I hate the feelings machine
I'm trying to reconceptualize the phone, the internet, and its role in our daily lives, so that I can finally get back some of my time.
Dear Evie,
I cannot get offline. It makes me feel terrible. I am scrolling for hours and hours every day and I’m not learning anything, I’m not accomplishing anything, I’m not building any relationships. This has been going on for years, I know it makes my life worse, and I can’t stop. What do I do?
— Phonehead
Dear Phonehead,
For better or for worse, I started my career in digital journalism at the same time that Upworthy was the most successful website on the internet. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, you’re blessed in ways I can’t imagine, but I’ll try to explain as succinctly as possible: Upworthy is the website that basically invented the clickbait headline that was once wildly popular on Facebook, ones that exploited something that was known as “the curiosity gap.” Something Something You Won’t Believe What Happened Next. This Thing Happened And The Response Was Shocking.
The curiosity gap doesn’t actually promise that you’ll learn anything new or have a novel experience, so “curiosity” feels like a misnomer; it lures by suggesting whatever you consume by clicking through to the content will make you’ll feel something. Upworthy’s chief story officer shared this kind of jaw-dropping quote in a 2017 interview with NPR: “If a headline maybe is saying, this story will definitely make you cry, one of the rules I have is I go back to the writer every time and say: 'Well, did this story definitely make you cry? Did you actually shed tears at your desk when you were working on this?’”
Imagine the plight of these writers, manufacturing emotion to do their job (get clicks) and then encountering demands to prove that the emotion is real! But I think this quote illuminates a well-known and bleak internet truth: Businesses that make money by producing internet content generally want to exploit their readers’/viewers’/consumers’ desire to feel something, probably while they’re at their desk or commuting or lying down at home or doing something that doesn’t constitute much of an experience.
Because feelings, traditionally, are generated by experiences: hiking up a mountain for the first time, having an insanely good first date, eating something so good it changes your life. There are far more mundane provocations of feelings, obviously — finding that your cat destroyed your favorite chair in the night, reading a gossipy text message, admiring a stranger’s outfit on the bus. I think when we’re bored that just means we are experiencing an absence of feeling.
But the internet, the ultimate solution to boredom, will feed you feelings all day long — and those content-creating businesses have figured out how to do it way more efficiently since 2013. What I want to emphasize to you, Phonehead, is that internet-driven emotions are manufactured and they are cheap and they are engineered to hold your attention for a few monetizable seconds, until you move on to the next stimulus. They will make you sick.
I don't think any of this is new information, but I’m putting it in this context — internet = feelings machine — to highlight why our entire contemporary way of being that relies on the internet to function is such a trap. You use the internet to work (probably), take care of your finances and bills, communicate with friends and family, read news and literature and things that actually feed your intellect and awareness of the world. But all of the platforms and tools that you use to do those things have become inextricably tangled up with businesses that want to wring money out of your attention in some form or another, and that’s how you go to send an email to your accountant and come to 45 minutes later, deep in a TikTok hole where you’ve watched a woman film herself sobbing to a Starbucks cashier about her partner’s violent death over that song from Cruel Intentions.
We were never supposed to intersperse so many feelings, and of such breadth — despair from news clips of international war, pure joy from a cat eating sushi, secondhand embarrassment from attention-seeking influencers, self-loathing from a stranger’s perfect body — into the infrastructure of our daily lives on a second-by-second basis. When I come out of a social media hole like the one I just described, I feel physically exhausted.
But more importantly, I have nothing to show for it. The same is true of news holes. I have felt sick every day this week reading about Gaza and Israel, watching Instagram stories, burying myself in posts. People describe this as being unable to disengage, but I disagree — you are totally disengaged, passively absorbing media. There is nothing engaging or activating about the experience of taking in the internet. I saw a Tweet from the writer Yasha Levine that really stuck with me: “Our minds didn’t evolve to be teleported to a new massacre every other day and told to care and take sides, while sitting comfortably at home—half our nervous system on fire, the rest relaxing.”
What I will also add that is that so much time spent alone, scrolling, absorbing without engaging, is an extremely isolating and self-indulgent thing. You are seeing so much of the world without having to participate in it; the world becomes entertainment.
I’ve described your problem at such length before getting to a solution because I have not yet figured out that solution in my own life. When I think of how much time I have wasted plugged into the feelings machine, I genuinely want to throw up. But I’m hoping that articulating what so much of the internet is — feelings machine — will help me and anyone who reads this be more conscious of what it is doing: desensitizing, draining.
Because the way that I have trained myself to use the more parasitic parts of the internet — social media and news feeds — is as a rest from more ostensibly stressful tasks. Have a treat. Have a little break. But it never makes me feel rewarded nor rested; it usually just makes me feel disgusted with myself, and unhappy for having put off whatever task I was avoiding.
I’m going to try something this week, and I recommend that you try it too: that’s being more aware of what makes me feel good and what makes me feel bad. I’ll make a list every day, and see what shows up consistently on both. I’ll try to keep my phone physically out of reach. Every time I sense myself reaching for the feelings machine when I could or should be doing something else, I will repeat this mantra: You are getting older every day and your life is worth more than scrolling.
For my own accountability, I’ll let you know how it goes in a brief dispatch between this and the next newsletter. Will you do the same for me? dearevie@substack.com, as always.
With focus,
Evie
P.S. I wanted to read something thoughtful and well-researched on how emotions are addictive, and one of the first links on Google was to an entry on Kourtney Kardashian’s lifestyle website Poosh that quoted something called a “soul intelligence expert.” This felt so apropos to the consumerist degradation of the internet I’m describing that I had to share.