What's the one thing we all hate but can't stop doing?

achieving ourselves to death within the social media industrial complex

This is episode 6 of Both Are True’s Season One: I’m (not??) The Best — multi-month deep dive into the ideas of competition, comparison, testing and achievement.

Here’s a lil riddle: what’s the one thing that we all hate but can’t stop doing?

No not taxes or brushing our teeth or using a random tub of chapstick we found on the floor of an airbnb in the mountains.

Social media.

No one I know likes it and yet everyone I know is on it.

Ugh fine let’s just get the chapstick thing out of the way: I got home and said hi to Lauren and she said Alex why are your lips red and I showed her the chapstick I found at the Airbnb and she said that’s a tinted chapstick and I said oh and she said that’s disgusting and I said oh and she said i’m not trying to shame you wear that if you want but let’s sanitize it first.

And I said no way what we need to sanitize is society’s voluntary and self-inflicted lobotomy of the soul. No clue game needed: it was us, in our own houses, and the murder weapon? Death by a thousand swipes.

I haven’t seen Lauren since.

Social media

Forgive me father for I have scrolled.

No one looks cool scrolling through their phone. If a little alien named Rally came to the USA Earth and saw an idiot guy named Matt staring at his phone, the alien would think ‘oh I wonder what cool stuff is on that device? Let me hover in his direction (I am invisible do not worry) and see what is up.’

Rally would see Matt…checking his emails? Scrolling through a feed of people from high school? Seeing who is Thrilled to share the news of a new…job?

These are not cool things. The things we do on the phone are not cool things.

Smart phones are the cigarettes of today. We smoke and we get sick and we know we’re getting sick because we say ‘I hate how it makes me feel’ but we can’t stop.

I genuinely believe future generations will look back at photos of us and say 'I can’t believe they were just always on their phones - like, didn’t they know how bad they were for their brains?’

Yes we knew.

Quick Qaveat: This is not a rant against the internet¹.

Worse than cigs

A group of ravens is called an unkindness.

A group of trains is called a consist.

A group of people all on their phones?

A group of people on their phones is an opium den.

And like most drugs, they almost immediately lose their luster leaving you jonesing in a default mode of Anxious and Afraid.

From this anxiety comes a need to produce. Create. Justify one’s worth and win the game that I am, it would appear, losing big time.

When I wake up, I am worthless, but if I wake up and make a video on tiktok about the time I farted so much it made the air purifier's Red Alert alarm go on because of how bad the air was, then I am worthwhile.

Worthwhile, but…only for a little while, because there is ever more to do. That's according to philosopher Byung-Chul Hahn, who argues that we are living in what he calls an Achievement Society. 

For most of history we have lived in various types of societies managed discipline. Here’s a summary of Hahn’s idea:

Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.

No one needs to make us do shit because we’re busy making ourselves do it. And if you don’t pull it off, well, that’s your fault.

Worst thing you could do is leave the game. Best you stay to close the gap between where you are and where you could be. How? Work harder take a class eat more coconut oil.

So of course you’re gonna stay and try. The gap HURTS. It’s painful to know you could be something, but you’re just not there. So, you achieve yourself to death trying to make the pain of not reaching your potential go away.

We’re all little Thomas the choo choo train engines I-think-I-can-ing our way into madness and distress.

Except we can’t. The gap cannot be closed for it is relative and I don’t mean a cool uncle. Wherever you go, there the gap is, taunting you forward with the siren song of value, success, and love.

I don’t think I can actually

I’ve got two problems with Thomas and Friends.

First, the uncanny valley ass way each train emotes. It’s way too human to be a cartoon. I mean, look at this:

Ok it turns out that kids on the autism spectrum (ASD) really like these overdone emotions because they’re easy for them to understand, so once again I am a monster.

But besides that, I’m not a big fan of the show’s incessant message that Thomas can do anything he wants, he just needs to believe in himself.

How about a Tommy the Train who says “I thought I could but then I thought some more and honestly I can’t. I don’t even want to. I won’t.”

A walking cliche

Writing about this feels like holding a sand castle in my hands - the ideas slip through my fingers into nothingness as I dismiss them as silly or useless or, worse yet, the mother of all idea disses: cliche.

You know what else is cliche? To love your family. Well, color me a cliche charlie cuz ya know what, I love my wife and son.

Cliche is an excuse we use to skip right over the bad feelings we feel about a truth we’ve decided is too intense to experience directly. We felt awful the first and second time we realized all the phone shit was bad but decided to not do anything about it (a decision made largely for us by Markie Zucks and the ‘geniuses’ of silicon valley.

Let’s pretend like this is the first time we’re realizing all of this.

Ready? Ok. We just figured it all out for the first time. Can you believe it? We’ve been bamboozled and then some. Shit sucks. We’re stuck of our accord and by our own petards. But - what’s this? - we CAN do something about it.

