocious foe” whose “unspeakable, unacceptable, and unthinkable words are not ours but rather those of the God-hating demon who fled from heaven.”

  Compulsions, religious or otherwise, presumably did not begin in the sixth century; it’s not hard to imagine a Neanderthal compulsively hoarding mastodon bones. But historical references in the centuries after John Climacus are so rare that the exhaustive 1995 tome A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origin and History of Psychiatric Disorders includes chapters tracing how societies have viewed every mental woe known to humankind—except compulsions. The reason, coauthor German Berrios of Cambridge University told me, was that “we could not find a sociologist who could deal with the theme in any depth.”

  That hampers what we might call behavioral archaeology, or studying what form compulsions took during different eras and how different societies viewed them. From the rare accounts of compulsions, it seems clear that until the late seventeenth century, compulsive thoughts and behaviors were seen as evidence of Satan’s hand and addressed by clergymen. There was no medical establishment to challenge the Church’s claim on diagnosing and treating religious compulsions. After medicine finally became a profession in the eighteenth century, on the infrequent occasions when a nonreligious compulsion was reported, it was often viewed as a charming eccentricity, an odd but innocuous point on the spectrum of human variation. Before extreme compulsions could be regarded as a neurological disorder, physicians had to recognize the brain as the organ of cognition and emotion, which didn’t happen until around 1800. But even after they understood compulsions as a manifestation of something gone awry in the brain, physicians fought bitterly—or as bitterly as proper Victorians and men of science could—over exactly what kind of disorder compulsions were. It was a fight whose echoes resound today in the continuing debate over where the line between madness and sanity lies, and over how an adaptive emotion such as anxiety can go off the rails.

  Enter the Devil

  Mental compulsions—thoughts one cannot stop thinking—beset any number of the devout, including many eventual saints, and were “ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan,” William James, the founder of American psychology, wrote in Varieties of Religious Experience. They beset ordinary folk, too, including an Englishwoman named Margery Kempe. Born around 1373, the illiterate Margery dictated the first autobiography in English. She had “many hours of foul thoughts and foul memories of lechery and all uncleanness,”II she wrote, in particular visions of “men’s members, and such other abominations.” She was unable to put thoughts of “bare members” out of her mind. Read what you like into the fact that Margery had fourteen children.

  The compulsion with the best-documented history is hoarding, with reports of pack rats going back centuries. Compulsive hoarding apparently existed in the early 1300s, and was notable enough for Dante to include in The Divine Comedy. With Virgil as his guide, Dante reaches the fourth circle of Hell, where those guilty of Greed are punished and two mobs pummel each other. In one are those who squandered possessions, while in the other are those who hoarded them. The “multitudes to every side of me” attack each other, Dante wrote, “wheeling weights”—enormous boulders representing the burden of possessions that they wasted or hoarded in life. “[E]ach turned around and, wheeling back those weights,/cried out: Why do you hoard? Why do you squander?”

  Behavioral archaeologists have little to go on until the Renaissance. Part of the intellectual revolution it launched took aim at traditional beliefs, including the idea that strange behaviors (there was no concept of mental illness) are caused by the devil or demonic possession. Renaissance thinkers invoked more naturalistic explanations for religious compulsions such as scrupulosity, the irresistible urge to engage in religious rituals or thoughts, accompanied by continual fear that one has not confessed adequately, performed religious rites correctly, or thought about God properly. Archbishop (and, later, Saint) Antoninus of Florence (1389–1459), for instance, described the “scrupulous conscience” as beset by indecision resulting from wild, baseless fears that one has not prayed or otherwise acted according to God’s wishes. As for its cause, Antoninus had one foot in pre-Renaissance thinking and one in the modern world: scrupulosity, he concluded, can be caused by either the devil or physical illness.

  Antoninus’s belief that scrupulosity sometimes had a physical cause, and not necessarily a satanic one, was one of the earliest documented realizations that maladies of thought and behavior were illnesses necessitating “medicine or other physical remedies,” as he put it. He recommended that those trying to escape religious compulsions receive God’s grace, study sacred Scripture, pray constantly, and put up a spirited resistance to the urge to pray or confess excessively. He also, however, cited approvingly the views of Jean Charlier de
Gerson, a fourteenth-century theologian and scholar, that extreme scrupulosity is like a pack of  “dogs who bark and snap at passers-by; the best way to deal with them is to ignore them and treat them with contempt”—an early example of the “just stop” approach to compulsions.

  Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Jesuits, described in his autobiography the scrupulosity from which he suffered, largely centered on an inability to stop thinking particular thoughts. “Even though the general confessions he had made at Montserrat had been quite carefully done and all in writing, . . . still at times it seemed to him that he had not confessed certain things,” he wrote. “This caused him much distress. . . . [H]e began to look for some spiritual men who could cure him of these scruples, but nothing helped him. . . . He persevered in his seven hours of prayer on his knees, getting up regularly at midnight, and in all the other exercises mentioned earlier. But in none of them did he find any cure for his scruples.”

  The first explicit account of a washing compulsion comes from physician Richard Napier (1559–1634), whose patient was “sorely tempted not to touch anything for fear that then she shall be tempted to wash her clothes, even upon her back,” he wrote. She was “tortured until that she be forced to wash her clothes, be them never so good and new. Will not suffer her husband, child, nor any of the household to have any new clothes until they wash them for fear the dust of them will fall upon her. Darest not to go to the church for treading on the ground, fearing lest any dust should fall upon them.”