On Mainlining the Internet, First Thing in the Morning

Hey, how’s it going? How’s your day been? Are you staying hydrated? How’s your posture? Have you gotten your daily recommended amount of vitamin D today? How was your morning? Did you have a nice breakfast? What did you do right when you woke up? I know what I did: I grabbed my phone and dove head first into the varying degrees of cesspool that are social media apps. Why did I do it? Because I am weak-willed and my tiny lizard brain craves constant stimulation.

There’s a lot going on in the world right now. Actually, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that there’s always a lot going on in the world. I don’t think a time existed when there wasn’t much going on. What has changed though, is our ability to know about everything that’s going on everywhere, all the time. Now, that’s one thing when you’re standing at the gas pump filling up your car at 4 pm. It’s a completely different beast when you haven’t even stood up for the first time today and you’re already three atrocities, five natural disasters, and seven acts of corporate malfeasance deep.

I’m no scientist but I do know a thing or two about consuming things that make me feel bad (pizza, Hot Cheetos, tequila, reality TV), and being up to my eyeballs in internet before I’ve had my coffee feels like it cannot possibly be good for me, or anyone else. On the other hand…

The memes! The pictures of raccoons! The videos of dogs being perfect, silly, angels! There are uplifting stories of people achieving their dreams. There are highlights of athletes that make you go, “Oh yeah! I remember that guy! He played for the ’04 Reds!” And then there’s my new favorite genre of internet videos: Older folks of different nationalities trying foods they’ve never had from other countries and falling in love.

So, now I’m stuck at a crossroads. I know it’s bad for me to read about all of the Nazis taking over Twitter at 7:03 am, but it also feels like its good for me to watch a video of a puppy and a duckling becoming best friends on TikTok at 7:06 am. I don’t want to simply let the bliss of feel-good-but-sadly-meaningless-videos wash over me until I’m blind to the actual goings on of the world. But I also don’t want to inundate myself with so much bleak misery, so many acts of pure evil, and enough blatant attempts to make the world a worse place, that I’m just numb by 8 am.

This, to me, feels like the modern-day Gordian Knot. An impossible-to-untangle mess of interconnectedness full of everything under the sun. Like that famous Greek knot, there seems to be a pretty easy solution: cut the rope and stop looking at my phone when I wake up…but as I said at the beginning “I am weak-willed and my tiny lizard brain craves constant stimulation.”

So, what’s your solution? Do you even have the same insane problem I do? WHAT’S A BOY TO DO!?