"Of all the people they’ve treated at this rehab center, Hilarie told me, there are certain things almost everyone has in common. They were all anxious or depressed before the compulsion began. For the patient, the Internet obsession was a way of “escaping his anxiety, through distraction,” she said. “That is their exact profile, ninety percent of the time.”
Before the Internet addiction, they had felt lost and isolated in the world. Then the online world offered these young people things that they craved but that had vanished from the environment—such as a goal that matters to you, or a status, or a tribe. “The highly popular games,” she says, “are the multiplayer games, where you get to be part of a guild—which is a team—and you get to earn your status in that guild. The positive side of that, these guys would say, is—‘I’m a team player. I know how to cooperate with my guys.’ It’s tribalism at its core.” Once you have that, Hilarie says, “you can immerse yourself in an alternate reality and completely lose track of where you are.
You feel rewarded by the challenges of it, by the opportunity for cooperation, by the community that you’re in, and have status in—and [you] have much more control over than the real world.” I thought a lot about this—about how the depression or anxiety preceded the compulsive Internet use for everyone here. The compulsive Internet use, she was saying, was a dysfunctional attempt to try to solve the pain they were already in, caused in part by feeling alone in the world. What if that applies not only to the people here, I wondered, but to many more of us? The Internet was born into a world where many people had already lost their sense of connection to each other.
The collapse had already been taking place for decades by then. The web arrived offering them a kind of parody of what they were losing—Facebook friends in place of neighbors, video games in place of meaningful work, status updates in place of status in the world. The comedian Marc Maron28 once wrote that “every status update is a just a variation on a single request: ‘Would someone please acknowledge me?’ ”
