the 'many escape rooms' theory of why our smartphones suck the big one

a confession that things have also been v hard + a pretty elaborate escape room metaphor // S1E8

I have been sick with guilt since Tuesday after posting this essay about the good time friday night dance party I had with with my family — a night I attributed, perhaps correctly, to my relative disconnection from the internet industrial complex.

The guilt has been there for three reasons:

One - The guilt is always there. Much like the rather strong stink of garlic fish that lingers in your home after you cook up some garlic fish, it stays there it doesn't go away and when you think it has it's simply become part of your house's smell.

Two - I fear I’ve painted too rosy a picture of it all. I hate when anyone paints a rosy picture. It's like, get real brother have you seen how many paintings there are of roses? Enough is, by definition, enough.

Three - I've sucked at staying offline since Tuesday. This, I fear, makes me a hypocrite of the worst order. Here by the way that order:

• not that bad: hippo crits - ppl who review games and desidara relating to the hungry hungry hippo extended universe

• pretty bad: Hippocrats - doctors and whoever else signs the hippocratic oath pledge vowing not to be an asshole when doing doctor stuff and then they end up being an asshole. yuck.

• awful scum of the earth: hypocrite who says one thing to a readership of what looks to be 9-10 million sweet innocent souls while, in his private den of iniquity, continuing to do the very things he rages against in the public sphere.

That's me. I'm the scum that pond scum looks at and goes, 'yuck.'

(if this were a legal the scum of the earth bit would be Section 1.3.3)

Your honor, I’m a bad boy

I've broken the rules probably fifteen times in the last few hours? Twenty? Sitting with Wilder as each of his cars gets stuck and requires assistance from the tow truck that is my hand, I quickly check my phone and get a text from Chris saying "hey are you going to Mike's thing?" which makes me go 'wait what thing is Mike having did I not get invited why does no one invite me to stuff anymore?' until I remember that the thing Chris is talking about is an improv show Mike is directing that i DID get invited to but probably can't go because the whole family including myself is sick but maybe I should try to rally and go since I feel like I can't really make it out to much these days as a parent which I'm sure Mike feels and hates me for but I feel so sick but who cares Michael Jordan won game 6 of the nba finals with a really bad case of the flu and I can't go to an improv show while sick no wonder Mike and Chris hate me so much.

Mind you, I have not even started to compose a response to Chris, nor will I. That entire roller coaster happens before I bring on the “time to compose a message’ wing of my brain.

So I don't respond to that message, but but I also am definitely not fully with Wilder either. How could I be?

the impossibility of staying present

It's wild that we are expected to engage in real life while also building and going on these roller coasters of anxiety that our brains create for every single thing that we see on the phone.

It's like I see that text message and construct a highly personal escape room experience that I have to get my way out of but I can't because I'm also still living life and the hot wheels car with a football helmet as its base needs a tow asap dada.

---

So I rescue the helmet car but I'm still stuck in that escape room, which makes me feel unsettled and wrong; bad in a vague sort of way that you'd do anything to get away from and hey whaddya know, a distraction couldn't hurt, so - were I not in the 'no internet' thing right now, I'd most certainly grab the phone and scroll and meander my way into several other escape rooms that'd all would build on each other like bread at a club sandwich competition until my anxiety reached overload and I snapped at something small and meaningless here in the real world that had nothing to do with anything and now fuck.

Last time, I talked about finite and infinite games. As a refresher:

THERE ARE at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite.

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

Playing with my son in the absence of the information superhighway's endless escape rooms allowed me, I argued, the infinite game. Here’s more from the book:

If a finite game is to be won by someone it must come to a definitive end. It will come to an end when someone has won.

We know that someone has won the game when all the players have agreed who among them is the winner…if the players do not agree on a winner, the game has not come to a decisive conclusion and the players have not satisfied the original purpose of playing.

The internet sure feels like a shitty finite game, except it does not have a definitive end…it just…keeps..going.

Does that make it an infinite game?

No, because we are all playing to win. To rank highest. To achieve and dominate and prove ourselves on the field of play.

So which is the internet - a finite or infinite game? Neither. It's more like an infinite non-game masquerading as one.

So what can be done? Well, getting off of it all entirely would be the right move, but that feels impossible.

Another little nibble from the infinite games book explains why:

To account for the large gap between the actual freedom of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle, we can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves.

Some self-veiling is present in all finite games.

Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them.

This is key: playing a game means tricking yourself into believing that the game is not a game but, in fact, reality.

If you're playing 2 on 2 basketball with your mid-30s friends and everyone's going really hard even though all four backs involved in play are hurting a lot actually, it is because each player believe the game to not be a game but life itself. In order to compete, we must forget we are competing.

