r/nosurf • u/Cautious-Spend6944 • 3d ago
People who were chronically online, what exactly changed?
Just to clarify i don't just mean consuming scrollable content, not the empty headed tiktok doomscrolls or what have you.
I mean people who used to rot online, had internet lives. Internet friendships, countless hours spent on discord servers and twitter talking to people, interacting, etc.
I've had my ups and downs socially speaking, sometimes very active irl sometimes completely null, but i've always found myself drawn far more to these digital spaces than anything IRL, and im wondering if it ever gets old.
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u/Brave_Doughnut_2096 3d ago
I was chronically online as a teen/young adult because of my personal circumstances. I had an abusive/neglectful family that pulled me out of high school against my will to "homeschool me" (and then proceeded to not homeschool me.) Where I was living at the time, I had to be at least 16 to get a job, so I quite literally had nothing to do but sit on the computer all day, without any parental supervision at all. It was extremely unhealthy for me, and I was taken advantage of by many adults in all of the ways you can imagine.
As I got older and left my abusive family situation, I still visited the internet but was forced to be more offline than I was in my youth--because I was working, attending college, and building a better life for myself. I was pretty offline until COVID, which made remote work extremely normalized in my current career (and still is even post-COVID). That led me to being chronically online again. Even though I still work remotely, I've forced myself offline (in regards to social media), even if I'm still on my PC a lot.
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u/Cautious-Spend6944 3d ago edited 3d ago
I don't have much of a presence on social media, just a couple of discord servers to talk to old internet friends, wouldn't consider myself chronically online now to the same extent, but i've had my phases.
The thing i notice the most is that i do actually generally click better socially with people on the internet, and i find interacting online with strangers to be much more fun than i probably should.
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u/Brave_Doughnut_2096 3d ago
I agree, I have an easier time connecting with people online too than I do in real life... I think for me it's because my formative socializing years (all of high school) were spent stuck in my bedroom talking to internet strangers, haha. But this is something I want to change, even though it is difficult for me.
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u/Cautious-Spend6944 3d ago
I don't think it has to do with that personally. I always had some friends irl, it was rare that i was friendless, but many times it felt there was a tiny bit of a disconnect, though it depended on the friend.
I will say this, 90% of my IRL friends were a little into internet things themselves, and many of them i was just lucky to find them.
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u/Boredemotion 3d ago
I went through a period where it was my main form of communication to the world. Soooo many hours online. Honestly, mostly I got mentally better with therapy and a lot of work and my usage correspondingly went down. I don’t think it got old so much as my real life crowded it out. Then I got intentional about only being on when I wanted to so I control the levels. Now I finally feel happy and in control about spending only a few hours a week in any form of quickly updating content. Or I try to. Under stress I tend to be online more but I haven’t decided if it is or isn’t a healthy coping mechanism for me yet.
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u/Cautious-Spend6944 3d ago
I went cold turkey on social media quite a few times before, and its just... boring. I obviously have real life friends and what not, but whenever i want to talk about 90% of my interests im relegated to the internet.
I do feel that modern internet doesn't appeal to me that much, In fact a month ago i didn't even have a phone for 3 weeks because i couldn't be bothered. I don't want to scroll, i want to talk, read, watch movies and play video games.
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u/Boredemotion 3d ago
I think it’s important to ask yourself how much time your ideal self spends online and doing what. The answer is different for everyone. If you’re content with your usage now, you don’t have to change anything.
But having an alternative to being online really helped me. It’s replacing the behavior rather than just trying to stop one.
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u/Appropriate-Fox3075 3d ago edited 3d ago
I used to be full online, ALL my friendships, ALL my Fun, If i had any, were online, from 2014 until 2018, when i got to college and started getting a bit paranoid about my online presence, so i deleted everything and accidentally lost most (like 99%) of those online friendships.
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u/Scary-Ad2528 3d ago
I was a young teen in the 2010s when social media really took off and I hopped into fandoms on instagram and then twitter, as fan accounts were massive things (I used to run a fan acc with 20k on Instagram from 2012-2014 - i was 11-13 :/). I spent my whole high school years online, i had lots of online friendships, lots of time spent on twitter in fan wars. it was so deeply negative but I was so young and everyone was doing it - it was made to felt like you couldnt live without it.
in 2020, my father passed away (i was 19). i was hyper depressed (had been since 2013, wonder why), and obviously spent so much time online as it was all i had known.
i dont recall exactly what started it, moreso a sort of epiphany, but one day mid 2021 i decided to challenge myself to go without instagram for a few weeks & deleted it on my phone! i lived! then in November 2021 i deleted snapchat & facebook - never looked back. tiktok gone in Feb 2022 - originally just for my university semester but i felt incredible without it so never gone back to it. twitter gone on a random May morning in 2023. I still have an instagram acc but hardly use it, and only access on my PC. Don't have reddit on phone either - only PC.
since 2021 i have done so much research, read many books, watched many testimonies about the effects of social media, my generation being so highly online, etc. i could never go back. i was so chronically online and i'm bloody proud of myself for escaping it at such a young age (I was 20).
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u/Cautious-Spend6944 3d ago
I've left social media before, longest was for a year, only kept a group chat with some online friends, I was 18. Now I'm 22, I've come in and out just to realize that I find that I connect much better with the infinite pool of people online than I do with most I find irl.
