/lit/ - Literature

Elaine's on her laptop, online shopping now, always online shopping. Always with one tab open, an endless stream of clothes she never wears and no one ever sees. They’re nice clothes though, Mac thinks.

“Did you hear about the nuclear test?”

“Another? I think so.”

“Yes another. I think it could really mean war soon. They don’t stop, and they’re getting bigger, the tests.”

Mac just sits in silence, sucking at his Coke through a red straw, chewing the red straw.

“You know if it happens, it wont be you who gets sent over to fight. It’ll be me, or people like me, my friends, you know, young guys.”

“Doesn’t matter if they drop a nuke on us.”

“Why would they nuke us?”

“To send a message. I don’t know. We’re not strategic but we’re also not very well protected, plus there’s a lot of us here, the death toll would be massive.”

“I don’t think it’ll happen.”

Mac stands up. Elaine has four small cacti sitting on her windowsill, soaking in the modicum of light that parses through the blinds, and he tips a bit of his Coke into their black plastic pots. He watches the soil absorb the Coke, watches it darken slightly, the Coke run off and drip out of the bottom of the pots. Then he presses his hand against the spines of one of the cacti to see if they are sharp, and they are, but not sharp enough to break the skin of his thumb, and he presses harder, and harder, until he thinks if he pressed any harder it might actually break the skin, and this is where he stops. Then he turns his thumb around and inspects the little shallow dimple the spine has left. He can hear Elaine typing away on her laptop behind him.

Everything described by other anons in this thread perfectly describes me. There's little more I can add, my short attention span makes me permanently anxious and I find nearly impossible to 'relax' and not feel either agitated or guilty.

But I want to ask, how normal and widespread do you think this is? I feel like everyone my age is addicted to their phone, but I don't feel like everyone is unhappy about it as I am - but maybe I just don't know because I can't see inside their brain. I have friends who have expressed similar concerns but they already have quite similar personality types to me. For want of a better, less pretentious term, does this shortening of attention span affect 'normies' in the same way? Do you think this unhappiness is a common phenomenon here on /lit/ specifically because 4chan attracts unhappy people (or maybe turns people unhappy) or do you think everyone (including 'normies') is unhappy and they're just not letting on?

I'm thinking I need to reduce my internet usage for a while. I don't really absorb anything anymore, things just pass by my eyes passively. Honestly, I think I do more work just watching the TV. TV is bare minimum. Internet is not even bare-minimum. I end up spending most parts of an hour just flicking between nothing - like I'm opening and closing the fridge the door over and over again but never picking anything to actually eat. I'm only talking really about Facebook and Reddit (don't shoot me) that just allow you to scroll and scroll and scroll. 4Chan is not as bad, since there is a limit on how much time you can waste here - especially slow boards like /lit/ - and enough of the content is intellectually stimulating enough to be rewarding, but it's still not perfect.

What I do process is all so constantly negative. All my news is just endless identity politics. Some minority you'd never imagined being oppressed in some part of the world you'd never heard of. The other end of the spectrum is just as bad. There doesn't seem to be any in between. Everything else is just ironic memes, so brain-deadening. I'm not trying to appear 'above' all that, it's just overwhelming and beginning to weight me down. And I'm not blaming the platforms, I blame myself for being addicted to them. I could read more, I could read articles, scholarly works, but for the most part I don't, I consciously choose to instead scroll endlessly looking at nothing.

You know, when I was younger I used to make fun of adults who criticised social media. I used to think they were just out of touch and scared of change. But I think they were right. This stuff breeds depression and anxiety. I honestly think there is a real problem that too many people ignore.