The first thing I hear in the morning is my Sleep-Cycle app, which is supposedly monitoring my movements in order to “gently” wake me as I emerge from sleep. I swipe it off and see the first alerts from the various news apps on my phone: bad things, getting worse. As I lie in bed, my thumb goes to Instagram for truly unknown reasons, but I’m less interested in seeing what others have posted than how many people have liked whatever photo I posted the night before. I check my personal email. I check my work email. I deleted the Twitter app off my phone, but don’t worry: You can always just open Chrome and go to Twitter.com.
I get out of bed and yell at Alexa a few times to turn on NPR. I turn on the shower. As it warms up, I check Slack to see if there’s anything I need to attend to as the East Coast wakes up. When I get out of the shower, the radio’s playing something interesting, so while I’m standing there in my towel, I look it up online and tweet it. I look at Slack again, this time to “check in” with my team on what I’m doing for the day. I get dressed and get my coffee and sit down to the computer, where I spent a solid half hour reading things, tweeting things and waiting for them to get fav’ed. I post one of the stories I read to the Facebook page of 43,000 followers that I’ve been running for a decade. I check back in five minutes to see if anyone’s commented on it. I tell myself I should try to get to work while forgetting this is kind of my work.
I think, I should really start writing. I go to the Google Doc draft open in my browser. Oops, I mean I go to the clothing website to see if the thing I put in my cart last week is on sale. Oops, I actually mean I go back to Slack to drop in a link to make sure everyone knows I’m online and working. I write two hundred words in my draft before deciding I should sign that contract for a speaking engagement that’s been sitting in my Inbox of Shame. I don’t have a printer or scanner, and I can’t remember the password for the online document signer. I try to reset the password but it says, quite nicely, that I can’t use any of my last three passwords. Someone is calling with a Seattle area code; they don’t leave a message because my voicemail is full and has been for six months.
I’m in my email and the “Promotions” tab has somehow grown from two to forty-two over the course of three hours. The unsubscribe widget I installed a few months ago stopped working when the tech people at work made everyone change their passwords, and now I spend a lot of time deleting emails from West Elm. But wait there’s a Facebook notification: A new post in the group page for the dog rescue where I adopted my puppy! Someone I haven’t spoken to directly since high school has posted something new!
Over on LinkedIn, my book agent is celebrating her fifth work anniversary; so is a former student whose face I vaguely remember. I have lunch and hate-skim a blog I’ve been hate-skimming for years. Trump does a bad tweet. Someone else wrote a bad take. I eke out some more writing between very important-seeming Slack conversations about Joe Jonas’s musculature.
I go to the gym. On the spin bike, I read things I saw on Twitter and stored in my Pocket app. I get interrupted once, twice, fifteen times by one of my group texts. I read something I like and slow down on the bike to take a drink of water and tweet it. I end my workout and go to the bathroom, where I have just enough time to look at my phone again. I drive to the grocery store and get stuck at a long stoplight. I pick up my phone, which says, “It looks like you are driving.” I lie to my phone.
I’m checking out at the grocery store and I’m checking Slack. I’m getting into the car to drive home and I’m texting my friend an inside joke. I’m five minutes from home and I’m checking in with my boyfriend. I’m walking my dog on the beautiful trails and I keep taking out my phone to take pictures. I’m back at home with a beer and sitting in the backyard and “relaxing” by reading the internet and tweeting and finalizing edits on a piece. I’m texting my mom instead of calling her. I’m posting a dog walk photo to Instagram and wondering if I’ve posted too many dog photos lately. I’m making dinner while asking Alexa to play a podcast where people talk about the news I didn’t really internalize.
I get into bed with the best intention of reading the book on my nightstand but wow, that’s a really funny TikTok. I check my Instagram likes on the dog photo I did indeed post. I check my email and my other email and Facebook. There’s nothing else to check, so somehow I decide it’s a good time to open my Delta app and check on my frequent flyer mile count. Oops, I ran out of book time; better set SleepCycle.
I’m equally ashamed and exhausted writing that description of a pretty standard day in my digital life—and it doesn’t even include all of the additional times I looked at my phone, or checked social media, or went back and forth between a draft and the internet, as I did twice just while writing this sentence. In the United States, one 2013 study found that millennials check their phone 150 times day; a different 2016 study claimed we log an average of six hours and nineteen minutes of scrolling and texting and stressing out over emails per week.1 No one I know likes their phone. Most people I know even realize that whatever benefits the phone allows—Google Maps, Emergency Calling—are far outweighed by the distraction that accompanies it.
We know this. We know our phones suck. We even know the apps on them were engineered to be addictive. We know that the utopian promises of technology—to make work more efficient, to make connections stronger, to make photos better and more shareable, to make the news more accessible, to make communication easier—have in fact created more work, more responsibility, more opportunities to fail like a failure.
Part of the problem is that these digital technologies, from cell phones to Apple Watches, from Instagram to Slack, encourage our worst habits. They stymie our best-laid plans for self-preservation. They ransack our free time. They make it increasingly impossible to do the things that actually ground us. They turn a run in the woods into an opportunity for self-optimization. They are the neediest and most selfish entity in every interaction I have with others. They compel us to frame experiences, as we are experiencing them, with future captions, and to conceive of travel as worthwhile only when documented for public consumption. They steal joy and solitude and leave only exhaustion and regret. I hate them and resent them and find it increasingly difficult to live without them.
