i went to the woods and realized the internet is insane

you don't know what you've got till it's gone fishin'

Hello from the woods. I’ve been here for sixteen hours (16), eight (8) of which I’ve spent sleeping.

None- and nevertheless, I am confidently ready to state the following as True:

The internet is insane.

Madness, chaos, a hyper virtual insanity that, like all insanities, quickly becomes reality.

By becoming the norm, it makes everything else, like being out in the woods, feel…itchy.

Where’s my internet, you ask.

Where’s my good time casino?

the brain is a pr machine

I used to smoke a ton of weed. It’d make me a little slower, dumber, forgetful, what-have-you.

But my brain and mind refused to accept those things as true.

Instead all behaviors would get justified as creative or funny or ‘how real artists are, like why are we so dead set on being productive all the time’ etc.

My brain was the PR department of my being. Rather than spending time making good decisions, it worked tirelessly to justify the decisions I’d already made.

this is heady but worth it, so stay with me

One example of “brain as PR team” is found in people who have split brain injuries / had their corpus callosum surgically cut to treat epilepsy.

For these people, the two hemispheres of the brain can’t communicate. Most of the time, this is fine - the left hemisphere (in charge of language) and the right hemisphere (in charge of spatial awareness), do their thing and all is well.

But sometimes, shit gets weird.

In an absolutely classic experiment, these two guys Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga showed a split-brain patient two images simultaneously:

• Chicken claw (to left hemisphere)

• Snow scene (to right hemisphere)

They then asked the person to select related items with each hand

• The left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) chose the snow shovel

• The right hand (controlled by the left brain) chose the chicken

Makes sense so far.

But then they ask the person to explain why they picked each one and the patient goes, "Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed."

Simple?? A ShOvEl To ClEaN oUt ThE cHiCkEn ShEd???

You, my friend, are a liar.

Each hemisphere picks the appropriate image, but only the left hemisphere, which controls language, can tell us why.

So when the left hemisphere, which didn’t ‘see’ the snow scene, is asked to justify why both images were picked, it makes up a big time, logical sounding lie!!

That’s the PR move. The brain doesn’t say, “i have no fucking idea.” It just says - with total confidence - here’s the reason.

Sure, this is a split brain thing, but the cold hearted killer in our brain who just makes shit up without skipping a beat, he’s always there.

And he does it all the time, making shit up to justify our own actions and to justify the actions done unto us.

So when we find ourselves in the mess that is the internet, there must be a reason, our brain says. Why else would we be here?

Or as the queen herself JD Joan Didion once said, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

But sometimes the stories suck! And keep us stuck.

Stuck in the suck, left unawares.

Being online means forgetting we are online

I re-entered the world on Sunday and, with the gift of some time away from the machine, decided to Change Everything.

I saw the brief window of time away as a rare opportunity to do things differently, and so I created some systems and rules for myself:

• no checking email as soon as I wake up

• no having Slack open all day

• no checking Substack numbers like at all

And ya know what, Monday went pretty well! I’d created enough distance from my ‘horny for the casino’ mind that I could resist.

Rather than just being online in all of the places all of the time, I made conscious decisions to go where I needed to go. I even wrote ideas down on an envelope instead of skeeting them directly into the feeds:

You don’t know what you got till it’s gone fishin’ IS a bonafide banger, but that’s ok, it can wait.

Then things fell apart

I had to visit the LinkedIn casino to reschedule a meeting, but by the time the site loaded and the personalized Times Square of notifications and posts hit, I’d forgotten why I was there.

No way I’d admit that to myself though, so I just started clicking shiny red dots for a while until I’d snap out of it, exit the page, and, what’s this? Find myself right back there, mere seconds later.

I was lost and, more importantly, I’d forgotten that I was lost.

So, ipso and dare I say facto, I was found. I had to be. This, as Dr. David Byrne of the Talking Heads once said, must be the place. Might as well stay a while and prove to myself this makes sense.

Until I start getting itchy and go to one of my other casinos like insta or substack or, my personal favorite, the All Mail folder in gmail.

God I love that place. I just scroll and scroll and scroll, like a guy on the beach with a metal detector in short shorts, hunting for treasure.

Maybe the filter’s made a mistake. Maybe there’s an email here that’ll change it all.

It’s fun!

It’s sick.

It makes a grown man wanna hurl.

nice try internet. I almost took a photo of the all mail folder but then I didn’t.

what is this, 2023?

Talking about all this…is a little gauche, no?

Banal?

Cliche?

Like yea dude, we know, the internet is bad and the companies got us good, aaaand? What’s next, you’re gonna ditch your smart phone and write about it?

The casinos are very good at commodifying all attempts to leave their grasp.

There is no escape, except of course the great newsletter

SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB

that’s run by good friend of the BAT

Seth Werkheiser

. And so many other places, like

Naive Weekly

, Sublime, Web Curios,

Metalabel

, and really a billion other places (maybe I’ll make a list soon).

But when we forget that those things exist, we’re stuck AND justifying our own stuckness as something we wanted, actually.

right now

It’s Tuesday morning, 4am. I’ve been up most of the night sick and full of phlegm. Probably withdrawal from the internet.

Yesterday was a good day, mostly. I did end up seeing the Substack numbers, and spent way too much time dissecting them, but I spent so much less time on the bad sites and more time with myself.

I texted a friend the Norm McDonald “Mildred” clip from Dirty Work.

As a great man once wrote on an envelope:

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone fishin’.

That’s it! When we went camping, we went fishing.

Ok we didn’t fish but other people were fishing.

Also we were glamping.

BUT with a little distance from the casino strip, I did know what I had: a great little life with a great family, friends who love me, people who like to read what I write, and a notebook to write my little ideas down. I wrote down a bunch of ideas including the origin of this very essay.

Now, I’m back. In the land of casinos and beer, money, career.

I’ll stay vigilant, my brain says. It’s so simple, it says.

Something has changed though. I remembered there’s another way:

There is an escape.
Gauche but true.
Nature.
It’s good for you.

Wanna wake up from the casino dream AND go from "I should be writing" to "I wrote today"????

Then boy have I got the BATCAVE for you.

The BATCAVE is a little ol place where, we can get together. BATCAVE baby.

No seriously it’s the new thing I’m doing for paid subscribers and includes:

🦇 Two monthly live video calls with mini-classes and QnQs (no answers here)

🦇 Four monthly 2-hour co-writing sessions

🦇 Private subscriber chat and community

That’s six live things a month!!!

All for $8/month or $70/year.

The first cowriting session is tomorrow (Wed) at 12p EST

Would love to see you there. Also I’ll send a recording.

Comments etc.

1. What’s your relationship with ‘the web’ these days? Casino? Something else?

2. Which casino is the worst for you? Which is the best?

3. What’s your “All mail” equivalent - that one seductress too tempting to resist?

4. When was the last time you escaped the casino?

6. Is there a part of the internet that still feels good?

7. How are you?

9. How are you really?