Quick Note: In November, Michael Dean reached out about his vision to start an anthology of the best essays published on the internet in 2025 that capture the spirit of what it was like to be alive then.
He wanted writers from around the world to send in their best work to be scored by a hardcore judging process. The top 10 essays would be published in print. And with $10,000 for the winner, the world’s largest “open” essay prize.
I submitted a pretty popular essay I wrote in the Fall on how to be less extremely online, but with some major rewrites and restructuring.
To my surprise and mild horror, my essay came 1st.
The book is out now. This first edition is a limited release of 1,000 copies, and sales close on March 31st.
It’s a cool project with a big vision. A kind of analog renaissance, caring about quality instead of AI-slop, an example of how we can pull the internet out of the ether and back into physical, tangible, textured, real life. Despite the ease and accessibility of reading on a screen, there is something refined and delightful, almost visceral, about paper and ink.
The final essay is below.
I think it’s much better than the original. More focused and clear and (maybe) timeless.
If you’d like to read the full version in print, as well as the other 12 essays featured, you can get a copy of the anthology here. 100% of the royalties will go to the finalists, the judges, and next year’s prize pool.
“At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.”
— David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
The other night, I got a flat tire on my bike, the fourth this year, and I had to take the city bus home in the dark. And as I stood on the bus, being rocked back and forth by potholes, an eerie and vacant silence destitute of any warm conversation or friendly chatter, I saw a girl across from me, Lebanese maybe, big bulky plastic headphones on, coat stuffed up to her ears, flicking through videos with an almost familiar ferocity—videos of tall white women with perfect makeup and poreless skin, tall white women in sparkling red dresses, tall white women on beaches in Greece or cafes in Italy. I saw a guy beside me with plastic headphones the size of arctic earmuffs, glossy and vacant eyes, watching Call of Duty gameplay, while scrolling through videos about Trump and missile strikes, while changing videos every few seconds, while trying to drink his coffee at the same time, raising his phone up like Simba to keep his glossy eyes glued, to not miss a moment. And I saw another guy on the bus, beside the hypothetically Lebanese girl, watching videos of a chef pulling pizzas out of a wood-fired oven—pizzas with genoa salami and sweet pepper and fennel, pizzas with prosciutto and arugula, pizzas with sausage and wild mushrooms, pizzas bewitched to a dark gold and glistening, while he pulled a second hard boiled egg out of a big crinkled Ziploc bag and began to peel it, without really looking, since he was watching his videos, fumbling his phone on his knees, surfing his phone across his knees, trying to hold the shell bits in one hand, but not really paying attention (since he was watching his videos), eggs shells cracking, egg shells splitting, falling all over floor. And I thought to myself, this must be a metaphor or something. I looked down the dark bus, lit up by a ghostly blue glow, and everyone was doing the same thing. Necks bent at forty-five degrees, postured to the palm of their hand, mesmerized by a little screen, constantly, mindlessly, compulsively reloading the feed, lost in a world that is entirely not their own.
And, feeling almost unbearably sad, I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the dark city bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much time he is willing to spend being passively entertained.
We live in a culture of watchers and appearers—really, of watchers and approvers—a culture where it feels distinctively hard to be a real human being. It’s like some sort of strange Orwellian nightmare, but worse, since we have also employed ourselves as the watchers, as Big Brother, looking in at a fabricated and essentially false image of other people’s lives, an image that isn’t real, in any sense that we use the word “real,” as in factual and not imagined, but we, for some reason, fool ourselves that maybe it is. Instead of consolation, screens make us feel more anxious and more distant and more disconnected, as an apathy sets in that is increasingly abstract. Maybe David Foster Wallace was right, about this strange post-literate society we find ourselves in, where we’re lonely because we’re overconnected, and to cope, everyone is numbing out.
We’ve become inverted headless horsemen: big floating heads, drifting and disembodied, restless and searching. Looking for our bodies. Bodies that have been taken from us. Bodies we lost somewhere along the way in the big promises of convenience and what actually makes us happy.