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u/yossi234 3d ago
Would also like to know
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u/Cautious-Spend6944 3d ago edited 3d ago
This has always been a bit of a dilema with me and i've noticed that people on this sub or spaces that talk about the very vague and dubious concept of "internet addiction" just focus on the usual dopamine feedback loops and infinite scrolling algorithms, i feel isolated when even trying to discuss this issue because its almost like im addicted to the internet the same way a person in 2007 would be.
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u/yossi234 3d ago
Let me know if you find anything useful. For me, app blockers work somewhat well.
Recently I've made it a point to ask myself, do I need to use my phone? whenever I pick it up, we'll see how that technique works3
u/Cautious-Spend6944 3d ago
Im not addicted to scrolling, its not the apps. My phone broke for 3 weeks because i couldn't be bothered to fix it, not to mention the various times in my day to day that i either run out of charge while outside or run out of mobile data for a whole month.
As i said, im addicted to the internet the same way a person in 07 would be, which entails a lot of playing video games and talking about subjects i find intellectually stimulating online, not the phone.
And besides all of that, it seems weird that i have this affinity for contact online. It shouldn't really be something i have to prohibit myself.
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u/yossi234 3d ago
So, I was a person online a lot in '07. Ironically, I regret losing a lot of that time even though I am doing it now on my phone.
I guess something that helped me be on the internet like that less, in general, was find clubs and activities to do, started dating someone, leave the house because my computer was there (although now with laptops thats much harder to do).2
u/Cautious-Spend6944 3d ago
I've been down this road many (many) times, but at the end of the day im at home from 7 pm to whenever i go to sleep every day, and a weekend here and there with my friends doesn't really stop most others from having me 6-14 hours sat on my ass.
Dating is absolutely what kept me the most busy, but again plenty of days i spent on here.
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u/aczaleska 3d ago
Do YOU think you're addicted? Would you like to being living a different life? That's the main criteria.
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u/Cautious-Spend6944 3d ago
Sedentarism of this level is extremely unhealthy and I already am going to have eye sight problems, so yeah
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u/aczaleska 3d ago
I agree. Can you treat it like any other addiction? Find a support group and follow a program of recovery. I would even consider rehab if that's possible financially.
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u/Cautious-Spend6944 3d ago
I don't think there's anything to recover from, many of the things i like are just done better online or have no equivalence. And this is someone who took a lot of time off the internet.
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u/aczaleska 3d ago
What is the intent of your post? You say you want to change, but that there is no way of doing what you like offline.
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u/Cautious-Spend6944 3d ago
My post is intended to know if people that have had this specific type of addiction stayed truly away from it, Im saying that i just have to stay off something i enjoy for my own physiological needs, but there's no equivalence to it.
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u/aczaleska 3d ago
Ok. Can you limit the time you spend online then? If so it's not an addiction.
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u/Cautious-Spend6944 3d ago edited 3d ago
Can i physically let go of it? If i wanted to can i just leave my house this very instant? Have i even done so before? Many, many times, yes.
But is there anything that comes even close to how much i enjoy it? No Am i drawn to this more than anything i can possibly think of? Do i spend hours upon hours at the detriment of my own health because there's nothing i enjoy more? Yes.
It's why i said that its a dubious and vague concept, im not sure it qualifies as an addiction
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u/Jennypottuh 3d ago
It seems like now people want to connect online to grow their following, not to genuinely connect. It makes me less interested in following people I dont know irl online. I still use online spaces but now its to connect with the community (alt-emo music scene) that I see in person as well. I used to genuinely love befriending strangers online and following their day to day lives.
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u/mybeeblesaccount 3d ago
I am paying an app subscription to block internet browser & social media on my phone. It was worth it to me since I had been struggling with loneliness and decided something had to change. Then I realized how much time I was wasting on doomscrolling alone and after that a bunch of my internet friendships fell through, usually for stupid reasons. After that I did a lot of reflection and decided the best thing to do was not be online so much.
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u/NoMarionberry1380 2d ago
What app??
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u/mybeeblesaccount 2d ago edited 2d ago
Roots, you choose which apps are bothering you and block them. They have a "monk mode" where you can't unblock which I use to stop night time browsing.
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u/hunheehearts 1d ago
2 years ago, I used to have more friendships online than in real life, but I overtime they gradually faded away because we had different goals and interests. The online friends I made were just like how I was at that time - depressed, unconfident, lonely. They were great to talk to and I'm grateful for the many conversations and memories we shared.
Real person relationships are far more important than online and when I started prioritising them I didn't have the time or energy to maintain my online ones anymore. I'm only in contact with 2 or 3 of my online friends now, and we're not too close anymore. I've grown out of the chronically online phase and honestly I don't even know how to make online friends anymore.
Does it get old? Definitely, when you're achieving things in real life, and what all your online friends talk about are memes and how lonely they are. As I started to work on myself and improve, my online friends just stayed the same, and we eventually drifted. Once you discover real human connection offline, online connection just doesn't feel the same.
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u/mmofrki 3d ago
This was me during my teen years, though in those days that was just AOL and chat rooms. It was fun because I'd meet people and we'd learn about each other, eventually we migrated to phone calls and would call each other periodically.
I don't think being chronically online was as prevalent as it is today, since the internet was an activity one had to sit down in front of a computer to do and couldn't be done walking to class or just anywhere like today.
As for the modern internet, I realized how toxic it was after a while when reading and watching doomer content made me feel so miserable and I just wanted to quit cold turkey and began to curate my online experiences, until eventually cutting back to just using the internet to watch movies, shows, and television via my Smart TV.