One of the things I learned when I was getting sober is that it’s more or less impossible to get sober around people you used to use drugs with.
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is the age-old wisdom (or common sense) that if you hang around people doing drugs, you’re more likely to do drugs. Even if you’re not supposed to.
I mean, you can see the leap we took to get to that conclusion. That doesn’t require top-level thinking.
But another issue is that, if you’re getting sober, you need to have a person or three or ten to lean on. And what you require from those people is that they’re healthy. That they already know how to have healthy relationships — because what you need, more than anything else right now, is healthy relationships.
And if you continue to hang around broken and angry and beaten-down people, regardless of whether they’re using drugs or not, they’re not going to be a good support network for you. Because they themselves are not healthy or capable of anything resembling a good relationship. They’re not capable of reciprocation, or patience, or commitment, or true healthy love. They’ve got their own messes to deal with.
Because they’re still trapped where you were. You have to escape from that place, and that unfortunately means escaping from those people. That’s one of the hardest lessons and biggest sacrifices of sobriety: you have to give up all of the people you think of as your friends.
Being addicted to drugs or alcohol, at its core, is about loneliness — whether the apparent cause is trauma, or a lack of identity, or self-contempt, the central issue is loneliness. You feel unheard, unseen, and unvalued. You feel like no one relates to you. You feel like your suffering is unique—and no one is equipped to help you heal or to let you be yourself.1 No one could possibly understand what it’s like to be you.
So you resort to the warm embrace of the drugs or alcohol. Because they will always be there to make you feel seen. The drugs might kill you, but they will never judge you.
Addiction, in most cases, is simply a connection-replacement mechanism. It’s a way to make up for a lack of connection. To anything, to everything. A way to fill something that’s supposed to be filled by something else.
People.
In this piece from After Babel, writer Freya India talks about how people, even young people, maybe even especially young people, are nostalgic for the ’90s. Or for the pre-phone world. For a time when people built connections through the awkward messiness of in-person interactions and social risk-taking. For a time when people got to know each other through their hobbies and idiosyncrasies and jokes, rather than the various ways we perform for the internet. For a time when we didn’t keep score on everything, for a time when we didn’t have to be online just to keep up with what was happening among our schoolmates. When things were slower.
Kids feel trapped in a world that they know is no good, and that they didn’t even create.
Everybody knows that girls were happier when they didn't have to compare themselves to the hottest women in the known universe on a daily basis.
Everybody knows that boys grew up happier and grew into sturdier men when they spent their childhood outside taking risks, breaking bones, and running from the police. Growing close to each other through the spiritual glue of adventure.
We all know that relationships, and dating, were better before dating apps turned us all into commodities and dating into an instant-gratification casino game. (Put in two hours of effort on Tinder: if you get nudes or sex, you win. If not, you lose and you move on.)
I mentioned in last week’s footnotes how the modern US is a catch-22: everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone wants out, but nobody wants to be the first to move out. Not geographically move out, necessarily, but to unplug. To stop playing these stupid, miserable games we play for status and prestige and money. And this applies to our internet-driven lives too. We need to put the internet where it belongs: in a toolbox. Not at the front and center of our lives.
Not everybody is so attached to the internet, of course. If you’re over 40, you might not see this as such a big deal.
But for some people, for instance an average 16-year-old or 24-year-old, it is. And for those of us who are this plugged in, we can’t seem to get out. If we unplug, we’re afraid we’ll be just as alone in real life as we feel online. We’re afraid there’s nobody “out there” to join, because everyone, everything, is tied to the internet. If we unplug, we’ll miss out on everything — and we may not even find any new friends anyway.
I’ve noticed something about people. Nobody even wants to be online this much. Or rather, most people don’t. We truthfully aren’t even enjoying ourselves. Nobody even wants to sit and scroll on social media for 3 hours every evening. Or 6. Nobody even wants to see yet another picture of their friend’s cat, or to leave a comment pretending they care about someone else’s grandchild’s ballet recital.
But what happens when we put our phones down?
We turn on the TV, fold a little bit of laundry, have a snack, maybe sit with the dog for a few minutes… and then realize that it’s just lonely. Just fucking lonely. No one is calling, no one is stopping by to chat or take a walk. We don’t live with our elders anymore, and the days of casual neighborhood door-knocking are over.
Nothing is happening out here.
So what do we do? We pick our phones back up. We don’t even want to. It’s a reflex. We just do it because we’re desperate to feel something. Because we have no plans and no one is coming to the door to make us feel seen or loved.
I also recently realized something about virtual reality: nobody actually wants virtual reality. Nobody actually wants to strap a device to their head and disappear into a fake world. Or, again, very few people do. Nobody reasonable.