These platforms feed into our desire to create a certain impression of ourselves in the minds of other people, in order to be liked or admired or accepted or, to be maybe a little simplistic but mostly accurate, unconditionally loved. But even after all the time and energy and careful cropping of ourselves to win approval or applause or whatever, even if we succeed, especially if we succeed, we fail. Because this polished person has almost nothing to do with who we really are on the inside, so we feel disgusted and fraudulent and trapped and sad. The danger—dare I say it, the peril—we have before us is casting ourselves as a spectator, a watcher, sinking snugly into the inertia of the passenger seat, instead of taking on the role of actor in the story itself. The danger is to spend our days watching ourselves being looked at, experiencing reality in terms of how it affects other people’s view of us, wanting witnesses, an audience to affirm our life matters and our experiences actually happened, distilling our identity down into an object of vision, a sight.
Modern writers have picked up on this scent of desperation like bloodhounds, like pre-teen boys. Everywhere essays are going viral on how to stop doom-scrolling on your “gross little phone” and literally just do things. Despite being a generally useless indicator of quality, I think we can use popularity to take a cultural pulse, to find the raw nerve-endings, to gauge the state of the subconscious which, as any Jungian will tell you, always runs to the opposite of the conscious mind. (Enantiodromia, it’s called, if you want to get fancy). I think this writing is so popular because it gestures toward a quiet yet violent yearning we all seem to share. This urge to be less performative, less see-through, less concerned with what others think of how we live—the urge to be less extremely online.
To reduce phone use, there are a few tactical things like deleting social media apps, deciding not to scroll during daylight, setting the screen to black and white, leaving it buried in a drawer in another room, or even more draconian measures, like downgrading to a dumb phone. But the reality is that without addressing the deeper, more metaphysical angst that drives this addiction, no tactics will make that much of a difference.
As the cultural conversation is dominated by what is fast and loud and immediately engaging—because those are the very qualities that screens reward—we lose the capacity to think in paragraphs, to think hard about the same thing for half an hour, to practice any kind of sustained attention. The ideas that resist compression are forgotten, cast aside, as everything has to be summarized in bullet points, stripped of all excess verbiage. And the faster things go, the more immersed we are in the infinitude of speed, unwilling to grapple with the slowness of the real world around us, the more we forget to feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet. That deprivation makes itself felt in the body as a kind of dread. A full body angst. I don’t think this feeling is an accident. It’s your conscience, whatever divine spark or higher knowing that is within you, sensing it is making you sick, trying to tell you, some days screaming at you, to stop.
Yet the worst part, the part that can only be described as sinister, is that the only cure seems like more. In order to compensate for the inner emptiness, you reload the feed again. And so a sense of lostness plants in your gut. And the loneliness intensifies into something you think you’ll just have to put up with for the rest of your life. This, mind you, is the best definition of addiction I’ve come across: something that makes you feel terrible, but the only way to feel better, it seems, is to do it again.
On his regular rants about ‘the Facebook,’ an old business professor I had in Navarra used to say, in his velvety Spanish accent, “If there’s no price, you are the price.” Entertainment’s main goal is not to entertain but to keep you so hooked, so riveted, that you can’t tear yourself away so advertisers can advertise. To create an anxiety that only promises relief by purchase. It’s a system that reduces the nobility of man to a cog in the capitalist machine, a unit of utility, something to sell to. And even if the powerful and pragmatic and ultra-intelligent algorithm can discern more about you in a few seconds than your Mom or best friend or wife knows about you, maybe more than you know about yourself, even if it can show you all your favorite things, all the stuff you love and laugh at, the algorithm doesn’t care about you. To it, you’re just data, a string of inputs and impressions, zeroes and ones. What the algorithm understands about you doesn’t mean anything to it. It’s not personal.
There was a Jesuit preacher, Anthony de Mello, who said if you’re suffering but not willing to do anything about it, you need to suffer more. Suffer until you get sick of your suffering. Which sounds harsh, but it’s true. The transformative moments in my life only came when the pain of staying the same finally became greater than the pain of changing. It wasn’t courage, perse, but a recognition of the cost of inaction.
