The Notebook Rule

How to get off the digital dope and reclaim your humanity

Dispatches from Inner Space is a proud member of the fiction Substack community. But it’s also about raw personal philosophy, and the first week of January seemed like the right time to unveil a big idea I’ve been working on for the past several months.

If you’ve ever felt like you might have a bad relationship with your phone, or your computer, or the Internet in general, read on. This is for us.

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Dope Gorging

For the past year or more, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how the primary challenge we face, as people living in a modern western society, is not surviving in a resource scarce environment, but is instead managing to not gorge ourselves to death, literally/physically or figuratively/spiritually.

Last March, I wrote this:

Back then, as I catalogued the cornucopia of modern addictions, it was obvious that a lot of the “candy” that presses in on us from all sides is digitally mediated: movies, TV, music, games, porn, social feeds, news, etc etc etc. I didn’t belabor this at the time because it wasn’t the point of the essay.

But it is very much the point of this one: we get almost all our dope through screens.

Oh sure, there’s plenty of dope-delivery abundance in our high-calorie physical environment -- that’s obvious. But it’s also peanuts compared to what we get from glowing squares.

Digital Dope Addict

When I was a kid, I binge-watched TV whenever I got the chance, and going to the movies was basically the holiest sacrament of my first real religion.

I got access to the Internet by the time I was thirteen or so, and then my first laptop when I was a senior in high school, right before I left for college.

I didn’t get an iPhone until 2011, and I remember the night before I bought it. I couldn’t sleep. It was like I was eight years old again on Christmas Eve.

For most of my life, I believed I had an addictive personality. Not for food, really, or for drugs or alcohol. But for movies, TV shows, porn, social media, news, and games.

• I vividly remember borrowing my mom’s boyfriend’s gameboy when I was eight or nine, and playing nonstop like my life depended on it.

• As a lonely kid in middle school, I occupied most of my evenings with channel surfing, and learned how to stretch an allowance of a few quarters at the arcade as far as they would go.

• In high school I spent countless hours forcing pictures of naked women through a dial-up connection. (Another word for addiction is dedication.)

• Over the course of one summer, I tallied more than two hundred hours playing a game called Baldur’s Gate 2. The sequel came out last year, and I won’t go near it.

• Back during its initial run, I binge-watched Breaking Bad four or five episodes at a stretch. Same with Mad Men. Same with Game of Thrones. Same with dozens of other shows.

• Through all seven years of college, I would frequently plunge two or three (or four) hours into some mindless game like Sudoku, or bubble shooter, while listening to music.

• There was one year early in our marriage where both my wife and I dedicated almost all of our free time to a game called Frozen Free Fall -- which was basically a Disney-themed version of Candy Crush.

• Four years ago I deleted Facebook off my phone for good.

• Then Instagram.

• Then Twitter.

• A couple years ago, I had to swear off playing chess on my phone.

• Lately, if I’m not very, very careful, I can easily kill a whole afternoon on YouTube.

Somehow, though, it wasn’t until just a few months ago that I realized I wasn’t battling an army of addictions to different things (chess?!), I was battling a single addiction to many flavors of one thing.

Digital dope.

21 Signs You Might be a Digital Dope Addict

Check all that apply:

1. On average, you engage in passive scrolling at least once a day

2. You check your phone (or some other screen) within minutes of waking up

3. You check your phone (or some other screen) within minutes of going to sleep

4. You check your phone for no reason

5. You have a hard time sitting still (or standing) for more than a minute or so without checking your phone

6. You use your screen to relax.

7. “Downtime” and “screentime” are functionally equivalent

8. You often get distracted away from some task on your phone or computer and lose at least half an hour before you realize what happened

9. You hunt for new notifications when you’re bored

10. You feel anxiety when you don’t have access to your phone because you left it at home, or even just in the other room, or it’s dead

11. You feel like you never have enough time for the things you want to do

12. Seeing someone on their phone makes you want to whip out your own

13. You wish your phone had a better battery

14. You would not be able to accurately estimate how much time you spend watching TV on the average day

15. In the past 24 hours, you have gotten angry about something you saw or read on the internet

16. You suffer constant, low-grade anxiety about “what’s happening in the world”

17. You harbor a secret (or maybe not-so-secret) fantasy of making a living as an “influencer”

18. You have characterized, to yourself and/or others, your screen habits as “not that bad”

19. Your phone and/or your computer are never more than a year or two old

20. The thought of dramatically reducing your screentime seems unnecessary and/or impossible to you

21. One of the items on this list struck you as an unfair and personal attack

Uh oh.

Most people are familiar enough with alcoholism to know that one of the best strategies to beat an addiction to alcohol is to stay the fuck away from alcohol. Don’t buy booze. Don’t go to bars. Avoid parties where the main thing is drinking.

It’s different with digital dope. Anytime you’re on a screen for any reason, it is instantaneously available. And if you think your problem is Instagram, for instance, you might decide to block that app, or delete your account, or whatever other tactic to get away from Instagram like the boozer gets away from booze.

But then it is almost guaranteed that some other variety of digital dope will fill the void.

No Escape

The problem is that we are surrounded by screens that deliver media (much of it interactive) designed specifically to capture our attention indefinitely.

By now, everyone basically knows this.

But even though we see the problem, and we complain about the problem, and we wish we could solve the problem, we are also helpless against the unrelenting engines of commerce that ceaselessly grind to improve the mechanisms of our enslavement.

