My #1 Internet Addiction
It's bad, people
It’s not p*rn, thank God. Making the documentary Over 18 (SFW) saw to that.
I gave up Reddit when it went public and BlackRock/Vanguard/JPMorgan bought a huge chunk.
Facebook never became an addiction thanks to Facebook News Feed Eradicator.
Never got into Instagram (I don’t own a cell phone.)
Too old for TikTok.
Twitter never did it for me…
Until Elon bought it, re-branded as X, and launched what is for my money the world’s most addictive algorithm.
Here’s how I know this is true:
My 2026 New Year’s resolution was to give up X (and BBC radio) for the year.
It’s been 159 days and I still want to go on X thirty times a day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My cravings have not diminished in the least.
In fact, they’ve shifted.
A few months after I put X on pause, my brain went hunting for feeds.
It started when my computer crashed. My new one didn’t have Facebook News Feed Eradicator. Facebook showed me a recent photo of dear friend. I liked it. For the next week, the occasional pop over to Facebook was like having a reunion with hundreds of people I hadn’t seen online in over a decade.
My brain wanted more.
It then found a feed on Substack
That’s right: Two feeds replaced one feed.
But the two feeds still aren’t fulfilling my brain’s craving for variable reward stimulus half as much as X. I want X. I want it now.
Remember, my scrolling is limited to my laptop, so it’s still like 1/20th of a normie. I don’t scroll in line, scroll in between meetings, scroll while waiting for appointments, scroll on dinners or holidays with my family. My nearly-70-year-old father-in-law scrolls at least 5X more than I do.
Plus, I use Adblock + Ghostery + uBlockOrigin, so I don’t see ads and tracking is decimating.
Am I trying to rationalize my addiction?
Absolutely.
We’re almost all addicted:
Over a billion people use their phone compulsively.
Teenagers are on screens as many hours each week as a full-time job.
The average adult with a phone will spend an average of over 5 years of life scrolling.
Once Facebook thought I was properly hooked, it started serving less relational content and more political content.
Same with Substack.
Then there was a straw that broke this old camel’s back.
Last week, I went for a walk in the woods with my wife and kids and father-in-law. He had a cell phone in his pocket. We somehow got onto the topic of J.K. Rowling, and I told him how she decided to stay in the U.K. and pay taxes because taxpayers had supported her while she wrote Harry Potter, decimating her billionaire status.
This is what my Substack feed showed me a few hours later:
This was not a coincidence.
My father-in-law’s phone heard the conversation.
Apple’s AI used his link to my wife and my voice ID to sell this data to God knows how many people who are building a dossier on all of us.
One of them, Substack, stuffed this in my feed.
It happens all the time.
I had a conversation with one of my friends about a wonderfully revolutionary book called The Patient Ferment of the Early Church and immediately afterward, she started getting sourdough posts.
I now have a folder containing dozens of such instances.
Just think of how quick the algorithms silo people into echo chambers.
Try this for yourself. Like 10 pro-Israel posts if you’re anti-Israel, or 10 anti-Islam posts if you’re pro-Islam, and watch how fast the algorithm starts feeding you what it thinks you want to hear.
Remember: Divide and conquer is their business model.
So what have I learned?
I am undeniably addicted, and not just to X. I cannot imagine how much worse it would be if I had a phone and was into gaming and p*rn. And there I go rationalizing again.
The feeds themselves are the problem. The variable reward… a little humor, a little anger, a little inspiration, a little cuteness, a little lust, a little fear, a little more anger… is keep the brains of billions searching for a hit. It’s skyrocketing anxiety and division while killing drive and productivity. The end result? Everyone’s too exhausted to do anything but keep scrolling, allowing trillion-dollar companies to bombard us with ads for stuff we don’t need at costs humanity cannot afford.
Like everyone else, I will always be addicted to feeds. Feeds are addictive. They are engineered to be addictive. It’s like heroin. Heroin will never not be addictive. The key is simply to not do heroin. The key is to get all feeds out of my life.
At what target am I aiming? I want to limit my dopamine hits to five major things: Time with God, time with people, work time, gym time, and time in nature.
How about you?
Which feeds do you like the most?
Where do you find yourself scrolling absentmindedly?
How have you cut back or cut feeds out of your life?
Comment below.