Digital detoxes don’t fix the problem. The only long-term fix is making the background into foreground: calling out the exact ways digital technologies have colonized our lives, aggravating and expanding our burnout in the name of efficiency.
What these technologies do best is remind us of what we’re not doing: who’s hanging out without us, who’s working more than us, what news we’re not reading. It refuses to allow our consciousness off the hook, in order to do the essential, protective, regenerative work of sublimating and repressing. Instead, it provides the opposite: a nonstop barrage of notifications and reminders and interactions. It brings every detail of our lives and others’ to the forefront in a way that makes it impossible to ignore. Of course we do more.
Like so many aspects of burnout, digital exhaustion isn’t unique to millennials. But our generation has a relationship with digital technologies that, at least in this moment, is uniquely aggravating. Our young adult lives were profoundly shaped by them, but we also have distinct memories of what life was like before their existence. Those memories are age and class dependent, but the commonality remains: Our childhoods weren’t textured by smartphones, yet our college years and young adulthoods were contoured by digital cameras and early Facebook and constant accessibility, even if it was via a flip phone.
These technologies changed how many millennials made plans, how we flirted, how we behaved and were then held accountable for that behavior in public spaces. They changed how we took photos, how we acquired music and listened to it, what we did when we were on our computers, and how long we spent on those computers. Everything seemed to be changing, becoming easier or cheaper or simpler, but it still felt gradual. My original “smart” phone had a shit camera and took ten minutes to load a single email. I still listened to CDs in my apartment and in the car. I watched Netflix DVDs on my laptop. I blogged on WordPress. I knew people were out there with Blackberries, but that wasn’t yet my world.
Slowly, and then seemingly all at once, all of that changed. The iPhone became available outside of AT&T. Netflix started streaming. So did Hulu and Amazon and HBO. Twitter took off and largely demolished the blogging world. Young millennials stopped using Facebook as their parents signed on. Instagram took off, and with it the mandate to aestheticize and package experiences for public consumption.
Our phones became extensions of ourselves—and the primary means of organizing our lives. I check email on my phone. I deposit checks using my phone. I schedule Airbnbs on my phone. I order groceries, and takeout food, and clothes on my phone. I split the bill for drinks using my phone, and figure out my subway route on my phone, and use my phone to make funny faces at my friends’ newborn children. I stopped bringing magazines to the gym and started just bringing . . . my phone. I exchanged cable for an AppleTV. I stopped using my iPod, and my digital camera, and my address book, and my tape recorder, and the DVD drive on my computer. When I got a new computer, it didn’t even have a DVD drive.
It took a decade, but the lives of most millennials I know have followed a similar technological consolidation. My brother resisted a smartphone until 2017 before capitulating; others have successfully quit or altogether ignored social media. But those cases increasingly feel like the outliers. For most of us, our lives now flow through our phones and the apps on them: They are the primary mediators of our errands, our travel, our work, our exercise, our organization, our memories, our connections, our finances, and our friendships.
Which is why it’s so difficult to moderate our relationship with our phones, let alone disengage with them entirely. For so many of us, disengaging from our phone means disengaging from life. There’s a fair amount of shame affixed to this new reality: that those more connected to their phones are lesser people, or at least people with lesser wills. But the phone (or, more specifically, the apps on the phone) was engineered to first create a need, then fill that need in a way that would be impossible to re-create—all under the guise of productivity and efficiency. To succumb to its promises doesn’t mean you’re weak; it simply means you’re a human, frantically trying to complete everything required of you.
But before we get into the specific ways that phones encourage our worst habits and aggravate our burnout, we should be on the same page about why an object with services that we hate is engineered to keep making us feel like crap. In short: It makes money. That money comes from manipulating, sustaining, and beguiling our attention, which is sold to advertisers, which in turn makes the app money—and makes our phones indispensable.
When people talk about “the attention economy,” they’re talking about the buying and selling of our time: time we used to spend with our minds “turned off,” meandering on a walk, staring into space at a traffic light, those seventeen minutes before you fall asleep. It’s an economy based on taking up residency in the interstitial moments of our lives but also through subtle, repeated disruption of the main events—so much so that Netflix’s CEO famously joked that the company’s main competitor is sleep.2
Dozens of studies and articles confirm what we already intuitively understand: Checking social media, at least when you find something positive or interesting, releases a small amount of dopamine, the pleasure-seeking chemical in our brain. Our brain loves dopamine, so it keeps seeking it out, addicted to the possibility of incremental changes: new photos, new likes, new comments—what the man who engineered the Like button calls “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure.”3 The same principle applies to our phones, generally: It doesn’t matter if there’s always something new on the home screen each time we pick it up. What matters is that sometimes there’s something new and worth our time.
