Tech Made Me Sick, But It Won’t Make Me Well
The worst part about depression is how quietly it arrives. You don’t want to admit it’s there, not really, not until it’s too late to pretend. I spent months telling myself I was just going through something, riding out a low phase, nothing permanent. But somewhere along the way the low became the baseline and I stopped even recognizing it as low anymore.
So I looked for solutions in the most obvious place: the internet. This was stupid. I read somewhere that social media was killing people’s minds, that constant connectivity was eating us alive, that everyone glued to their phones was fundamentally isolated. It made sense. I had my phone in my hand constantly. I was on Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, all of it. And I felt terrible. The connection between those two things seemed obvious.
I started deleting things. Facebook first. Then WhatsApp because I didn’t want to keep track of four different chat apps. Then my gaming apps because I was too old for that shit anyway. I told myself this was the move, the thing that would fix it. Remove the digital noise and the real me would emerge from underneath. I sat in front of a mostly empty phone and felt certain this was when things would turn around.
Instead I just got lonely. The apps disappeared but the feeling didn’t. So I kept looking online for the answer—in Reddit threads about digital minimalism, in blog posts about reclaiming your attention, in YouTube videos about people who quit the internet entirely. Somewhere in there had to be the magic trick. Some other person who’d figured out what I was missing.
The whole thing was absurd and I knew it while I was doing it. I’d delete Facebook and reinstall it three days later at midnight. I’d organize my music collection obsessively, telling myself that structure was the answer. I’d spend hours reading about privacy settings and mental health and productivity hacks, thinking if I could just find the right system, the right app to remove or the right app to add, something would click into place. The technology had made me broken, so technology had to be the thing that fixed me.
But nothing was getting better. And gradually it dawned on me—the kind of dawn that takes forever because you’re trying so hard not to see it—that I was looking for a cure in the one place it couldn’t exist. The internet didn’t give me depression. It just gave me ten thousand ways to avoid dealing with the depression I already had. I was wasting hours searching for answers I already knew. The real fix wasn’t hiding in some forum or recovery blog or life-hack video. It was sitting in an office somewhere, waiting for me to make an appointment I hadn’t made and probably wasn’t going to make.
I knew that. I knew it the whole time. And knowing it while continuing to do the opposite—continue reading, continue deleting, continue searching—that’s the real trick depression plays. It knows exactly what you’re supposed to do and it lets you know that you know it, and then it convinces you that doing nothing is somehow smarter than that. At least I’m not being a cliché about it, I told myself. At least I’m not broadcasting my pain to strangers on the internet, right? I’m just quietly, privately destroying myself in a slightly different way.