You know when you do heroin? You feel the greatest you’ve ever felt, riding this wave of euphoria into the heavens of Jesus Christ… until you sober up. Then, you’re off the stuff for a little while, vehemently wondering when you can get your next hit, feeling like you need to get back to that state. Until being sober is no longer bearable.
Take it 1000 notches lower and you’ve got you, your phone and the little highs you feel from the little joys it gives you.
You wake up, you check your phone. You take a shit, you check your phone. You’re eating breakfast, and you’re checking your phone. Before anything remotely productive get’s started, we are undeservedly pleasuring ourselves in ways that form our habits of living and thinking.
Boredom no longer exists. Now, feeling anything that isn’t synonymous to good seems like a disease. And our standard of normal is ‘looking at a screen so the pretty lights can make me feel things’. We’ve evolved from an age of fulfillment from hunting shit or consuming a fatty meal with our wisdom teeth, to a generation where the same happy chemicals can be triggered from getting a follower or reading some juicy shit off of reddit.
I once thought of myself as mentally healthy. I thought positively of myself and had a generally optimistic perspective of life (which was a feat, considering my childhood mantra at one point was ihatemylifeihatemylifeihatemylife). At the time, the problems in my life were at bay and no news continued to be good news. I remember sitting on a bus in this state of utter bliss thinking to myself: I better soak up every fucking ounce of this because it’s only a matter of time before I feel the exact opposite.
And so I did.
But little did I know how much of it would be self-inflicted.
I realize how automatic it is to feel good, to experience some form of pleasure. It’s literally within arms reach at all times (yes, masturbation is almost always possible but I’m talking about phones this time). It can be a pretty toxic relationship the moment using your phone becomes far more than just a simple gadget for entertainment. Our standard of happiness gets increasingly high because we’re constantly surrounded by some form of endorphin rage fest. This is why it’s easy to spend money on things you shouldn’t be spending money on, eating more than what you intended on or wasting exuberant amounts of time scrolling through your phone. These are distractions. This instant gratification is a temporary fix that gets worst when we don’t want to address a bigger picture.
But what kills me is how our phones can make us feel even worst about ourselves. For me, I lost interest in caring about my appearance until I got sucked back into the vortex of social media. If these people get so much admiration for their clothing and their facial organs, why can’t I?, said the brain. And now, I’ve been spending money I don’t have on clothes, my Amazon wish list and chocolate because my ego is raging against me, trying to make me feel even more pleasure. But all it’s ever done is make me feel worst about my situation, because these short term money lead goals are no where near genuine fulfillment.
Comparison is a bitch, y’all. But it’s a choice. Take a moment to reflect where your negativity lies. Everyone’s just trying to be happy. So are you. Empathy. Duality. No need to feel ways when you realize that we’re all just trying to be happy. Let them do their thing. Continue doing yours. Soon enough you’ll realize how little someone else’s presence affects yours once you understand your self worth.
This is your fucking life. How much of it do you want to spend looking at your phone? How often are you going to delude yourself into thinking you need things to be happy? When are you going to figure out that happiness is a physically impossible goal to achieve.
You realize you have a choice right? All it takes to start a change is to decide that you want it.
