Internet addiction is something that I've struggled with for well over a decade now. Innumerable days, weeks, probably years, lost to aimless scrolling with no goal in particular. My interests are more "intellectual" than the average social media addict who only looks at TikTok and Instagram, so perhaps my habits are more defensible in that regard, but I think it's still had a significant negative impact on my life and has prevented me from spending more time on things that I actually care about.
I wanted to see if anyone struggles with the same issues, and also share some of my recent thoughts on the nature of internet addiction.
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First, it has to be recognized that the internet can be both a force for great good and a force for great evil. Unlike hard drugs, total abstinence is neither possible nor desirable. The internet made me the person I am today, and gave me so many wonderful, unforgettable experiences. I can't just repudiate it entirely - rather I have to learn to live with it, and take better control of my relationship with it.
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I don't support the use of strategies like apps that automatically cut off your access during certain times of the day. Nietzsche once said something to the effect of, "only the weak man wants to pluck out his eyes to avoid looking at lustful things". It's a sentiment I agree with. Any solution that "forces" you to reduce browsing time is just putting a band-aid over the problem. The goal is to fundamentally reconfigure your desires and dispositions so they're more naturally aligned with your actual goals.
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A key factor in understanding internet addiction is understanding the need to accept boredom. Before smartphones, people used to get bored way more often. Sometimes you'd just have to sit there with literally nothing to do, not even anything to think - you won't always want to read a book, or entertain yourself with your own thoughts. Smartphones permanently cured boredom - scrolling the web is infinitely entertaining, and takes zero effort. It's like a liquid that seeps in through the cracks furnished by boredom and gradually fills up all available space, taking over every second of time that you have. I think that one of the biggest keys to reconfiguring my relationship with the internet, for me anyway, is accepting and embracing that there will simply be times where I am bored and I just sit there doing literally, absolutely nothing. But that's not an excuse to resort to web browsing in those cases.
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I'm currently trying to take an organic approach where I accept that the internet is extremely fun and beneficial, and I will browse it multiple times a day, but I try to consciously remind myself to limit it and make time for other things as well. For example, making short-term plans like "I won't look at my phone until I'm back from my morning walk, at which points I will check websites X Y and Z, and then I won't look at my phone again until after lunch". We'll see how it goes. The unfortunate thing about addiction isn't that any one mitigation strategy is difficult to implement and stick to, but rather that I seem to have little control over exactly what person I'm going to be next week. I always seem to wind up back in a place where, on a meta-level, I simply no longer have a desire to control my web browsing at all and I no longer see it as a problem, so I ditch any prevention strategy and I just go back to unrestricted scrolling. I'd really like to fundamentally reconfigure myself so that doesn't happen anymore. But I don't know how to do that.
I view this as a societal problem, not just an individual problem with me. I saw a family of three at a restaurant the other day, mom and dad and a young boy, and all three of them were glued to their phones, ignoring each other. That made me very sad. I hope that more will be done in the future to raise consciousness of internet addiction, and smartphone addiction in particular.
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Also struggling with this. I find it baffling that net addiction isn't talked about more often; I worry that the younger generation, so used to growing up with access to the internet, would be unaware that the extent of their usage could be considered addiction. I can't imagine what school must be like when you're constantly hyperconnected to all of your peers through social media, I feel that people aren't well equipped mentally for that kind of constant surveillance of their own online self and the online personae of everyone around them. Despite these worries about social media addiction and the mental harm it could cause, that isn't the type of net addiction I struggle with: it's what I think of as "information" addiction.
This is mainly YouTube content and various forums & boards. I think of it as "information" addiction not because I'm actually informed by what I'm looking at (though some content does provide genuinely useful info) but because it gives me the same feeling of satisfaction as learning something, becoming more informed about something. Whether I read a programming book and learn useful information about a language I don't know very well, or read a post about what a strange autistic streamer from Wyoming was doing on his stream yesterday, it doesn't matter. I can very well understand that one of these is vastly more important to me than the other but I gain satisfaction from both regardless. And therein lies the problem: the unimportant useless information is much more convenient to consume, is completely endless and still provides the same stimulation so why choose anything else? The solution I've reached is exactly the same as your own in that I see no sense in trying to go cold turkey, so I'm trying to limit my use of forums & discussion boards. Do some exercises first before I check the net in the morning, have breakfast without reading some inane imageboard posts etc. It mostly works but I do occasionally slip up and find myself almost unconsciously reaching for the phone.
I'm the same. I classify youtube/forums and even tv/movies as largely the same process of mindlessly ingesting the creations of the minds of others. I rarely pause to contextualise what I'm ingesting to expand my own knowledge in the way that happens when I'm being introspective or reading books.
I eventually came to a sort of epiphany where I believe it is better to come to conclusions and build knowledge from my own experiences, even if this is 're-inventing the wheel' from base principles, than it is to mindlessly accept and agree with the conclusions of the brightest minds of this and past generations. When you think of something yourself, you grok it in a way that is impossible if it was fed to you. This is also how you really grow your own mind and get closer to your full potential.
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