Treat the Internet Like Real Life

Talk about social media, and someone will inevitably start explaining how it’s unhealthy. They’re not wrong. In fact, most of the ways people use “the computer” (phones, laptops, even game consoles included) are bad for people as a whole, even if they aren’t causing harm day-to-day. Why though?

Most tech optimism that drove the world into its current state was predicated on connecting people and reducing time spent on undesirable activities. These are good things, broadly speaking, but the devil is in the details. Connecting which people to whom? Reducing time spent on boring tasks to free up time for what? It’s disingenuous to say that the Internet and associated advances in technology didn’t deliver on these promises – they did – but the side effects are still felt by everyone.

One of the my most deeply-held dogmas is a philosophical interpretation of Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The way I see it, everything results in positive and negative consequences that cannot be undone, in equal portions. That isn’t to say that the negatives can’t be mitigated, but that mitigation will be an opportunity cost, or it will at least shift the negative consequences somewhere else. The Internet is one of the biggest examples of this, in my opinion.

The promise of connecting people was kept. Right now, you can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, with ease. I’ve met so many people that I would have never crossed paths with if it weren’t for the Internet. I think overall, this has been a good thing. Problems, however, are twofold. The first major problem is too much of a good thing; talking to too many people too often probably isn’t going to improve your life, and will probably waste a lot of your time and mental energy in the process. Pop psychology says people can’t truly “know” more than 200 people, and whether that’s true or not, I think it’s fair to say that there’s an upper limit to the number of acquaintances you can reasonably have. The other problem isn’t too much of a good thing, but rather a conventionally good thing done in an unnatural way. I like to say that “people weren’t meant to talk to everyone, all the time.” There are very few people in real life who willingly engage with random people’s opinions and spout their own bite-sized opinions at anyone who will listen regularly, but people online do that in the hundreds of millions. That’s called Twitter, and microblogging as a whole, and it’s not a natural way of communicating. Considering that people weren’t meant to communicate like that, is it any wonder that everyone hates using Twitter? Any site that attempts to fix the site by making a new one with an identical format is embarking on a fool’s errand, evidenced by every single Twitter clone, including Bluesky and Mastodon.

Technology has always been sold to consumers as a time-saving device in some shape or form. Even when not explicitly stated, user interfaces are designed to reduce friction as much as possible for the user. If you aren’t a cynic, good! You probably don’t see the potential issues that are downstream from this, because the problems aren’t innate to optimized user interfaces or time savings. I’m guessing, however, that more than a few of the people who read this are cynics and understand what has happened. When you save time, where is that extra time spent? The obvious answer for practical technology is “doing something else,” or more specifically, doing something you want to do that doesn’t involve the activity that was skipped or sped up. That’s not what’s happening, though. People spend more and more time on the computer doing things they don’t want to do. Did you hop on to read something, check your messages or some other routine activity, then find yourself doing some nonsense that you never set out to do? The promise of saving time was kept, but then an indeterminate amount of time spent doing something you didn’t intend to do was tacked onto your session. You’re not powerless against these things, but it’s just made so frictionless that it now takes conscious effort not to go along with the flow. Again, the promise was kept, but problems began when it strayed from being a natural improvement to being an unnatural perversion unlikely to happen in real life.

The prevailing theory on why it feels so bad to be on the computer is “enshitification,” a term so overused and so unqualified that I hate even typing it. In essence, it means that stuff starts out good… then goes bad. It’s hardly a theory, and mostly describes the typical venture capital cycle, but it’s enough of a righteous-sounding protest word that most people feel catharsis from repeating it. Some of the more intelligent criticisms of the modern Internet experience include algorithmic content recommendation and ads, but they usually focus on specifics instead of broader patterns of behavior and social consequences. My theory is that the ills stemming from technology use can be explained by their deviation from our nature as humans.

There are some really surprising negative effects from just sitting in a chair too long and too often. Sitting on a chair isn’t physically dangerous (usually), and yet doing it every day can cause tons of issues to your back and your general health.

Don’t buy $10 office chairs from China

Not going outside can cause you to have all sorts of vitamin deficiencies and worsen depression, despite indoors being physically safer and much more comfortable. Even over-sanitizing your environment can lead to a weakened immune system. Doing things that are unnatural will inevitably carry unforeseen negative consequences, even if the things you’re doing don’t pose any immediate danger and even appear to be completely positive. I believe that the only healthy way to use the Internet is to treat it like your real life. Be thoughtful about your activities and decisions that deviate from how most people live in real life.