But social media wasn’t always this way. Think back on your first memories of Facebook: pre-Newsfeed, pre–Like button. You’d go to the website (on your computer!) and then maybe a day would go by, and you’d check it again. But the addition of the Like button—and changing the “alerts” from blue to red, so that people couldn’t ignore them—incentivized repeated, obsessive returns to the site. For years, if you wanted to read more on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, you’d have to refresh the site; in 2010, Loren Brichter introduced the “pull to refresh” function on the Tweetie app, which has now become standard on social media apps and beyond. These days, “pull to refresh” isn’t really necessary—there’s technology that could automatically refresh your app—but it functions as a sort of slot machine lever, keeping the user engaged far beyond when they’d normally have clicked out of the app.
Again, it wasn’t always this way. Snapchat didn’t always alert you when someone was simply typing. News sites didn’t always send push alerts. Neither did apps for meditation, or Starbucks, or dating, or the New England Patriots, or learning Spanish, or the number matching game 2048. Sephora didn’t alert you when you were close to a store, and Google didn’t ask you to rate your subway trip after you finished it. But without your attention—your repeated, compulsive attention—these apps would become worthless. Or, at the very least, far less valuable. So they softly urge, manipulate, and command it: through notifications, but also through gamification, which use game-like elements to draw you into otherwise very un-fun activities, like following my Delta Frequent Flyer progress.
These days, the phone is where most millennials do our bank account checking, Amazon ordering, ride hailing, route finding, music playing, TikTok watching, photo taking, secondhand clothes selling, recipe finding, sleeping baby monitoring, and ticket (plane, movie, bus, concert) storing. Some of those tasks can still be done off the phone, but they’re increasingly designed to be performed through an app. That’s how phones root themselves in our lives: not through one app or five, but via a whole maelstrom of assault on our attention. The user is the ostensible benefactor of all this technological advancement, but our reliance on our phones is a net loss: a loss of privacy, of attention, of autonomy. The winners are the companies that have so effectively exploited our drive for convenience, over and over again, for profit.
When I first got an iPhone, it felt so bizarre to be able to look anything up at any time. Now separation from my phone is like phantom limb syndrome. In those early iPhone years, I could still leave it at home all day and not even notice its absence. Last year, I forgot it at home on a weekend trip and felt totally unmoored. I know exactly how alerts and push notifications manipulate me and am still delighted when I step out of the Lyft and feel a buzz in my pocket: Who could it be? Oh, right, it’s just the app asking me to rate my driver, just like it’s done the last five hundred times. I am the rat pushing the lever to feed myself poison that tastes, ever so briefly, like candy.
Granted, I have a job that keeps me more online than most, more wed to Twitter than nearly all. But there are other tethers, shared and unique: Pinterest, Instagram stories, Poshmark, sports, crosswords, Slack, school apps, fertility apps, meal-planning apps, fitness apps, and text chains that ironically feel like the only thing tethering us to our non-phone lives. And it doesn’t matter if you follow the tips for reducing your phone dependence: Getting rid of the pushes and email alerts might stop the notifications, but the behaviors themselves have already been internalized. You can delete an app, like I deleted Twitter, and still figure out other ways to access it. You can put your phone on airplane mode after eight p.m., which I do, and still find your tendencies unchecked at eight a.m.
Why is the allure so strong? The dopamine explanation is part of it, for sure. But for me, I think the larger draw is a shared delusion: that with my phone, I can multitask like a motherfucker, and be all things to everyone, including myself. It’s not the shiny black rectangle that’s beguiling; it’s the idea that your life could be so ruthlessly, beautifully efficient, seamless, under control, that makes it appealing.
That’s a lie, of course. It doesn’t matter how many times we read studies about how multitasking actually inhibits your ability to complete tasks: We convince ourselves that the internet makes us better, more efficient, right about to really start killing it. We’ll concentrate at work; we’ll master that errand paralysis through apps; we’ll keep our household in order through other apps; we’ll figure out a social media strategy that at once develops and refines our personal brand while also demanding very little of our attention; we’ll make everyone in our lives feel recognized and special because of texting!
When all that fails to occur, we stress out, which makes us want to multitask even more to try to get a handle on the situation, which makes us even more inefficient. It’s an attention death spiral for all of us. I think it’s valuable, though, to parse the forms of the internet that are particularly propellent for burnout: 1) millennial-oriented social media; 2) the news; 3) technologies that spread work into what remains of our nonwork lives.
For millennials, Facebook shaped (and messed up) many of our social lives when we were in our teens and twenties. But these days, most millennials I know have largely abandoned it. Facebook is toxic, Facebook is political—and the knowledge of the ways the company has exploited our personal information is too difficult to ignore. Most of my millennial friends have started using it almost exclusively for the groups: private, public, and secret, oriented around podcasts and hobbies and discussion interests.
A portion of young millennials still use Snapchat; Twitter remains the compulsion of choice for many writers and academics and wonks; Pinterest has its own psychological attractions. The communities of Reddit have an addictive pull. LinkedIn is Twitter for people with MBAs. But the social media platform most overtly responsible for burnout is Instagram. This might seem counterintuitive: Instagram’s appeal has long been that it’s Facebook without drama, a distillation of what made Facebook truly interesting in the first place, that is, cute pics. But generating those cute, curated pics is exhausting. So, in its own way, is looking at them: a never-ending scroll of lives that don’t just seem cooler than yours, but also more balanced, more put together. The Instagram feed becomes a constant, low-key lecture on the ways in which you haven’t figured your shit out.
