Technology is Killing Us (good thing i uploaded this to my technology)
From AI to scrolling instagram, what may seem harmless is actually gaining a pretty good reputation stating otherwise. With suicide rates at an all time high, it’s important to look into what could be harming us, because I know that many people in my generation, including myself, have struggled with mental health issues that may have been tied to social media use. Not only is social media draining the life out of us, but now AI is becoming just as addictive due to its vampirical design for our engagement.
Prominently in young people, suicide rates are up, and as I observe the world around me, I only find that kids have unsupervised access to the internet at younger and younger ages. Ellen Barry from the New York Times wrote an article titled, “Real Risk to Youth Mental Health is ‘Addictive Use’, Not Screen Time Alone, Study Finds”. She wrote that it’s not the amount of screen time but rather how addictive it is to the person and moreover she wrote that people who said their social media use was addictive were two to three times more likely to have thoughts of suicide or self harm by the age of 14, even if their screen time was pretty low. That is a horrible realization to come to. It is incredibly easy to become addicted to things during your childhood or adolescence because your frontal lobe, the part of your brain that controls impulsivity, is not yet fully developed. But that also means don’t blame yourself completely, don't put yourself down, because it’s not your fault if technology trapped you in a box as a child. Kathy Katella wrote for Yale medicine in 2024, stating a report “stresses that the brain is going through a highly sensitive period between the ages of 10 and 19, when identities and feelings of self worth are forming. According to the report, ‘frequent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain,’ potentially affecting such functions as emotional learning and behavior, impulse control, and emotional regulation”. All of this on top of how much social media and overall technology use might be disrupting your daily activities that are essential for a happy healthy body, such as sleep and exercise. Katella wrote that these issues we’re facing with social media are similar to what happened when the first televisions came out and became all the rage. So essentially, if you weren’t destined for mental health complications but you used (or use) social media in your adolescence, you’re destined for them now.
I am scared of the amount of AI usage, whether people are using it to generate their whole essays, generate funny cat pictures to send to your granddaughter, or to generate a break-up text for your loving girlfriend. I am scared of it taking away human creativity and originality entirely in the world and it is scary that it is becoming as addictive as scrolling on your phone. James O’Donnell from MIT Technology Review wrote in his article, “AI companions are the final stage of digital addiction, and lawmakers are taking aim” that we are used to a social media where the technology is made up mostly of “mediators and facilitators of human connection. They supercharge our dopamine circuits, but they do so by making us crave approval and attention from real people, delivered via algorithms. With AI companions, we are moving toward a world where people perceive AI as a social actor with its own voice. The result will be like the attention economy on steroids”. The term attention economy is referring to the type of marketing strategies companies use to hook and capture your attention in an effort to profit off of your engagement. AI would make this worse by constantly getting to know you inside and out and figuring out exactly what you will get hooked on next so you can keep engaging with it, and go do whatever it tells you to do. The people using it to help get them through college classes are just helping chatgpt learn everything they’re paying to learn in classes, but for free. The people using chatgpt as their personal friend or therapist are never going to see a flaw in themselves again because it’s not especially appealing to be told you’re wrong about things, so AI won’t do it. AI will be on your side when you ask it if your relationship is going south, it will be on your side when you wrong a friend, anything to keep you engaging and using it for whatever your uncreative heart desires. I don’t even know if it’s your fault at a certain point.
I was intrigued to know if there were any preventative methods that people have taken to put a stop to harmful outcomes to too much tech/social media. But unfortunately, what works for some may not work for all. Sometimes it is hard to take a break from social media and it can be hard to realize when maybe you’ve been scrolling too long, and consuming too much media. Although I don’t always follow my own rules, I try not to use any technology before I sleep and right after I wake up. I give myself time to just lay down and think about things without having five billion topics being presented to me with every swipe of my thumb. I feel like social media gives people very little room to have their own thoughts and opinions about things, even regarding their own lives. I give myself time to think about my actions as of late, my flaws, my achievements, the way I have been treating those around me, the way I have been treating myself. When you are scrolling through media like tiktok, you’re being presented with a different emotion per video you see, it goes from something humorous to something political, to something that might have a harmful backlash to your own mental health. I don’t think it’s healthy to be constantly switching around your thoughts and emotions. I try not to interact with the media where people are talking about their own mental health issues, or other things that can manipulate my emotions to become suddenly disrupted. Even crying suddenly from a sad kitten video you saw online and then going back to whatever resting emotion you were at before doesn’t seem healthy. Give your brain time to breathe, and give yourself some time to breathe too. There is nothing nervous system regulating about social media, so it’s important to get your deep breaths in when you remember; inhale six seconds, exhale six seconds. I could go on forever about things I wish I could do to protect my mind from harmful technology and social media but it’s up to you and what you have the drive to do, and starting small is still starting.
