I grew up on the internet, and I love it, but something broke in me during the COVID era and its aftermath. I worked remotely in the crypto industry for 5 years, spent all my spare time on Twitter, and got stuck in a doom loop of e-addiction that I couldn’t unplug from. It fried my brain. So, I took a break this year to reset and reckon with my relationship to the world wide web (and to tech in general), and this post is a set of notes to share how I’m currently thinking about the internet and how to stay mostly sane while juggling the pros and cons of being online.The main distinction I see in my life from before and after COVID is that at some point the internet stopped being a tool I used every day and instead my online-ness became a default state of being. I was always on.It’s become obvious to me that we’re not built to live terminally online lives. We’re not built to fill every gap in our day by doomscrolling, checking messages, and generally consuming global information streams at the speed of light. It’s sensory overload.Being so online has implications for our personal lives. Common side effects include increased anxiety, depression, envy, and insecurity. That, along with shrinking attention spans and disrupted sleep.Being so online has implications for wider culture as well. People are becoming more average over time because we’re all consuming the same content curated for us by TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X and so on. This is often talked about as “algorithmic flattening,” and what that means is when we all consume the same inputs, we create similar outputs whether that’s in the form of art, startups, research, or even thoughts. We’re all losing our floofy spiky uniqueness and being eroded into a standard shape, which crushes originality and creativity at a societal scale.Anyone who is very online understands these issues in a visceral way. We see it in our lives, and we know that being hyper online has some problematic secondary effects... and yet, so ma