Digitopia is ruining our lives

The term is made up, but the symptoms are not. How being hooked to the digital world translated into negative feelings and thoughts without me being aware of it.

Digitopia is not a well-known term because, well, I made it up. I wanted to find a way to group all the suffering I've experienced under one umbrella and, since certain parts of technology were the main drivers, I've decided to combine the words “Digital" and "dystopia" to describe the hole I've found myself in.

Digitopia (pronunciation: dij-i-toh-pee-uh) — an idealized but ultimately isolating and detached state induced by excessive digital interaction.

With the above in mind, I can redefine and shorten my mission statement to “Helping 1 million souls to escape Digitopia”.

My side-mission is to get Digitopia into dictionaries so that autocorrect leaves me alone.

Digitopia symptoms

⚠️ Disclaimer: the symptoms below are based on personal experiences, personal research and experiences shared by other “Digitopians".

Symptoms of Digitopia present themselves in various forms/ways. I, and the people I've been talking to, struggled with.

Anxiety

Anxiety was fed to me through various sources. Starting from news outlets whose main goal is to compose negativity-afflicted content pieces which, by purely looking at data produce the highest amount of clicks and change the vision of the world in your head.

On the topic of news outlets, I can highly recommend the book Factfulness which goes deep into conveying that the world is improving day-by-day, rather than moving closer to an apocalypse.

Then there's constant streams of notifications which "immediately" require your attention, coming from your laptop or phone.

Moving along, there's comparison traps on social media that paint unrealistic images of those who you are following and finally, the overall, never-ending digital noise. You know what I mean.

Lack of focus

People getting diagnosed, or self-diagnosing themselves, with ADHD is on the rise. But let's take a step back. Is it really ADHD or is it the self-inflicted damaged that comes from being constantly bombarded with information?

I also had self-doubts about trying to find that one thing that's causing a lack of productivity when working and, being hooked to the internet, it was only natural to Google (or search on Reddit) for explanations. And really, when you describe that state of mind, all answers point in the same direction -- ADHD.

Due to Reddit, I became a 100% sure that it's ADHD and that I need to get on meds to finally escape this mindset. Luckily, I didn't go for meds, but rather switching to a dumbphone for 2 weeks, and lo and behold, after just a week, the "ADHD-virus" suddenly started disappearing.

You can find more details on how I overcame my Reddit addiction right here.

Depression

And finally, the third pillar of Digitopia-induced symptoms, depression. This one is a bit difficult to write about as it encompasses many things but I'll try to entangle it as good as I can.

There are multiple factors that drive depression such as isolation; which often stems from being constantly alone, indoors and/or having a fake sense of "being social" by socializing with strangers on the internet, lack of confidence; stemming from comparing ourselves to others, letting go of ourselves and avoiding basic hygiene, grasping for quick dopamine hits or actions that yield in sweeping the "depressive" thoughts under a rug, and so on, and so forth.

Re-reading the paragraph above, I don't think I've done a good job of entangling it but I'll make a note to write a whole article on it. The consensus is, all of the bad habits, such as doomscrolling, isolation and gaming, keep feeding the depressed state of the mind by temporarily applying bandaids on where it hurts. The problem is, those bandaids need to be ripped off constantly, and every time they do get ripped off, it hurts. It hurts even more. And it creates new wounds.

And more..

And that's not all, but for the sake of this article, I've decided to focus on those that affected me the most on my journey. Just to name a few, and I'll feature them in future articles, sleep disturbances, procrastination, overwhelmingness, and the list goes on and on.

How to escape Digitopia

The steps to escape Digitopia are simple. Dead-simple. But so is running a marathon -- wake up every day, put on your running shoes, run for an hour or two, eat, go to sleep, repeat the next day.

There are a couple of things that made it easy for me to escape it but they require discipline. A lot of discipline. And that's the hardest part. I'll write them down but keep in mind that, written like this, you'll have to constantly think about them and force yourselves to do them, which is not ideal, so please stay tuned on future articles where I'll do a detailed breakdown and follow-along that everyone can follow and (hopefully) succeed.

What helped me escape the Digitopian state, sorted by the amount of impact it had, is:

Being present
Being in the Digitopian state usually means living on autopilot. Grabbing one thing after the other, trying to get through the day, distracting yourself at any negative emotion you face.

You've most likely heard about Meditation as a tool to ground yourself, and stay present, and I fully recommend it. It takes a week or two to get into the flow but things suddenly start making sense.

Try it now. If your mind is filled with thoughts, set a 1 minute timer and focus on different body parts and see how they feel. Can you feel the blood flowing? Can you feel the chair beneath your glutes? Can you feel a soft breeze on your face?

Frequency: 5-10 minutes a day

Walking
We need to walk. That's where evolution got us. Walking is the simplest form of exercise and a good way to reset your brain from all the thoughts flying around. Exercise does some chemistry magic to your body/brain and the dynamic-nature of the "outside world" gives you enough things to look at and process, so that it overrides your negative thoughts.

Frequency: 30-60 minutes a day

Showering
If you've ever been depressed, you've most likely gone a day, or two, or four without showering. But even when it's super-hard, take that shower. It does wonders with resetting the feelings in your brain. Don't think about it, just enter the shower and turn the water on.

Frequency: 10 minutes a day

--

Try doing those 3 items for 1 week. At worst, you'll "lose" less than an hour in the day, and surely your screen time is bigger than that, but I can almost guarantee that by the end of that week, you'll feel much better.

Final words

I'm not happy with how this article turned out as it condenses paragraphs and paragraphs into a relatively short read. I'll do my best to expand as time goes on by creating specific symptom-related articles but I'm happy that I've managed to put all the bad things I've felt under one umbrella -- Digitopia.

If you want to reach out, provide feedback, or just talk, please do so: digitopia.blog@proton.me