All of the harmful things on your phone from social media addictions to using AI for every thought and question you have are designed to do just that. It is all to keep you engaged and it's a cycle that only you can break, as difficult as it’s deemed to be. True creatives might never see their true potential if they’re forever stuck in these harmful loops of relying on technology for your entire life. Practice your original thinking and your deep breaths.
(i wrote this one beginning of november 2024, a few things get too personal so that's redacted for now)
My mother is pushing me in my stroller, I’m wearing sunglasses that are too big for my face, the aluminum on my purple ipod shuffle feels cold on my flushed cheeks, and “peach plum pear” by joanna newsom is blasting in my ears via the gray crumbling foam on my pinkish purple sony headphones. It’s 2009, the ipod was a gift from my grandparents but the playlist was a gift from my mother. Originally we would listen to all the millions of songs she had on her ipod and I loved to sing and dance to them. But she picked the best of the best for my own playlist and of all those songs, “peach plum pear” is what I hear when I start to wonder if the happiest time of my life was really that long ago. Of course there are many songs I consistently dissect and relate to, songs that make me cry, songs that my memories cling on to, but this song revives a very important, very tiny part of me that curled up and died one day a long time ago.
I loved how compelling Joanna’s voice is along with how talented of a harpist she is. It’s not easy to interpret and analyze a song when you’re three years old but I had such a connection with it. What I really love about this song is there is so much about it that makes you think. The first two sentences are as such, “We speak in the store I'm a sensitive bore”. The word bore can mean to make a hole in something or make one's way through something like a crowd. A sensitive thing pushing your way through people, through life, through the grocery store. Some have theorized that Joanna is in a grocery store going through her grocery list of peaches, plums and pears trying not to think about the more difficult things. I think of every lyric in many different ways each time I listen, but lately it felt like a conversation with myself. I’ve grown up all over California and I have blacked out memories throughout all of it, like someone scribbled “redacted” all over the big things with a jumbo sharpie. Just the same, I remember how my mother would paint on huge canvases in our apartment's garage in Murrieta. I remember sitting in the front seat of moving trucks at two years old bound for San Francisco. I remember packing up and doing it all again to see my grandpa in the hospital somewhere in southern california. I remember the fuzzy pink teddy bear he gave me while he laid sickly in bed, it's gray and tough now. I remember when my mom’s friend Cybil taught me the best way to eat a mango in the kitchen of someone's apartment I always admired the architectural aspects of.
Joanna sings, “And I’ve read the right books to interpret your look/You were knocking me down with the palm of your eye” and if I’m caught in the right moment, these lyrics force all of the loneliness to come rushing back to me. She could be referring to a Hamsa hand with the phrase, “palm of your eye”, but I think of something a little more metaphorical. I think of how hard I tried to make friends my whole life, I think of how loved I wanted to be, I think of all the books I read that made me wonder why it wasn’t so easy for me as it was for the book characters. And I wondered how someone could just look at me and know they didn’t want me. Nothing changed in my fleeting youth, my mother would even scold me for texting and calling friends too much, she always saw the outcome before I did. A lot more circles back to (redacted) than I realize, my lasting hunch that I’m unlovable, the lyrics of this song (redacted) has nothing to do with, my eye shape.
Joanna sings with a sort of whine, like the crack in your voice when your chin scrunches up and you’re trying not to cry, it's nasally and unconventional. Listening to it smells like a health food store, the smell of kombucha, vitamins, and flax seeds. My mother raised me vegan. It makes me think of her and I both being alone, alone together, I suppose. I resonate with the woman she was at that time, when it’s late and I’ve had a long day of caring for everyone besides myself without a clue of what I’m going to do in my life besides that. Joanna’s voice gives me the same nostalgic feeling of eating cheap take-out Chinese food on my mom’s bed out of the original little cartons I never see anymore, while it pours outside and the city smells like it’s being washed and refreshed, as we watched Audrey Hepburn’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We didn’t have a TV, we had dvds we loved and watched over and over, hundreds of songs she raised me to know all the words to, and books scattered all over our little apartment.