I look at my feed right now and I see a picture of a well-behaved puppy in beautiful morning light, a husband posting a picture of his wife’s perfect Natasha Lyonne shaggy haircut, a friend from college holding her baby in an Oregon pot field, a Montana reporter on a rocky traverse outside Glacier National Park, another reporter’s glam wedding look in Bulgaria, an ad for a swimsuit I was looking at yesterday, a blurry photo of a quasi friend’s epic karaoke weekday night, a writer I haven’t spoken to in two years finishing a draft of his book, a really well-lit photo of a friend’s baby I’ve met once, a local friend out on the river after fishing, my best friend from college at a pool party with no one else I know.
I broke down the anxieties each one of these sparks:
Cute Well-Behaved Puppy →
I should take cuter pictures of my puppy.
Wife’s Perfect Natasha Lyonne Shaggy Haircut →
God, my hair is uncool.
College friend in pot field →
That seems like a lot of work.
Montana Reporter in Glacier →
I am not hardcore.
Glam Bulgarian Wedding Look →
I have gone feral out here in Montana.
Swimsuit →
Is it time to go for the late-thirties one-piece look?
Epic Karaoke →
Am I an old lady with no friends?
Book Finish →
Remember how I haven’t finished my book?
Well-Lit Photo of Baby →
What if I regret not having a baby?
Local Friend on River →
I spend too much time on my computer.
Best Friend at Pool Party →
She has new friends that aren’t me and I hate it.
Are these rational takeaways? Sort of. They’re regular anxieties, the type of worries that could pop up from looking at a magazine or a friend’s postcard. But on Instagram, they’re all jammed into one continuous line, piquing every corner of our potential anxiety. They form a personalized mosaic of the lives we’re not living, choices we’re not making, and they force a type of pernicious comparison cycle. Each photo is just one in a tall stack of evidence, posted over months and years, pointing to how others are living the millennial dream: working at a cool job but not working too much; hanging out with a fun and supportive partner; if desired, raising cute and not cloying kids; taking unique vacations and making time for interesting hobbies.
We all know that Instagram, like any other social media platform, isn’t “real.” It’s a curated version of life. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t judge ourselves against it. I find that millennials are far less jealous of objects or belongings than the holistic experiences represented there, the sort of thing that prompts people to comment, I want your life. The millennial dream depicted on Instagram isn’t just desirable—it’s balanced, satisfied, and unaffiliated with burnout.
The photos and videos that induce the most jealousy are those that suggest a perfect equilibrium (work hard, play hard!) has been reached. Work is rarely pictured in the millennial Instagram life, but it’s always there. Periodically, it’s photographed as a space that’s fun or zany or has a good view—and it’s always framed as rewarding or satisfying. But most of the time, it’s the thing you’re getting away from: You worked hard enough to enjoy life.
But few of us have even come close to reaching that equilibrium. Posting on social media is a means of narrativizing our own lives: We’re telling ourselves what our lives are like. And when we can’t find the satisfaction we’ve been told we should receive from a good, “fulfilling” job and a balanced personal life, the best way to convince ourselves is to illustrate it for others.
If you look at my Instagram, it’d be easy to extrapolate that I spend all my time hiking, communing with nature and my dogs, running or walking or cross-country skiing—all while managing to travel somewhere equally beautiful every other week. I do spend a lot of time outdoors with my dogs, and I do spend a lot of time traveling for my job. But I post the outdoor pictures to try to prove to myself and others that the bulk of my Montana life isn’t spent behind a computer, and the other shots are to convince myself and others that constant travel isn’t an alienating slog, but a thrill. The truth of my real, lived life lies somewhere in between what’s pictured and what’s intended. But there’s a reason I sometimes find myself scrolling through my own account as I fight that before-sleep anxiety: When I don’t feel connected to myself or my life, Instagram reminds me of who I’ve decided I am.
For knowledge workers, a well-curated Instagram, like a popular Twitter presence, can be a gateway to a job, or #sponcon. The purest example of this concept is the social media influencer, whose entire income source is performing and mediating the self online. Most people’s lives aren’t so explicitly monetizable, but that doesn’t mean they’re not cultivating a brand to project to the larger world. To wit: I have a friend whose brand is “Parenting is hard but always worth it.” Others include “My kids are so bizarre!”; “I’m a Cool Dad”; “Wilderness overposter”; “Books are life”; “Wheels up”; “Culinary adventuress”; “Cosmopolitan nomad”; “I ride multiple bikes”; “I am yoga”; “I have friends and we drink alcohol” and “Creative being creative.”
A powerful brand requires constant maintenance and optimization. We might not curate our “squares” as ruthlessly as Gen Z—who often keep just a handful of photos posted at a time—but most of us think about how often to post, when something’s “story” content versus when it’s a post, how much photo editing is acceptable and how much is too obvious. And then there’s the never-ending search for content: At its most pronounced, it’s people risking their lives in extreme locations “for the ’gram”; in most people’s lives, it’s just oscillating between actually experiencing a thing and thinking about how to best present that thing on Instagram in an on-brand way. We post, therefore we are.
