CCIE certification ($3303) · Snippets

This way he could be with people, but in a world where there were clear, neat rules, and where he could be someone again.James started skipping lectures and tutorials to play EverQuest.As the months passed, it took up more and more of his life.He was vanishing into this electronic world.After a while, the university told him he couldn’t go on like this.But he kept returning to the game, as though it were a secret mistress who obsessed him.When he was expelled, people back home were puzzled.He married his high school girlfriend and promised her he would give up gaming cold turkey.He got a job working with computers, and he seemed to be slowly getting back on track.But when he felt lonely, or confused, he felt intense cravings for the game.One night, he waited until his wife had gone to sleep, sneaked downstairs, and fired up EverQuest.Before long, this became a pattern.Then one day he waited until his wife left for work, called in sick, and spent all day gaming.This, too, became a pattern.He couldn’t bear to tell his wife, so he started to pay their bills on the credit card.The more stressed he became, the more he gamed.By the time he arrived in Hilarie’s therapy office, everything had fallen apart.His wife had realized what he had been doing, and he was suicidal.But she was receiving more and more clients like this who were compelled to spend their lives in online worlds.There was another young man who couldn’t stop playing an online version of Dungeons and Dragons.And on and on they came.She didn’t know what to do when it began.At first, I was mostly going by instinct, she told me when we sat together in a diner in rural Washington state.Now, when she looks back on those first patients, she said, I feel like I was seeing the trickle before the flood.And this flood is becoming a tsunami.I stepped out of the car into a clearing in the woods.The maple and cedar trees all around us were swaying a little in the wind.From what looked like a farmhouse, a little dog ran up to me, yapping.Somewhere in the distance, I could hear other animals making noises, but I wasn’t sure what or where they were.As a reflex, without thinking, I checked my phone.This is the meditation hut, where we have been learning mindfulness.This is the kitchen, where we have been learning to cook.And then we sat in the woods, just beyond the center, and talked.Matthew told me that when he felt alone, I’d hide those feelings, and use the computer as a sort of escape, he says.Since his teens, he had become obsessed with the game League of Legends.It’s a five by five game, he told me.There are five people on a team.You work together toward a common goal, and everyone has specific goals.He was already skinny, but he had lost thirty pounds because he didn’t even want to break away in order to eat.I would just sit there pretty much the whole time.Mitchell’s story was a little different.For as long as he could remember, he would escape the isolation that came from a difficult home life by gathering information about anything that intrigued him.As a child, he would store huge piles of papers under his bed.Okay, I’ve learned enough now.When he got a job as a software developer and he was given an assignment that made him feel pressured, he found himself endlessly chasing down Internet rabbit holes.He would have three hundred tabs open at any given time.They felt very familiar to me, Matthew and Mitchell.If you’re a teenager, you send on average a hundred texts a day.And 42 percent of us never turn off our phones.When we look for an explanation for how this change happened, we keep being told it’s mainly caused by something inside the technology itself.We say there’s something about smartphones themselves that is addictive.We blame the device.But as I spent time in this Internet rehab center, and as I reflected on my own Internet use, I began to wonder if there was a different and more truthful way of thinking about it.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.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.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.‘Would someone please acknowledge me?’ Hilarie told me, If the culture you are embedded in isn’t healthy, you’re going to end up with an unhealthy individual.So I’ve been thinking of that a lot lately.It’s just a really neat thing that I noticed happening over here, he said as we walked.There’s a spider’s egg that hatched up in the tree.You could tell, because if you’ve seen the animated [film] Charlotte’s Web, at the very end, the spiderlings hatch, and then they send out their streamers, and they float off.That’s what’s been happening!Every time there’s a strong breeze, you see some lines shooting off the top of the tree.He had been standing with the other guys in the rehab center discussing this web for hours, he said.He looked at one of the other residents and smiled.But there was real joy in Mitchell’s face, and it stopped me.We both looked at it for a long time.He stared at it, quietly.It’s just, he said, a really interesting thing that I’ve never gotten to see before.I felt moved, and promised myself I would learn from this moment.And then, when I was ten minutes’ drive from the center, I felt a pang of loneliness, and I noticed my phone reception had come back.People nod to each other and close their doors.This disconnection has spread over the entire Western world.People