I don’t know if other people feel the nostalgia of their childhood like a broken bone the way I seem to. I don’t know what's happened to me that could be analyzed to figure out why I operate the way I do and if I got the chance to figure it out I don’t think I would. Peach, Plum, Pear hurts my mental state the way hand sanitizer stings all those little wounds on your fingers where you tore the skin off. It hurts specifically and invisibly. Joanna wrote, “This was unlike the story, it was written to be. I was riding its back, when it used to ride me”. She expresses every lyric with a sort of unsureness. Peach, plum, pear is sometimes used as a children’s rhyme like eenie meenie minie moe, in order to pick something; And Joanna writes in such a way that she is not something to be chosen, or she has not been chosen. She sings of “gathering floozies” who “afford to be choosy” as if she is looking at other people who have what she cannot, or have what she never has, and it’s as if to say, “why them and not me?”.
(a bit of an intimate essay i wrote in july 2025,
a lot has changed since then;
disclaimer: I do not have this boyfriend anymore, but I still love what I wrote here
My grandfather did pass away months later and so the things I wrote about him feel all the more special right now)
It’s hard to find happiness in your daily life when the hole inside you is filled with anger at that same fact.
I’m home for the summer and all of my belongings are still in bags shoved under my bed, my walls are bare, my best friend is traveling europe and I haven’t seen her since christmas, my boyfriend and I are clashing and he's the only person I spend time with, I’m not enjoying what I see in the mirror, and starbucks discontinued the turkey pesto sandwich and they got my order wrong after they broke that news to me. That sandwich fiasco brought a tear to my eye, I thought, “I hoped I wouldn’t wake up this morning and when I did, this was my reward, perfect.” Of course Starbucks isn’t my biggest issue, but it’s so hard to see past all the inconveniences, all the messes, and assumed incompetence of everyone around you. Unfortunately, the real incompetence is not being able to look past all the bad swarming around you. That’s okay, but I have to learn.
Sometimes it feels like there are so many things going wrong that I can’t breathe right. I wear my heart on my sleeve, and a less cute way to put that is I let my emotions control me more often than not. I snap at people when I’m sad and there's not anything fixing it right away. Something I should probably think of more often is what matters most, the bad emotions versus the good ones. And that’s not as obvious an answer as it’d seem. But I think of visiting my grandparents in their cramped house in riverside. That house is filled with anger and sadness; we sleep on the living room floor due to lack of room for visitors, my family fights over silly things, I get caught in the middle of hurt, I yell and scream just to keep up. My grandpa is developing dementia and when I visit it feels like it gets worse and worse. And after we’ve all worn ourselves out for the day and we’re too tired to keep fighting, I look over to my grandpa and I hold his hand and he draws spirals on me with his fingers. Holding his hand makes nothing else matter. That’s the mentality to keep. When I get home from a long day of arguments, 100 degree weather, and a canker sore bugging me, I think about what a waste my day was. But I never think about how glad I am to light a candle, put on lotion and clean pjs, and make some chamomile to drink while I read. I never think about how my cat waits for me to get home to greet me outside, or how I have a small bunch of purple flowers my mom set on my nightstand for me. There's so much love and joy happening around me while I sit obliviously in my anger for my lack of happiness.
I think a lot about how it feels like nothing matters these days, but today I learned that in December, after I spent time with a friend, my boyfriend texted her and thanked her for taking me out because she's the only one who hadn’t bailed on me recently and how I’ve been having a hard time and how he knows I appreciated her very much. I didn’t think I’d be such an obvious sack of sadness and isolation but it happens to the best of us, and I had no idea it made someone else happy to see me happy with a friend. I had no idea that mattered to anyone. I recently got black cold brew coffee and creamer so I can make iced coffees the way my best friend and I used to in the mornings and it’s helped me to be excited to get out of bed for the day. It brings back memories with someone I love and miss, and it’s delicious. I can’t be miserable forever, and if I want to be less lonely I can't bring that sort of energy to every person I see. Therefore, I smile, I make my bed every day (nearly), I pick up my room when it starts to look as sad as I am, I practice deep breaths, I try not to think about my appearance so much, and I try to make myself a more pleasant and respectable person to be around. I allow myself to be sad because I would not be the woman I am if I was not a bit sensitive, but it’s a slap in the face reminder that my sadness is not who I am. I really start to think it is sometimes, but it is so obvious that I am more than that. I’ve had a hard time with self expression and bringing back my spirit and personality I seem to have lost, but I am a kind, healthy girl. I make conversation with virtually anyone I meet, no matter the differences, I like my meals to be colorful and nutritious, I am getting into perfumes, I go on runs when I’m mad, I can’t sleep if I feel I could be having fun instead, I have a very large book collection for someone my age, I play many instruments, I love snowboarding, I keep my body athletic and healthy, and I love loving. There are so many exciting things about me and for some reason I constantly think I’m dull and good for nothing. I haven’t changed my mentality completely yet, it’s a work in progress to find things to remind myself not to take joy for granted. But this is a lesson I will carry for the rest of my life.