I Am No Different From a Drug Addict

Watch someone on drugs and you can tell right away. The unsteady walk. The unfocused eyes. The strange expression. The mumbling that makes no sense. I look at people like that and my face twists in disbelief. How does anyone live like that? Doesn't everyone know drugs will wreck your life? But am I really any different from them?

Take a smoker. At set intervals, out comes a cigarette, in goes the flame, and nicotine floods the bloodstream. Only then does the calm return, only then can the day go on. Doesn't matter if it's a regular cigarette or a vape. Action, then relief the same loop, every time. It's the same structure as a drug. Only the intensity is different.

So does someone who doesn't smoke get to feel superior? No. Most of us are exactly the same. Look at the morning commute. On the bus, on the subway, over ninety-nine percent of people have their heads down, staring at a phone. Like it was scheduled in advance. Like zombies. Someone's watching shorts, someone's watching a drama, someone's scrolling a chat. The instant a notification lands, there's an urge to check it within seconds. It's not just the commute. It happens at meals. It happens at home.

At least a drug has substance. A chemical acting directly on the body. But YouTube, shorts, webtoons, social media they have no substance at all, and they still get you hooked. Isn't that more frightening? Something with no substance controlling something that does me.

I always thought I was careful about this kind of thing. Turns out I wasn't the exception. At some point I was being pulled under, slowly. I just hadn't noticed.

Marcus Aurelius once wrote something like this to himself:

"Take whatever is in front of you and break it down to what it actually is. This is the corpse of a fish. This is the corpse of a bird or a pig. That expensive Falernian wine is nothing but grape juice. That purple robe is wool dyed in shellfish blood. And sex is nothing more than the friction of a membrane, followed by a spurt of mucus."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Strip away the fancy wrapping, and you see how ridiculous it was to have poured your heart into it in the first place.

I decided to try this method myself.

Break down a single short-form video. What's actually inside it? A few seconds of stimulus, the anticipation of the next stimulus, a reflexive flick of the thumb. That's it. There's no purpose in it. Watching, by itself, cannot be a purpose.

Break down a cigarette too. Light it, inhale the smoke, nicotine travels through the blood to the brain, manufactures a moment of calm. Once that calm fades, light another one. That's the whole thing. Not pleasure just the same deficiency, filled and refilled.

Social media is no different. Turn on the screen, swipe with a thumb, glance for a second or two at someone's day or some jolt of content, swipe to the next one. Nothing left behind. Break it down and it's the same structure every time: lack, stimulus, brief relief, lack again.

There was a time, when I was young, when none of this existed at all. Back then I remember always being fully present in the moment. Now there are times I miss the past and dread the future. Missing the past means I'm not living well right now. Dreading the future means I'm not ready for what's coming.

I have reason. And I've left it unused for far too long. Doing something with no purpose, repeating it without even knowing why, is no different from being an animal. Working, coming home, resting a reasonable amount, enjoying a reasonable amount of leisure that, on its own, isn't the same as living well. If I'm not doing it because I chose to, but because I was pulled along by outside stimulus, then I'm nothing more than one sheep in a flock, being herded by a border collie.

I am not a sheep. I am a human being with reason. So I shouldn't be living like the flock.
I'm doing this for my own sake, but also because I'm a father. If I want to guide my child in the right direction, I need a clear mind myself first. If I want my child to look up to me, I have to change first.

I can't promise what will change, or whether this will even work. But I've decided to do it. Call it a digital detox. I'm going to keep a record here of the changes and the feelings that come with it.
This is what I've decided to do.

• I'm deleting webtoons, YouTube, and every short-form video app. None of them have a purpose. Watching is not one.
• I'm quitting smoking. I have to start by admitting I'm no different from an addict.
• I'm cutting out aimless web surfing. The laptop only opens when there's a clear purpose.

I believe our lives are made out of whatever we habitually think about. If I keep acting without purpose, day after day, I'm nothing more than an animal driven by the impulse of the moment. When the urge to smoke comes back, or the pull toward YouTube, social media, or any other meaningless habit returns, I intend to remind myself of exactly that I am not an animal, I am a human being and overcome it.

Going forward, I'm going to keep recording whatever emotional changes come out of this, and however my behavior ends up shifting.