must belong to a tribe. Just like a bee goes haywire if it loses its hive, a human will go haywire if she loses her connection to the group.As a result, we have been left alone on a savanna we do not understand, puzzled by our own sadness.Disconnection from Meaningful ValuesWhen I was in my late twenties, I got really fat.It was partly a side effect of antidepressants, and partly a side effect of fried chicken.My own favorite was the brilliantly named Chicken Chicken Chicken.Their hot wings were, to me, the Mona Lisa of grease.One Christmas Eve, I went to my local branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and one of the staff behind the counter saw me approaching and beamed.We have something for you! The other staff turned and looked at me expectantly.From somewhere behind the grill and the grizzle, he took out a Christmas card.I was forced, by their expectant smiles, to open it in front of them.To our best customer, it said, next to personal messages from every member of the staff.Most of us know there is something wrong with our physical diets.We aren’t all gold medalists in the consumption of lard like I was, but more and more of us are eating the wrong things, and it is making us physically sick.As a little boy, Tim arrived in the middle of a long stretch of swampland and open beaches.His dad worked as a manager at an insurance company, and in the early 1970s, he was posted to a place called Pinellas County, on the west coast of Florida.By the time I left Florida, he told me, it was a completely different physical environment.There, he would play Asteroids and Space Invaders for hours.It sounds like Edgware, where I am from.I ached and pined for that lump of plastic.I don’t remember anyone ever telling me this explicitly, but it seemed to me then that happiness meant being able to buy lots of the things on display there.I would ask my dad how much each famous person I saw on television earned, and he would guess, and we would both marvel at what we would do with the money.It was a little bonding ritual, over a fantasy of spending.I asked Tim if, in Pinellas County where he grew up, he ever heard anyone talking about a different way of valuing things, beyond the idea that happiness came from getting and possessing stuff.In Edgware, there must have been people who acted on different values, but I don’t think I ever saw them.When Tim was a teenager,1 his swim coach moved away one summer and gave him a small record collection, and it included albums by John Lennon and Bob Dylan.As he listened to them, he realized they seemed to be expressing something he didn’t really hear anywhere else.He began to wonder if there were hints of a different way to live lying in their lyrics, but he couldn’t find anyone to discuss it with.In 1984, he voted for Ronald Reagan, but he was starting to think a lot about the question of authenticity.I was stumbling around, he told me.I think I was questioning just about everything.I wasn’t just questioning these values.I was questioning lots about myself, I was questioning lots about the nature of reality and the values of society. He feels like there were piñatas all around him and he was hitting chaotically at them all.I think I went through that phase for a long time, to be honest.When he went to graduate school, he started to read a lot about psychology.It was around this time that Tim realized something odd.It had been talked about a lot, by some of the finest minds who ever lived, and Tim thought it might be true.But nobody had ever conducted a scientific investigation to see whether all these philosophers were right.It all started in grad school, with a simple survey.Tim came up with a way of measuring how much a person really values getting things and having money compared to other values, like spending time with their family or trying to make the world a better place.He called it the Aspiration Index,3 and it is pretty straightforward.You ask people how much they agree with statements such as It is important to have expensive possessions and how much they agree with very different statements such as It is important to make the world a better place for others. You can then calculate their values.Tim’s first tentative piece of research was to give this survey to 316 students.This was, he knew, just a primitive first shot in the dark.Was this something that happened only with young people?To find out, Tim measured one hundred citizens of Rochester in upstate New York, who came from a range of age groups and economic backgrounds.The result was the same.Tim’s next step was to conduct a more detailed study, to track how these values affect you over time.He got 192 students to keep a detailed mood diary in which, twice a day, they had to record how much they were feeling nine different emotions, such as happiness or anger, and how much they were experiencing any of nine physical symptoms, such as backache.It really did seem that materialistic people were having a worse time, day by day, on all sorts of fronts.They felt sicker, and they were angrier.What could be happening here?Ever since the 1960s, psychologists have known that there are two different ways you can motivate yourself to get out of bed in the morning.Because I love it, he said.Then he scrunched up his face and said You’re silly! and ran off, pretending to be Batman.These intrinsic motivations persist all through our lives, long after childhood.