I'm an addict

12 Dec, 2025

Hello, my name is Marc, and I'm an addict.

I was born in 1990, and vaguely remember the time when we didn't have internet. But telling enough, is that I do strongly remember the day when we first got the internet connected back in either 1997 or 1998, and trying to figure out what to do next.

We'd just been informed by my mum that we were hooked up to the net; we were online. So my sister and I found a newspaper Dad had lying around and started flipping through the pages to find a website to surf to (back then it was still "surfing the web" and I vote we bring that saying back). I vividly remember us coming across a gold mine of a few URLs, but the one we found, the one we knew we had to test out, was thex-files.com.

I'm hoping my brain isn't just making up the memory of remembering it looked like this, but is sure as shit is ringing a lot of bells:¹

Since then, it's been an endless journey of goofing around on the web. From the early days of learning from a mate about no$gmb from Zophar's Domain (which still exists today!), to stumbling through the nightmare of Visual Basic in high school as we all chatted together on an MSN Messenger clone that our classmate built in one lesson, to lurking in endless nerd forums like overclockers.com.au and home-barista, to somehow teaching myself to code (albeit basic) Python in my thirties to scrape websites (pre-ChatGPT thank you very much!); the internet has kept me faithfully in my seat since practically as long as I can remember.

I say "in my seat" very pointedly here, because about ten years ago I got my first smartphone, breaking the shackles of the desk, freeing the hamstrings from endless neglect, unlocking the endless connectivity we'd been promised would transform our lives in ways previously unimaginable.

I spent many years actively resisting getting a smartphone. I was watching a video recently from YouTuber jvscholz where he proclaimed that he wasn't using a dumbphone to seem more quirky, but I think I probably was. I also likely don't give myself enough credit here, however I think another part of it was that I like sitting at a desk and using a computer. Something about translating these actions to a phone just felt like it was robbing me of a hobby I'd always enjoyed. It still does.

As a point in favour of increased connectivity: I was always notoriously hard to get a hold of. I'd hardly answer my phone, barely answer texts from people I didn't want to speak to at the time, and no doubt left others feeling put out by my selfishness.²

But damnit, I was happy. There was never this abject weight loaded in my pocket, threatening to suck me into the void the second the screen was unlocked. It was just a friendly weight that helped me with my day.

(This is my old phone and it lost all the keys trying to open a beer with it. See what I mean? Helpful!)

So, as mentioned, ten or so years ago a good friend of mine loaned me an old Windows phone. Man that thing sucked, but it was the first taste. I don't strictly remember doing anything "smart" on it, but it was there and you could go on the internet with it. It must've been not so long after, before my trip to Europe in 2016, that Dad gave me his old iPhone 5s. Wow. This was an absolute gamechanger for travelling and definitely my era of taking photos, messaging apps, and actively using the internet on a phone had begun.

(It's so tiny! Phones have gotten too big and it's all part of the plan to keep you addicted /tinfoilhat)

It's 2016 and I get plugged in. Not with the ability to roam with data, only using the phone at wifi spots, but the addiction had started to manifest. We travelled Europe, enjoying our holidays, and I can see my picture collection start to grow. This is great! The ability to capture these things with this incredibly portable device really is something else.

But as we wound down our three month journey around Europe and I headed back to Australia, I realised looking back that I was now attached to my phone. I'm into my photos, I'm into messaging people on messenger, I'm hitting up reddit (absolute shitshow), and it's all turning into this heady wonderland of whatever the hell I want at any minute. Bliss... or so I/we thought...

I'm back in Australia at the end of the 2016 and if you were around that time, you'll sadly remember the absolute clusterfuck that was the US elections and I'm so. damn. plugged. in. to this nightmare unfolding before us on r/politics, that I really admit I had manifested my addiction writ large by that point. Not only that, the news cycle is just so rapid that I'm a total sucker for it. No doubt I'm also being influenced like crazy by the huge amount of astroturfing all over reddit at that point.

At the very end of 2016, my buddy who I'd travelled with in Europe that year has moved to live in Berlin, and pings me saying, "come back here, it's awesome!", so I do. There's more to that story, but that's for another time.

2017, I'm in Berlin again (phew that was fast)! WhatsApp gets loaded up, phone gets locked in to a new Aldi simcard, and I'm back online! But at that time I'm really exploring the city, climbing a LOT and meeting people. It's awesome, but now I always have my phone with me, ready to check a message at a moment's notice. I quickly pick up a used Median Laptop as well to really get back to business and pretty quickly regress to sitting at a desk again which I like. However, the phone has now become omnipresent.

I'm happy to gloss over the last nine or so years until today, because from then until now, I find myself always checking my phone, even though I've removed almost all social media, removed almost all my apps, essentially quit using YouTube, but somehow I still find something to scroll through. Hackernews, ars-technica, fucking reddit still (on the mobile web version no less and lordy is it terrible), the spam folder of my email; it's endless. It's endless and it's draining.

Two things did happen recently that has helped a lot: the birth of my nephew, Sven, and that's the discovery of this website you're on right now: bearblog.dev. I've always loved writing down my thoughts and I actually have a fair backlog of scribblings that I'll probably never make public, but I really wanted to just put some of my ideas out there with a goal to make a small archive that my beautiful new nephew can go through when they're older and get an idea of who uncle Marc is/was. Thanks to Herman for making that so easy!

These two things came together rather serendipitously and suddenly I had this outlet I can reach to that is actually just as much the dopamine hit as scrolling through hackernews is. Dare I say it; it's more exhilarating!

Having a creative outlet is quite possibly the only thing that can really stop the endless-scroll. If you're on Instagram, Twitter, facebook, etc; but you're engaging purely as a consumer, then no doubt you've been hit with that feeling of "why can't I do that/be as cool as that/achieve those goals", and that's kind of the point of those platforms. They make you addicted to seemingly unobtainable things and ideals but they don't push you to create. That's a big step that people need to make to go from observer to server, but ironically it's the thing that stops the doom-scroll, and I don't say "doom" just in the colloquial sense; there's a very real feeling I get (maybe you do too), when you just sink deeper and deeper into your feed and you know that it feels bad and you know you should go and do anything else, but you're trapped. That is a very real sense of doom and I was, and still am, often stuck with it. That's why you're reading this blog.

I love the internet for what it's given me. New skills, happiness, friendships, entertainment, jobs, but I'm tired of it being dominated by those willing to take advantage of my free time using every trick in the book to turn me into an addict. And I'm also tired of trying to hand off my responsibility for how I (ab)use my time to someone else. So I hope I manage to keep writing here, and I know that by doing so, I'm building something for Sven and for myself, that I can look back at and say, "now that was the right use of my time."

#2025 #life