Take TikTok, for instance. The best drug ever invented by human beings. Way more addictive than any other social media that came before, but without all the bad feelings. By comparison, quitting the other ones (Fb, IG, X) isn’t too hard, because using those apps makes you feel bad. But TikTok makes you feel good! No matter how many hours you sink into scrolling, you don’t get tired of it. It’s always just interesting/funny/inspiring enough to keep you in a good mood. It is the ultimate escapist drug. You don’t even have to deal with a comedown.

Unfortunately, the only thing you get for all those hours is a craving for more. And, oh yeah, a gradual loss of interest in real life.

But even if you don’t ever use TikTok (which I don’t), you’re still probably addicted to screens (which I am).

Mechanisms of Enslavement

In designing the apps we use every day, companies do their best to “reduce friction,” where “friction” is a euphemism for making decisions. The goal is to create a “user experience” that is as frictionless as possible.

And it works! You can see it every time you get the impulse to “check your phone” for no reason at all. Or when you find yourself scrolling somewhere, but you don’t really remember starting. Or when packages from Amazon show up that you barely remember ordering.

You might have noticed that “autoplay” is the default setting on every single streamer.

These companies, the attention economy itself, and the consumerist society that gave birth to it, deploy vast resources to turn as many people as possible into passive consumers, to reduce us to our eyeballs and our wallets. Because the more control a company can get over those things, the better their stocks will perform.

First, consumerism turned us into consumers, and now, well, what do they call us in Silicon Valley board rooms?

Users.

(Which seems like a pretty frank admission that we are all trapped in a digital dope economy.)

Do we even remember what it means to be human?

OK, what DOES it mean to be human?

In a bold new era of LLMs, we keep having to go back to this question. As AIs eat more and more of the work we do, most of our default assumptions don’t quite cut it anymore. Machines, it turns out, are pretty smart, and can do a lot of the things we thought only humans could do.

So what can AIs NOT do? What distinguishes us as fully ensouled human beings, if not the work we tend to define ourselves by?

I would argue that it is an alchemical combination of our capacity to make decisions, and our ability to evaluate those decisions. And when I use the word evaluate, I don’t mean pragmatically, or logically (although we do have some skill there, just not as much as a computer), I’m talking about morality.

We are at our most human when we make deliberate decisions based on our deepest held and considered values. That kind of decision making takes lot of energy. It creates a lot of friction. But it is what makes us human.

So when we abdicate our responsibility to evaluate the allocation of our attention — or, in other words, when we are captured by passive behavior patterns and automated, frictionless consumption of screen-mediated dope — we have lost our humanity.

Solutions that Don’t Work

Face to face with the gravity of this problem, you might be tempted to throw your phone away. To go live in a cabin. To break every screen you see.

But most of us know such extreme measures are impractical at best. No, this is the world we live in. Here I am, writing this essay on a screen.

So how do I continue to live and work in the world, and also protect my sacred human agency?

Here’s what doesn’t work:

• Deleting or blocking apps

• Commitments to have more self-discipline

• Complicated boundaries around phone and computer use

• Raging at the deeply corrupt and complex systems that turned us into digital dope addicts to begin with

• Money

If the problem is passive behavior loops and frictionless consumption, then perhaps the solution has something to do with active decision-making and increasing friction.

But it also has to be simple enough to practice over and over again, and context independent. Meaning, it has to work all the time, everywhere, in every situation.

The Notebook Rule

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been fault-testing something I’m going to call The Notebook Rule.

It goes like this:

Before any interaction with a screen, I write down, in a notebook, what I intend to do. Then, as soon as I’m done doing that thing, I walk away (close the laptop, put the phone down, literally walk away, etc).

Caveats:

• If I find that I’ve drifted away from the intention I wrote down, I immediately walk away. Rinse, repeat.

• Phone calls are the exception -- I can make or take a call without using the notebook first. But as soon as the call is done, I walk away.

• In the event that someone needs me to use a screen to help with something, I don’t need the notebook. But as soon as I’m done helping, I walk away.

As I’ve been testing this rule, I’ve learned that there need to be a few exceptions, but that it doesn’t hold up if there are too many of them.

I’ve also learned that to the degree I keep The Notebook Rule, I am vastly more productive, getting more done in a day than I normally would in a week. My mood is better. I am more creative. I feel more grateful for what I have, and more resilient in the face of challenges and disappointments.

In short, my humanity flourishes.

And that’s the point.

Reclaiming Humanity

Anyone who’s had any experience with addiction (regardless of the flavor) knows that it eats life. It eats humanity. It erases you, and turns you into itself.

I realized last year that everything I care about, everything that matters the most to me -- my family, my career, my personal and spiritual development, all of my creative endeavors -- all of it is downstream of my ability to break free of my addiction to digital dope.

Logically, then, my very highest priority must be to regain my freedom and preserve my human agency.

And that means radically changing my relationship to screens.

Thus: The Notebook Rule

One Whole Year

I am committed to keeping The Notebook Rule for (at least) one whole year, during which I will periodically document my experiences here, and in Substack Notes. Then I’ll probably write a book about it.

I’m going to do everything I can to make this an ongoing conversation, because I strongly suspect that only the power of community, of authentic human connection, is strong enough to save us from the robust and relentless efforts of the digital dope pushers.

So please, share your experiences with the digital dope economy. What flavor are you addicted to? How have you tried to manage it? Has it worked?

Hit reply, leave a comment, share this post, whatever.

Let’s be human together.