There is a reason I tell this story, besides getting something personal off my chest or challenging stereotypes. A lot of this comes down to time and how I used it. Since I quit social media back in November, followed more recently with deleting numerous games and apps from my smartphone, I have noticed many disturbing parallels to when I quit partying in terms of how my life has changed. I think about what my late academic advisor and friend Ben Agger wrote over a decade ago about how smartphones were changing the ways we interacted with each other, how we perceived time, and even our biological rhythms and cycles. He called it iTime, a blurring of boundaries between private and public, of work and leisure, of day and night. It has, consistent with his theories, unfolded as a constant battle for “eyeballs” or attention which has the effect of “dopamining” society, as philosopher Gerald Moore has recently discussed, in which the machinery of profit-making is turned ultimately on hijacking the reward-mechanisms of the human brain via increasingly sophisticated technological interventions (i.e. “screen culture”).

People, especially we denizens of western civilization, are often linear critters. Things had a beginning and will have an end. Life is a journey from birth to death to whatever comes after that (I don’t pretend to know). We mark off lives in time relative to predictable expectations and norms and “acting our age.” I am entering what is called “middle age,” bringing with it the expectation that my life is halfway between its beginning and its end, as well as expectations about what I should or shouldn’t do. This linear story often has “high points” and “low points,” an expectation of “glory days” and “good times” (usually in the younger years) and a long, steady decline full of anxiety, nostalgia, and reaction beginning around 40. Is this why middle-aged people so often start thinking the world is coming to an end?