The internet does a great job at this by making us forget that we have any choice to play. We forget that we can leave, and so we complain about the hellsites and doomscrolls as if there's nothing to do but keep playing since the game is no longer a game but…life.

Here’s the real kicker — these games are invisible. No one knows we’re playing games of social ranking on the internets.

So the game never ends, we can’t win, and no one knows we’re playing. Sick.

This means we’re all walking around trying to solve these escape rooms while pretending like we’re not.

There you are, sitting with your family enjoying some toaster strudels because why not those suckers are good, but then all of a sudden you freak out over not getting enough of that very white cream filling packet thingy.

Is that because you didn't get enough of that much too white creamy stuff? No. It's because you're still stuck in like 15 different overlapping escape rooms from which you cannot escape.

But since you can't see em, you get mad at yourself for not being able to handle a simple real life situation that could be solved by going to the box of toaster strudels and grabbing another one of the just honestly way too white looking cream filling stuff.

So you hate yourself a bit more which, what's this, changes the field of play in each and every escape room you’re already in since each of those escape rooms is, itself, about your self worth.

smug ass dough boy

bad

This is, as we say in the army, is a big ol' slice of Really Awful Situation Actually (RASA).

But - and here's the good news folks in the back I see you on your phones put those away please that's literally what we're talking about - all you need on that piece of RASA bread is a hunk of tabooleh by which I mean Tabula by which I mean Tabula Rasa.

A blank slate.

intermission

I didn't see that coming either. Take a break if you need, check in with your family etc.

end intermission

oasOk we're back.

A tabula rasa happens when you give your life the ol' etch-a-sketch style shake that clears the board. That restarts the game.

But there is no end to our internet games and thus there is no etch-a-sketch to shake.

Last night it rained. And when it rains, it puddles. And when it puddles, Wilder stomps around in said puddles with his rainboots, so that's what we were doing when he said "watch this" and did a huge jump into the puddle.

I then said "watch this" and did a big splunk right into the puddle.

He, having really not even seen my move - making me doubt that he'd ever been keeping up his end of the 'watch this' promise generally - said 'watch this' and started running laps through the puddle.

This continued for a while, but, unlike last time, I wasn’t really able to lose myself in the dance. I felt bored. Jonesing for something else, some other bigger better hit of the dopamine that I'd been getting in steady drips prior to our puddle adventure.

I acknowledged this and tried to focus on the ‘watch this’ game but I couldn't. I was stuck in not just the escape rooms of the past but in my cravings for future escape rooms that hadn’t yet been created.

in conclusion

Recalling this to Lauren later, I said that I felt like I was failing the challenge entirely.

"It's just an experiment," she said.

I have lessened my use, I told her, probably by like 70-80%.

"That's…amazing," she said, reminding me that I do not ever allow myself to win the simple, self-created games of my own mindorama.

Because - ah here we go - THAT itself is a big ol' game I love to play. It's called "No matter what happens, you lose." The rules are simple and are right there in the title of the game.

This game, btw, sucks. It is an escape room that cannot be escaped, and I seem to have tricked myself into believing I have to play.

But I don't. None of us do.

We can stop. Leave. But will we?

Will I?

I don't know.

Maybe that’s the big takeaway for everyone’s goody bags today: remember that you don’t have to play. You can shake the etch-a-sketch whenever you want even though it probably feels like you can’t.

But you can, maybe, sometimes, wake yourself up from the dream of needing to play.

Good job. Now go get yourself a pop tart cuz fuck toaster strudels and those white goo packets they made us use.

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Coming soon: On the rec of Nate the patron saint of this entire project, I reached out to The Light Phone, which is like a cool dumb phone, told them what I was doing, and asked if they’d send me a phone to use as an experiment which I’d then write about in BAT.

Much to my chagrise, they said yes! So maybe The Light Phone will solve all my problems lol.

More soon.

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   1. S1E1 - I got a perfect score on my SAT and all I got was this lousy feeling of never being enough

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   3. AND a link to my ‘offline logs’ that I’ve been keeping since starting this offline experiment.

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Comments

1. For everyone trying to also get offline, how’s it going ? Any highs, lows, or mids to share??

2. Does this infinite game shit make sense? I sometimes worry its just a bunch of malarkay nonsense?

3. Thoughts and responses to my list of different hypocrites ? Any missing?

5. I love hearing from people who have made it out on the other side of all this mess - if that’s you, plz share tales from your life of peace. Are you nirvana?

6. Toaster strudels v pop tarts? What other snacks top the pantheon of your