That’s how Instagram further blurs whatever boundaries remain between work and play. There is no “off the clock” when every hour is an opportunity for content generation, facilitated by smartphones that make every moment capturable and brandable. Even when you’re somewhere without phone service—traveling internationally, in the woods, on the water—you can still take the picture and save it for later. Instagram’s photo compression system means that even the crappiest of internet signals can get the job done. And then you wait to see measurable approval of your life roll in.
Whether or not you explicitly conceive of Instagram in this way—as a window unto others’ balanced lives; as an opportunity to portray your own—even casual users find themselves resentful of the place it comes to occupy in their minds. Open the app and discover a dose of newness—and, if you posted yourself, an opportunity to see each and every person who’s liked the latest slice of your life, who’s watched your story, who’s messaged you a torrent of 100s in affirmation. It’s quietly thrilling, at least until you think about just how little has changed since the last time you opened the app.
Which explains the twinned pleasure and pain of social media, the sharp contrast between our draw to it and the continually unsatisfying experience of actually being on it. Instagram provides such low-effort distraction, and is so effective in posturing as actual leisure, that we find ourselves there when we’d rather be elsewhere—deep in a book, talking with a friend, taking a walk, staring into space.
When I have fifteen minutes before bed and I’m exhausted, I know the best thing to ease myself into rest is reading a book. But just making that choice to put down the phone demands discipline. Opening the Instagram app is easy—even if it makes me feel like shit, and even more in need of the sort of actual escape the book could’ve provided. Same for the moment the plane lands: What if I keep reading whatever I’m reading? Or rest my eyes, or do a quick meditation, or just observe the packed humanity around me? Instead, I get anxious for the LTE to kick in so that I can check all the incremental changes and affirmations on my social media.
That’s how social media robs of us of the moments that could counterbalance our burnout. It distances us from actual experiences as we obsess over documenting them. It turns us into needless multitaskers. As you’ll see in the next chapter, it erodes what used to be known as leisure time. And perhaps most damagingly, it destroys opportunities for solitude: what Cal Newport, drawing on the definition of Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin, describes as the “subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.”4 In other words, hanging out with your own mind and all the emotions and ideas that experience promises and threatens to unearth.
Ask yourself: When was the last time you were really bored? Not bored with social media, or bored with a book, but truly, expansively, bored, a boredom that seemed to have no beginning or end, the sort of boredom that characterized so many of our childhoods? Until recently, it’d been years for me—at least as long as I’ve had a smartphone, with its limitless aptitude for distraction.
But then I spent three weeks in remote parts of Southeast Asia, where traveling required long hours on winding roads. There was no internet, and it was too bumpy to even attempt to read. So I listened to music, and stared out the window, and allowed my mind to wander places it hadn’t been in years: memories, thought experiments, new ideas. My memory of childhood boredom is that it was always painful—something I was desperate to escape from. But now I find myself desperate to escape to it, and repeatedly foiled by the easy proximity of the phone.
I want to never think of Instagram again, yet feel a deep mournfulness for what I’d lose if I were to abandon it. It’s an unrewarding part-time job that’s also my only connection to friends I’ve become too busy to spend actual time with. And it’s become so intertwined with my performance of self that I fear there’s no self without it. That’s an exaggeration, maybe. But the prospect of relearning who I am—and who others are—remains daunting. I’m already exhausted, I tell myself. Where would I find the energy to do something that hard?
Up until the 2016 election, keeping up with the news cycle felt generally achievable. Read a few websites, listen to the news, maybe a political podcast, and you’ve got it. But Trump sent the news cycle into hyperdrive. Through the election and early days of his presidency, I began to feel increasingly out of control, a sense that seemed to extend to the state of the government, society, the presidency, democracy, the global world order. Every time I tried to get a handle on what was happening around me, and tried to really root myself in the facts and the context, the ground began to shift. Trump tweeted; someone else lied; Trump tweeted; someone else published a big investigative piece; Trump tweeted something racist; #MeToo happened; Trump tweeted something else racist; someone from the cabinet resigned.
Katherine Miller, a longtime politics editor and writer at BuzzFeed, best described the feeling just months into Trump’s presidency: “Everything might seem so normal,” she wrote, “then you unlock your phone and—bam—everything gets LOUD again. You have almost certainly had this experience: You wake up in the morning or from a nap, or walk out of a movie, then check Facebook, Twitter, your texts to find people mid-thought, context-free, frozen in emotion, angry at Trump or the Trump people or the anti-Trump people or the media, angry and mocking at hypocrisy whose details aren’t yet clear to you, angry at how ineffectual someone is, or maybe they’re doing something even more indecipherable—it’s not anger, it’s just a meme or a quotation or a screenshot with ‘lol’ or ‘2017’ or just an emoji. The mystery begins: What happened? What has Trump done now?”5
Miller’s experience of the news cycle, like my own, is elevated: our notifications are filled with people who are relentlessly, indefatigably online, and many of them are yelling at us or, since we’re members of “the media,” in our general direction. But journalists aren’t the only ones assaulted by the news. Boomers text their millennial kids to check whether they’ve seen what Trump’s done; all sorts of seemingly well-meaning people post sincere reactions and pleas to PAY ATTENTION, REFUSE TO BECOME COMPLACENT on Instagram and Facebook.