Applying the concept of real life logic to the Internet and technology as a whole can be hard. While there are some things that are fairly obvious, like not spending 12+ hours a day on your phone or computer, there are more subtle considerations that can be taken to the way you communicate. It might sound surprising, but I actually really like Instagram – or at least, the way I use Instagram. My usage of the platform is defined by what I don’t do on it. I don’t use Reels, I hide recommended content, I don’t post Stories and I only follow people I know or musical artists or venues that I like. This keeps my usage of it limited to seeing what my friends are doing, what shows are coming up and what music my favorite artists are making. It’s easy for me to get value out of it by going through my friends’ recent posts and Stories, then closing it because I don’t have any more content to view. This is actually how social media was in its early days, and what made Facebook and other early sites genuinely useful for people. Using social media as a way to talk with people you know and see what they’re doing mirrors real life interaction, but doesn’t have limitations like losing contact when you move. It doesn’t stray too far from natural, real life socialization.

I’ve talked about it before, and I’ll say it again: people weren’t meant to talk to everyone all of the time. Microblogging is exactly that, and it’s crucial to absolutely never use Twitter or any other microblogging platform personally (as in, not as part of your business or for marketing) in order to keep yourself mentally sound. Not only does microblogging not resemble anything close to a normal real life interaction, but it also encourages weird narcissistic behavior. I have never once seen the Twitter account of someone I knew and not lost at least a little respect for them based on things they decided to write for the world to see on their profile. People do not need to hear every little thought in your head, and you do not need to hear every little thought in everyone else’s head. This is not normal. Using Mastodon/Fediverse or Bluesky does not exempt you from the mental harms of microblogging. It’s not a Twitter problem, it’s a format problem, and nothing will change that.

I believe the most healthy form of communication online is simply chatting in a group with people you know personally. It’s the closest thing to real life interaction. In fact, group chats come naturally to real life friend groups. I don’t think I’ve ever had a negative experience as the result of using group chats that wouldn’t have happened in real life also. Meeting new people online should also be done in ways that mirror real life, like small- or medium-sized groups that welcome newcomers, or based around interests.

In closing, I would like to remark on one habit that serves well both online and real life. Be authentic, and seek out other authentic people. Constant sarcasm and irony are really bad for you and form some of the most cancerous groups around, be it online or otherwise. You are not here to play a character, you are here to be a real person and interact with real people. Friends and family are the most important people you will ever have in life, and being ironic will never allow you to form bonds with those people that will last longer than the character you play.

If you read all the way to here, why don't you write your thoughts? You can put a fake email in the email field.

3 thoughts on “Treat the Internet Like Real Life

  1. Oh boy, another article about having self-control while using the Internet. It’d be more helpful to skip most of the boilerplate and spend more time on how to effectively use a website that’s unethical, like Instagram or YouTube, and ways around it if you know any.

    The article’s title is misleading up until the last paragraph where you say “You are not here to play a character, you are here to be a real person and interact with real people”. What if I am? It’s the Internet, and the Internet posits itself around the idea that nobody needs to know who you are. Only someone that grew up with a pervasive Internet presence who sees a lack of it as something exceptional would think that treating the Internet as real life analogue is cool and useful, not realizing real life exists to treat like real life if you want to.

    Separation of the Internet and real life is as far as you need to go, anything else risks an encroachment.

    1. The main point of the article is not telling people to have self-control, the focus is on how the unhealthy parts of the Internet and technology are the ones that deviate from human nature and real life counterparts. The final paragraph explicitly states that the advice holds true for both online and real life. I agree that there are too many articles telling people to just do a better job at controlling yourself, which is why I wrote an article talking about the reason why there are things you need to avoid in the first place, not just that you should avoid them.

      The article’s title is misleading up until the last paragraph where you say “You are not here to play a character, you are here to be a real person and interact with real people”. What if I am? It’s the Internet, and the Internet posits itself around the idea that nobody needs to know who you are.

      You can do that, people do that in real life, too. I’ve certainly played a character IRL and online. I use a pseudonym pretty much any place I am online. But if the only thing you do socially online is play a character for your own amusement, you’re not going to get much value out of online interaction. Which is fine I suppose, but then you’re not the target audience for the article.

      Only someone that grew up with a pervasive Internet presence who sees a lack of it as something exceptional would think that treating the Internet as real life analogue is cool and useful, not realizing real life exists to treat like real life if you want to.

      I don’t know what your point is here. I don’t think it’s cool to use the Internet like real life, I think that being thoughtful of how usage of the Internet reflects real-world behavior can lead to a much healthier and overall better experience.

  2. tbh you just summed up the Discordification of the internet and why everything seems to happen in private Discord groups now. Which of course gives you the chicken and egg problem of “how will you meet people if you’re not in one of those groups to begin with”.

    Why be on the mainstream internet if one part is just you broadcasting yourself and treating your social media feed as an RSS feed, and the other part being extra vulnerable to 12 year old kids in Section 8 apartment complexes, jacked into VR, trying really hard to mimic Packgod’s roasts.

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