It’s the one I spent the most time on the internet, of course. Despite the hit parade of self-inflicted nightmare fuel that is America in 2026, nothing’s ever gonna be as bad as the mid-2010s when it felt like everyone was on Twitter, and I gave a bunch of people access to my id/psyche. I was down bad — when I wrote something or posted something that hit, the rush was enormous, it was all I’d think about, I’d be fixated on it for days. And if I felt like I got owned in some way, or fell on my face, I’d spiral — I’d be putting my head under my desk between my knees, doing box breathing, because I thought the world was collapsing in on my face. It sucked. Years later, I’d visit a cardiologist, and it became clear that these episodes contributed to what’s considered essential (or a baseline of) hypertension. The silent killer! I uninstalled Twitter from my phone in 2018, and my life’s gotten so, so much better since. 

Instagram. No question. That they haven’t made a version of the App without Reels feels like a violation of some kind of cosmic Geneva Convention. I just . . . end up on them, and then I’ll look up, and an hour’s gone by, and the only thing I’ve put into my head are a bunch of clips of annoyed dachshunds and several variations on the Alex Jones taxonomy meme.  

Like I’ve been clobbered with the dumbass stick and sedated by a tranquilizer dart, after I asked for it. You know all those maxims about how the most significant regrets most people have in life involve the things they didn’t do, as opposed to those they did? This is both: Time spent doing something that I regret, and time I could’ve spent doing literally anything else, that I didn’t. Karl Marx called religion being the opiate of the masses, but he couldn’t have imagined endless scroll. 

No idea, and the framework of that question is deeply unsettling. I no longer allow my phone in the bedroom; so it’s at least eight hours a night. And I just got back from El Salvador, where I had a running bet with the friend I was with: Whoever has more screentime from the day before buys dinner. One day, I had only two hours, and felt like I’d achieved something. How fucked is that? I recently started trying to take to heart something Molly Young wrote (and I’m paraphrasing here): She treats her phone like poison or a pack of cigarettes, which feels like the correct way to go about things. 

Here’s whatss fucked up about the ego: The ones that have felt the most “popular” have typically been the ones that I’ve taken any flack for, or that’ve put me (as opposed to the story) at the center of things. The ones that get positive feedback always felt smaller by comparison. So while it might actually be the one I wrote for Gossamer about taking reservations for Balthazar back in the day, which people said many kind things about, it feels (in my memory) like the time I wrote a dick joke about the owner of the Knicks in my third week at the Village Voice, in 2010, that resulted in him pulling $1M in advertising from the paper. There were two responses, generally: “This is brilliant and funny and great,” or “this is stupid and you suck.” I was getting my ego inflated and crushed, simultaneously. Not great! At all! 

NPR’s Up First. Beyond that, I’m trying not to compulsively consume media about it, for my own sanity. Crazy as it is, I still believe in major journalism institutions’ ability to do a better job telling me what’s going on than a collection of randos on the internet trying to monetize their every last thought. I once Skeeted or Tweeted something on Bluesky — which, much like Twitter, is a social media platform for idiots and the deranged — about how people shouldn’t feel obligated to view videos of violence on social media, that these machines are profiting off of global violence’s watchability. People shouted me down! There’s a difference between following the news and indulging in it. We shouldn’t turn away from the horrors of the world, but we don’t have to mainline them, either, and I question the motivations and judgment of anyone who believes that’s at all a controversial statement. People are fuckin’ nuts, man. 

If she’s not lying, again, I quote Molly Young: “I treat my phone like poison. I leave the house as much as possible without it. After I had a kid, people were like, ‘What if there’s an emergency?’ Every fucking person on Earth has a phone. I’ll ask the person sitting eight inches away.” That seems like a good model. And if Jonah Weiner isn’t lying, and is on his phone as little as someone who’d suggest (correctly) that everyone looks stupid looking at their phones, him too. But personally, do I know anyone with a good relationship with their phone? By default, probably not. People who don’t have relationships with life online now outnumber the people in my life who don’t, so that’s just a good perspective to absorb by osmosis.

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