I appreciate Miller’s use of the word “mystery,” though, to describe the frantic attempt at catch-up: It captures both the compulsive, serialized aspect of the contemporary news cycle, but also the constant frustration at never actually wrapping up the story. Like social media, reading the news—with all its new ness—activates the dopamine machine in our brains. In Riveted, the cognitive scientist Jim Davies explains that dopamine makes “everything look significant”: a switch in Oval Office personnel, a gossip item about Ivanka’s ability to land dinner reservations, a major policy reversal, a new meme retweeted by the president, it all feels equally, desperately important to understand.
And while some of those reports are indeed significant, experiencing them online, either through push notifications or Twitter or other people’s texts, flattens them into one long plane of dubious import. A major policy reversal is far more crucial to understand than Ivanka’s dinner reservations, but when both are reported with equal urgency and fervor, who’s to know? It’s increasingly difficult to parse where to allocate your most rapt attention. Which helps explain why, at least fifty times over the last three years, I’ve watched a “revelation” break across my Twitter timeline and had no idea how to react. “Is this actually a big deal?” I’d ask a politics reporter. Usually, the answer was “potentially—but most likely no.”
Part of the problem, of course, is that events that would have been a big deal during previous presidencies simply aren’t under Trump. There are multiple reasons for the muting of would-be scandals: the refusal of the much of the political right to be publicly scandalized, morally, financially, behaviorally, or otherwise, by his behavior, but also Trump’s own ability to redirect the news cycle via new false and/or outlandish and/or racist statements. If you’re a Trump supporter, the dynamics are inverted: Trump does something that should be celebrated and isn’t; when that celebration fails to arrive, he rightly redirects toward another deserved point of celebration.
In practice, the Trump-directed news cycle has all the notes of a horribly plotted film: narrative threads continually dead end; punchlines fail to land or arrive at all; characters don’t develop and their actions have no consequences. It’s impossible to tell which plot points need to be remembered and which ones are meaningless. And, worst of all, there’s never any closure or catharsis. There are cliffhangers from week to week like a bad soap opera, but you never figure out what’s really going on, what’s really going to happen, who’ll be held responsible.
Likening the news to a movie isn’t meant to trivialize it. Trump’s actions, like any political figure’s, have had very real consequences in the world; multiple reputable studies have underlined the ways in which anti-Semitic violence, bullying, xenophobia, and white supremacy increased under his administration. People argue about whether or not it’s okay to characterize one of his tweets as racist, but there are millions of people who actually experience harm from the racist attitudes Trump has espoused, propagated, and normalized. There’s also the generalized anxiety of living under this administration as a trans person, or an immigrant, or an undocumented person, or a queer non–birth parent, or a Jewish person, or a Native person, or even just as a woman. Some of it stems from living in low- or high-grade fear that people you love will be taken from you. Or an overwhelming sense that hard-fought-for rights are being eroded. Or the slow-burning revelation that you are now living in a country in decline. Even if you think that others shouldn’t feel this way doesn’t change the fact that they do.
Everyone has different ways of coping with anxiety and fear and sadness. But one of the most prevalent, now and for centuries, has been to turn it into stories that feel morally legible. That’s what melodrama did for societal tensions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; that’s what film melodrama and protest music did in the twentieth century. The news has long served this societal function, but it’s never provided omnipresent dramatization in quite the way it does now.
Sometimes we find these narratives on deeply partisan sites, or by following deeply partisan figures. Sometimes we find them in the dry play-by-play of the New York Times, the richly investigative pieces of ProPublica, or the palace intrigue of Vanity Fair. Political profiles are the new celebrity profiles; celebrity gossip has expanded to include the love lives and peccadilloes and best tweets of everyone from Kellyanne Conway to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We’re not reading this information because we’re curious; we’re reading it because we’re desperately, continuously confused—and each click promises something approximating meaning. And while Trump is the inciting factor, there’s little hope that our broken media cycle will mend itself after he leaves office.
The same principle applies outside the realm of explicitly presidential politics, in the chasm between the tragedies that surround us and the apparent inability to do anything about them. Gun violence, broken healthcare, refugee crises, global climate change, police brutality, children in government custody at the border, mental health crises, the opioid crises, violence against trans women and Native women—to cope, you can choose darkness, or apathy, or obsessive self-edification. Consuming news makes it feel like you’re doing something, even if it’s just bearing witness.
Of course, bearing witness takes a toll—especially when the news is structured to emotionally aggravate more than educate. Plus, as Brad Stulberg argues in a piece about breaking digital addiction, it can provide a false illusion of participation: “Instead of worrying about illness you can exercise,” he points out. “Instead of despairing about the political situation and making comments on Facebook you can contact your elected officials. Instead of feeling awful for people in unfortunate circumstances you can volunteer.”6
All of this is true. But those are options for people who aren’t already so exhausted by the rest of their lives, people with the wherewithal for proactiveness instead of the reactive, frantic Band-Aid-applying approach so many of us have settled into. When you’re burnt out, sometimes the best you feel like you can do, as a responsible citizen with an open heart, is try to keep up with the news. But then the heavy, inescapable load of that same news burns you out even more: The world becomes work.
