The Rise of Anxiety and Depression in the Digital Age
My Dad and I read the newspaper together almost every morning since I’ve moved home from college. We sit in our big chairs in the living room and share a lamp on the table between us. He reads the Finance and Sports section and I read the Life & Arts and Review sections. We also trade once in a while. Yesterday, my Dad handed me a newspaper article called “The deep Dangers of Life Online: The El Paso and Dayton mass murderers reflect a modern epidemic of self-obsession.” written by Daniel Henninger.
The premise of Henninger’s argument, or rather discovery, is the alarming rise of anxiety and depression in people my age, and the root cause: our screens. First we see the link between spaces on the internet like 8chan and 4chan to the rhetoric and violence of recent mass shootings:
“8chan describes itself a forum for unimpeded, uncensored “free speech.” That is wrong. 8chan is a nut house. But don’t blame 8chan, Gab.com or Twitter. Blame the internet. More specifically, blame the inevitable deterioration of lives lived online.”
Yet this type of “deterioration” is not contained to sites like 8chan, it is wide reaching epidemic across the internet, and in fact, Henninger blames the internet. The effects of our addiction to technology, to social media, is only now being unravelled. And yet it is not new news to me- I have felt it, seen it, lived it for a long time. I actually quit my personal social media over a year ago, yet even away from social media I still feel myself entrapped in the anxiety and depression Henninger points to. The worst part is that it feels normal. It is so prevalent among people my age that it really has become the norm.
“Humans need to wake up,” my Dad said as he reclined back in his chair. I could dismiss his disdain as part of an older generation’s annoyance and weariness at a younger generation’s faults, but deep down I was too afraid to rebut: he was right. The article addresses the biology behind our digital obsessions, how this addiction is not “normal or natural.” That our brains are not meant to be processing this much data all of the time. It is information over-load, it is a plunge into the extremes of our capacity for self.
Whether the adaptability of the human brain is the invention of God or Darwin, I don’t think it was designed to endure the volume of relentless inner-directedness that is driven by these new screens. It is not natural or normal.
Yet in the world we’ve created it is impossible to live without our screens, it is a way of working and a way of living. And there is so much good that comes from it (including my site :) But it cannot be all we experience, see, and hold onto. It cannot be the only means of thinking, communicating, and living.
When I am anxious and depressed, I return to the books on my shelves. It is almost an old trick I play on my mind: the physical, tangible words in front of me unconsciously pull me out of the anxious spell. I still feel the tick tick tick of wanting to check my phone, my email, my accounts, but after a while, like a runner, I forget that I am reading, or that my phone is calling me three feet away. I am absorbed, transfixed in another world, which is sadly the only relief I feel from the one we are living in.
I don’t know all the solutions, but I can only share what has worked for me and well, most generations since the beginning of time: reading, listening, telling stories. If we talk about what is natural, it is our capacity to tell stories, to write them down, to read them and translate them to one another. It is a process of slowing down, learning to be patient, learning not to try to understand everything all at once. It is learning to use our minds critically, to sustain attention.
The article my Dad handed me showed me what I have been afraid of all along, which is the data of just how miserable and self-obsessed we actually are staring at our screens all the time. But it also reinforced my purpose and passion for bookstores and the literature they hold. These screen-less spaces are more important than ever. Diving into other worlds than one’s own is more important than ever.
To end this post on a positive note, I want to challenge you, reader, to go to a local bookstore, buy a book, and sit and read it in peace and quiet- an uninterrupted two hours. If you notice how difficult it is, and find yourself checking your phone, then start doing this everyday.
The screen genies are out of the bottle. Banning them won’t work. Maybe the app masters who elevated self-obsession on Instagram and 8chan could turn toward apps rooted in reality. After last week, we have nowhere to go but up.