Let us pierce the veil of our collective cynicism and imagine, if we will, a world that is not like this one.

If you could, what would you change?

Here’s how I’ve been thinking about it: what’s the one big decision I can make that then makes 100 little decisions for me. Like if you couldn’t stop eating movie theater popcorn, rather than trying to decide daily whether or not to go to the movies and eat that delicious bucket of pop, you could commit a crime against the movie theater industry so heinous that you’d be blackballed by all theaters and thus no longer able to ever get popcorn there.

Personally, I’d go to each movie theater and demand they play the Criterion Channel classic film Armageddon and run up into the projection room and play it until I got kicked out.

No armageddon, no popcorn.

What’s my one decision that makes a hundred? Get off social media, sure, but still the itch is there. And my whole career is sort of online.

Turn off the internet as a default and only turn it on at certain periods to do specific work? Make offline the default mode and online the exception? Ok now we’re walking.

Only check my phone at specific times and never look at any single email, message, or notification more than once? Now we’re walking and squawking.

The Two Week Do Shit Differently Challenge

Last night, I ran this idea by my friend Nate and my wife Lauren. Nate asked what my goal was. That was a tough question, so I asked him to leave.

Then I asked him to come back in and we talked it through. My goal, Nate helped me realize, was to regain self-control over how I use technology.

So here’s what I’m gonna do for the next two weeks.

• Not always online — Offline as a default.

  • Devices will not have the internet on by default and I’ll need to turn them on.

  • Phone may go into airplane mode and I’ll use a burner phone so Lauren can reach me

  No roaming and scrolling — Only check my phone / computer at my desk.

  • this can be at a coffee shop / other place I’m working

• One and done — Only look at any message once, respond, and be done with it.

• No social media — take all the apps off my phone and change all my passwords.

  • Substack doesn’t count because this is how I make money (hey btw speaking of, subscribe maybe idk?)

• Audio-based stuff is good — Phone calls, spotify and podcasts are all okay wherever.

I was originally gonna do 40 days but

Michael Estrin

said:

Who are you, Josh “40 days and 40 night” Hartnett? Do you wanna try a week, or do you feel like you need the big number goal to motivate? …Try two weeks. Write about it. Use that piece to pitch a book about a year offline.

If you’re a book person, give me a shout and let’s write a book. Oh right, I’ll do the first two weeks first.

I’ll be writing about the experience

I plan on keeping a log of my experience for paid subscribers. If you’d like access, become a paid subscriber here and you’ll get 24% off !!! This is a good deal and also, remember, it helps me do this for a living!

Who wants in?

What else am I missing? Anyone else wanna try this with me? Or tell me that I’m a psycho or not realizing that for many people having their phone is part of their job and not something they can get rid of in any meaningful way.

Recently, someone sent me an email that said:

I think you would be a fun guy to lead a french revolution (everyone hates the elites, the rich, whatever you call it) and you seem inclined to guillotine.

Whoa. First off…thank you?

Second off, as leader, I ask that we guillotine all the thomas the train engine heads and also cut all the smart phones in half but first, the two week challenge!

Is this stupid? Yes.

Will it fail? Yes.

But we gotta start trying right? Fail fast, break things, and when it gets hard just remember:

I think I can’t I think I can’t I think I can’t.

Comments

1. Seriously, do you want to participate? If so just say “I think I can’t” in the comments.

2. What’s your relationship w the internet, social media, the hustle on the apps, etc?

3. Any tips for me / others on how to pull this off?

5. what else?

My first test will be after publishing this. I’ll want to look at the comments and stats but I won’t until I am ready to respond. Here goes muffin!

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In case you missed it: I also yesterday announced that I’m available to help people with their writing. One day later, it’s looking like i might have TEN new clients. So if you or your company wants to write stuff that doesn’t suck, or if you want help in starting your newsletter, check out this post and reach out.

1. I love the internet. My middle name is Internet (note: walk to US Government Office and ask to make this official). I’m not saying I am getting off the internet. FAR from it.

I want to engage with the lush landscapes of the internet MORE. Most of online is like the shire in LOTR - magical and full of second breakfast. And then there are a few mega cities which Yancey Strickler once described as all feeling like NYC’s times square. Yes, times square but an opium den.

This is not good. It’s actually bad even.

But things can change I think they already are so let’s hurry the process along. Imagine if for the rest of your life you didn’t spend hours a day making yourself feel terrible by staring at your phone?

You could make yourself feel bad by doing all sorts of other shit like trying to build ships in bottles and realizing its actually hard or making croissants from scratch that’s no joke.

You could even and I know this shall be a bridge too far for most but idk you could even make yourself feel good by shooting hoops or visiting a museum.