For many, there is a struggle to acknowledge that more information, like more friends, or more photos, or more work ethic, is actually worse—that you can fuck yourself over with your own good intentions. In a piece on “the new FOMO,” Wired journalist Nick Stockton acknowledges what we all know: Checking Facebook, reading the news, being online all the time, makes us feel worse. There are studies that clearly show as much. Smart people, lots of them, say that we should all engage in social media breaks.
But as Stockton writes, “I don’t want to take a break. The internet is doing exactly what it’s supposed to: give me all the information, all the time. And I want to hold that fire hose of information right up to my face and gulp down as much as I can. I just don’t want to feel bad about it.”7 Recovering from burnout doesn’t mean extracting yourself from the world. It just means thinking a lot more actively, and carefully, about the way you’ve convinced yourself is the best way to interact with it.
A year into my job at BuzzFeed, Slack arrived. We’d had a group chat system, but Slack was different: It promised a revolution. Its goal was to “kill email” by switching workplace communication to direct messages and group discussion channels. It promised easier collaboration (true) and less clogged inboxes (maybe). And most importantly, it had a sophisticated mobile app. Like email, Slack allowed work to spread into the crevices of life where until that point it couldn’t fit. In a more efficient, instantaneous manner than email, it brings the entire office into your phone, which is to say, into your bed, when you land on the plane, when you walk down the street, as you stand in line at the grocery store, or as you wait, half naked, on the exam table for your doctor.
Granted, work has long been able to follow people home. Doctors would review their “dictation,” or notes on a patient visit, after hours, and you could always whip out some memos on the Apple IIe at home. But none of those processes were “live”: Whatever work you accomplished on your own wouldn’t be known to others, or force others to respond in kind, until the next workday. Workaholism could be a personal problem.
But the spread of email—on the desktop, then on the Wi-Fi enabled laptop, then the Blackberry, and now all manner of smartphones, smart watches, and “smart appliances,” including your exercise bike—changed all that. It didn’t just accelerate communication; it standardized a new, far more addictive form of communication, with a casualness that cloaked its destructiveness. When you “shoot off a few emails” on a Sunday afternoon, for example, you might convince yourself you’re just getting on top of things for the week ahead—which might feel true. But what you’re really doing is giving work access to be everywhere you are. And once allowed in, it spreads without your permission: to the dinner table, the couch, the kid’s soccer game, the grocery store, the car, the family vacation.
Sites of digital leisure increasingly double as sites of digital labor: If you help run your company’s social media, every time you log into Facebook or Twitter or Instagram you face bombardment from your work accounts. If someone emails you and you don’t immediately respond, they’ll move straight to your social media accounts—even when you have an auto-responder indicating that you’re not available. Fewer and fewer employers supply work phones (either on the actual desk or in the form of work cell phones); calls and texts to your “work phone” (from sources, from clients, from employers) are just calls and texts to your phone. “Back in the day, AIM was the thing,” one Silicon Valley CEO explained. “You had an away message. You were literally away from your device. Now you can’t. You’re 100 percent on at all times.”8
It’s the emails, but it’s more: It’s the Google Docs, and the conference calls you listen to on mute while making your kids’ breakfast, and the databases you can log in to from home, and your manager texting on Sunday night with “the plan for tomorrow.” Some of these developments are heralded as time-saving schedule optimizers: fewer meetings, more conference calls! Less rigid workplace hours, more flexibility! You can start your workday at home, spend an extra day at the cabin, even take off early to pick up your kid from school and wrap up loose ends later. But all that digitally enabled flexibility really means digitally enabling more work—with fewer boundaries. And Slack, like work email, makes workplace communication feel casual, even as participants internalize it as compulsory.
Granted, only a fraction of the workforce currently uses Slack—as of April 2019, around 95,000 companies paid for its services.9 But many other workplaces use similar programs, or will soon; given the unabated rise of remote work, its influence feels inescapable. There were remote workers before Slack, but unlike email, or phone calls, or Gchat, Slack is able to digitally re-create the workplace, complete with standards of decorum, and participation, and “presentism,” however unspoken. It was intended to make work easier, or at least more streamlined, but like so many work optimization tactics, it just makes those who use it work more, and with more anxiety.
Slack thus becomes a way to LARP—Live Action Role Play—your job. “LARPing your job” was coined by the technology writer John Herrman, who, all the way back in 2015, predicted the ways in which Slack would screw with our conception of work: “Slack is where people make jokes and register their presence; it is where stories and editing and administrating are discussed as much for self-justification as for the completion of actual goals. Working in an active Slack . . . is a productivity nightmare, especially if you don’t hate your coworkers. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either rationalizing or delusional.”10
As more work becomes remote, it’s something so many of us think about: How do we demonstrate that we’re “in the office” when we’re in our sweatpants on the couch? I do it by dropping links to articles (to show that I’m reading), by commenting on other people’s links (to show that I’m reading Slack), and by participating in conversations (to show that I’m engaged). I work very hard to produce evidence that I’m constantly doing work instead of, well, actually doing work.