But the sad truth is, that might end up being the only way left we can entertain ourselves. We are so desperate to feel something, that virtual reality and its visceral onslaught of sights and sounds might be the only way left that we can. We won’t use it as a destination, but as an escape. From how pitifully empty our lives are becoming. We’ll get on the roller coaster and puke again simply because we don’t like standing on the ground.
The trouble is, like an addict with no support network, we feel that we have no world to “return” to. So we put the goggles back on and try to avoid hating ourselves a little longer. This is what addiction is.
(And you can bet your ass that if someone has an interest in selling you VR goggles, they also have an interest in you having no real-life friends.)
An addict’s best chance, his biggest unfair advantage over other addicts, is to have a “normal” to return to: a normal middle-class family. A family who can give him tough love, a safe place to be, and, most importantly, a healthy functioning environment. For him to be around people who live stable, grounded lives, and can support him with patience and attentiveness.
If you’re from a poor background, you may not have anything like this to return to. Therefore, as is so common, class disadvantage kicks in and you are less likely to stay sober. Your environment might be full of chaotic, unstable, or abusive people. With an environment like that, your only chance of staying sober is to leave and find a new family (as harsh and sad as that is). This is, more or less, what a 12-step program is. A new family; a replacement for what doesn’t work. That’s not all it is, but that’s partially what it is.
Even if you’re not getting sober, but rather just trying to escape a toxic family and its constant troubles, you have to have somewhere to escape to. Most people don’t, because family is family. It’s not like most people have a backup mother or father waiting in the wings. You get what you get.
That’s why fixing a dysfunctional family is so hard: you have to change the whole tectonic foundation that the family moves on. You can’t just fix one relationship, you can’t just right one person’s wrongs — you have to fix how all family members interact with all other family members. And that’s so hard that it’s just straight-up discouraging.
It seems that the demand for healthy relationships outweighs the supply of them. Only so many people can get sober, because there are only so many viable options for supportive friends and family. Out of 350 million Americans, how many people could act as a good steward of your sobriety? Of the new you? Well, it’s not zero. But it’s certainly not 350 million.
Likewise, it’s really hard to disconnect from an online world. The supply of people who live offline, grounded lives is simply not enough for all of us to disconnect and be friends with.
There aren't enough healthy people to go around.
Not coincidentally at all, this is also why dating is such a nightmare now and the sexes are hating rather than loving each other: there aren’t enough healthy, reasonable people to go around. Neither men nor women. We’re all going through a thing right now. And you know what they say — you're not supposed to date when you're going through a thing. Work on yourself first.
Surprises
When we were kids, we would ride our bikes to each other’s houses and surprise each other. One minute you’re playing with action figures and the next minute your friend is here and you’re going on an adventure. But it was that way with adults, too. There were surprises. There were impromptu evenings of chatter. Passing neighbors on the street and talking for almost an hour.
If you stop by your friend’s house after work for a surprise visit now, they’re not going to suddenly remember “oh yea, we used to do this” and be happy to see you. More than likely, they’ll be annoyed with you because you’re invading their pillow fort of internet-enabled isolation. Even though all available logic says they should be happy to see you, they’ll probably just be put out because they don’t like surprises anymore.
Nobody likes surprises anymore.
I mean, my goodness. Think about the last time your doorbell rang. The perpetrator is automatically a complete piece of shit, right? Because who the fuck rings a doorbell anymore. Especially at 3pm on a Wednesday. Who the fuck calls a person on the phone anymore. Jesus, don’t these people understand that I’m sitting here doing nothing?
And don’t they understand that I’m also desperate for real human contact, which makes absolutely no sense and why am I so angry?
This is a paradox of the phone world: we protect our time fiercely, because we are terrified of using it badly. And in doing so, we use it badly. Or we don't “use it” at all.
We want to have complete control over our schedules, our free time, our visits with other people. We hate our phones for disconnecting us, but then when people try to connect with us we act like we’re too busy for it. Once again, this perfectly mirrors how an addict behaves. You condemn the thing that's making you miserable and then hug it more tightly.
Our phones have done a very weird thing to us: they have empowered us to plan, control, and manage in a way that we were never able to before. We can text and refine details and second guess until we’re nauseous; then, when the time comes to actually go out and do the plans, we don’t want to. Because suddenly we have social anxiety and we’d rather not give up our precious free time. Even though it’s basically guaranteed that we’ll have free time again tomorrow, and we’d probably be happy that we went out tonight. We just don’t.
Our phones have given us more control over our time and our plans, thereby rendering us unable to do anything unplanned. In being “able” to do so much, we are unable to do anything.
The Catch-22 in the Rye
Google’s search bar defines a catch-22 as “a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions.”
The saddest part of this whole modernity thing is that it's a perpetual catch-22: in order to start living more simply and more offline again, we have to find other people to do it with. But in order for us to find people to do it with, there have to already be other people doing it.
Again, it’s a supply problem. There aren’t enough of them.
And it’s not just about the internet. It’s about everything. If you want to find people who eat naturally and don’t take pills, good luck. If you want to find people who systematically work through their emotional issues and don’t carry them forward, good luck (although I’d recommend Alcoholics Anonymous). If you want to find people who don’t have issues with patience or delaying gratification, good luck. Because a lot of us suck at all of these things now. Especially those who literally grew up with a phone in their hands.
The biggest issue facing our young people is not the individual plight for health, it's the fact that we have not figured out a way to get people healthy en masse. To give our unhealthy young people, other healthy young people to get “back” to. Communities that have nothing to do with the internet. Until we do that, it feels like an individual fight.
You can’t just tell your kid to “stop being so negative, stop believing that your life is so hard and lonely, go outside and play.” Because there’s no one outside to play with.
So don’t be too hard on Generation Z, or Generation Alpha, or Generation Puppy or Bunny or whatever the hell is coming next.
They do know better. Really, they do. They’re not helpless, or dumb, or self-centered.
We have birthed them right into addiction. Maybe it’s not our fault, either. Maybe it’s nobody’s. Maybe we were destined to be here, because technology takes us somewhere bad before it takes us somewhere good. There’s a learning curve, and we’re still learning.
But this thing is possible. Some of us are going to have to do this alone if we want to do it at all. And that’s okay. Someone has to go first.
We don’t have the advantage that a 12-step program has: we can’t just say “no more alcohol.” Because the internet isn’t like alcohol — it’s really not optional for us to drink the internet.
We can get rid of poisonous social apps. That’s a start. But how do we repair the damage we’ve done to ourselves, as individuals and as communities?
Well, I’m not going to spend 30 more paragraphs talking about the solution. Because we already know the solution. We all know what we need to do. As I said earlier, the catch-22 of getting sober is not impossible. It’s just hard. Here are a few simple ideas.
We could start by saying hello to people. You rebuild a community by making it feel like a community again. Right? Don’t get angry when the doorbell rings. Whoever’s at the door, ask how he’s doing and why he doesn’t have a real job. Ok, leave that last part out.
Start a chess club at the coffee shop.
Don’t guard your time so fiercely. Time is a resource that you trade for adventures and surprises. If you aren’t using your time for those things, you’re wasting it. Hoarding your time like a dragon is not how life is supposed to be lived.
And just say hello to people. Just say hi, happily. For no reason. And if they are open to a conversation, talk to them. Ask if you can sit next to them at the ice cream stand. Ask if they’d like to grab lunch and chat about that little business they started.
Just come right out and ask them, “would you like to be my friend, and sit together and not pull out our phones?”
And it’s hard. Yes, it’s hard to feel irrelevant by avoiding social media when your friends are on it. Yes, it’s hard to be the first to move. And yes, it’s hard to not let your kids have smartphones until they’re 17.
Yes, it’s hard. Getting sober is what hard feels like.
But guess what else is hard? The way we’re living now.
Drink some water.
JDR
“I have found that the process of discovering who I really am begins with knowing who I really don't want to be.” - Alcoholics Anonymous
If you feel this way, sit down with someone you trust and have a tell-all conversation. If you can find a genuine person who will not judge you, and tell them everything, your life will utterly change. Because, emotionally and spiritually, you will no longer be alone. Someone will see the real you. And chances are, they will not run away. They will adore you, and they will be interested in supporting you. Because you were vulnerable and honest. This is what step 5 of Alcoholics Anonymous is. It’s the “you’re no longer alone” step.
Man, this hit hard. I've been wanting more and more every day to unplug, but for all the reasons you mentioned - especially the one of fearing even greater loneliness on the other side - I haven't committed to making the leap. I can feel the direction I would like to move forward in pulling at me, the tactile world waiting to be lived in, and yet the lonely, addictive baggage that we are all given to carry nowadays weighs me down and keeps me in a state of inertia where I'm just waiting for that one, indefinite day when I can eventually bring myself to cut the cord.
I really find that living with a technological addiction feels like constantly postponing your life. I feel like I've lived with this vague vision of some future time when I will finally start living, but it's always a future time. I hope that more and more of us can manage to shake free of this malaise and finally start to build the kind of communities we so keenly feel to be lacking.
Thanks for the great post!
Great read JR! Easily one of your top ones