My editors would say that there’s no need to compulsively perform on Slack. But what would they say if I just didn’t use Slack at all? People who do “knowledge work”—those whose products are often intangible, like ideas on a page—often struggle with the feeling that there’s little to show for the hours we spend sitting in front of our computers. And the compulsion is heightened for those of us who worked, job searched, or were laid off during the post-2008 recession: We’re desperate to show we’re worthy of a salaried job, and eager to demonstrate how much labor and engagement we’re willing to give in exchange for full-time employment and health insurance. That was certainly the case for me, especially in a field like culture writing, where full-time gigs remain rare.
This mindset may be delusional: Yes, of course, managers do think about how much work we’re producing, but only the worst of them are clocking how many hours the green “active” dot is showing up next to your name on Slack. And most of our coworkers are too worried about LARPing their own jobs to worry about how much you’re LARPing yours.
We’re performing, in other words, largely for ourselves. Justifying to ourselves that we deserve our job. Justifying to ourselves that writing for the internet is a vocation that deserves steady payment. At heart, this is a manifestation of a general undervaluing of our own work: Many of us still navigate the workplace as if getting paid to produce knowledge means we’re getting away with something, and have to do everything possible to make sure no one realizes they’ve made a massive mistake.
Of course, there are myriad cultural and societal forces that have led us to this point of disbelief. Every time someone makes fun of a millennial’s undergrad or grad degree, or denigrates a job that somehow manages to funnel the passion that we were told by the adults in our lives to follow; every time someone is befuddled by a job description (social media manager!) that doesn’t match their personal understanding of hard work and chooses to ridicule it instead—all of those messages come together to tell us that our work is either easy or pointless. No wonder we spend so much time trying to communicate how hard we work.
Midway through writing this book, I went to the woods. Beforehand, I bought a solar panel setup to power my laptop. And then I spent a week at a campsite on a lake in the Swan Valley, with no internet, and no phone signal—save a very small corner of camp, and even then, just enough to send out a very slow text message. Otherwise it was just me, my draft, my books, and what felt like luscious, expansive pools of time.
Every day was a variation of the same: Wake up, walk for an hour with the dogs, work for a few hours, take a run, read a novel over lunch, take another walk with the dogs, work for a few hours, have a beer while editing what I just wrote, take the dogs for a swim, get in the tent, read my novel, and go to bed. I did that for six days. I wrote over 20,000 words.
The number of actual writing hours wasn’t that huge—probably around six to seven a day. The difference was that I spent those hours actually writing. When my mind wandered, I’d pet a dog. Or I’d pick up my phone and look at a photo I took of my dog, but do nothing with it because there was nothing to do. Or I’d just stare into space. Then I’d return to what I was writing, my concentration and direction miraculously intact.
I should’ve been thrilled with my progress, but I was racked with ambivalence: If I could just work this way in the non-woods world, I could be producing so much more—and, at least theoretically, working so much less.
Of course, I was able to write with that intensity because I was essentially without obligations. I didn’t have to care for children. I didn’t have to make small talk. I didn’t have to pack anyone a lunch. I didn’t have to commute, or do laundry, or clean, save the daily excavation of pine needles from my tent. I didn’t have to shower or worry about my appearance. My work email was on an out-of-office auto-responder. I was getting nine hours of sleep a night, and had time to exercise, and money to purchase food that made me feel full and good. The only thing I really had to worry about was whether or not my solar panel was in the sun. My life—and productivity—was not unlike that of an independently wealthy white man writing in the nineteenth century.
Ultimately, that productivity had less to do with the lack of internet and more to do with the centrality of my work: It wasn’t constantly vying with distractions, but it also wasn’t vying with every other thing I had to do. Digital technologies allow work to spread into the rest of our lives, but they also allow the rest of our lives to spread into work. As I attempted to write these past three paragraphs, I was paying my credit card bill, reading a breaking news story, and figuring out how to transfer my new puppy’s microchip registration to my name. Everything—especially writing this section—was taking far longer than it should have. And none of it felt good, or fulfilling, or cathartic.
But that’s the reality of millennial, internet-ridden life: I need to be an insanely productive writer and be funny on Slack and post good links on Twitter and keep the house clean and cook a fun new recipe from Pinterest and track my exercise on MapMyRun and text my friends to ask questions about their growing children and check in with my mom and grow tomatoes in the backyard and enjoy Montana and Instagram myself enjoying Montana and shower and put on cute clothes for that thirty-minute video call with my coworkers and and and and.
The internet isn’t the root cause of our burnout. But its promise to “make our lives easier” is a profoundly broken one, responsible for the illusion that “doing it all” isn’t just possible, but mandatory. When we fail to do so, we don’t blame the broken tools. We blame ourselves. Deep down, millennials know the primary exacerbator of burnout isn’t really email, or Instagram, or a constant stream of news alerts. It’s the continuous failure to reach the impossible expectations we’ve set for ourselves.