Backstory time. *old quavery lady voice* Back in my day, the internet existed when I was growing up but my parents were staunchly on the side of the “healthy kids should play outside and not stare at screens all day” style of upbringing. That, coupled with their insistence on retaining their ancient dial-up internet access12 well into the age of wireless routers, ensured that any time I could spend on the world wide web would be slow, painstaking, and constantly interrupted anytime our household got a phone call.
At the time, I railed against the injustice of this system. It was clearly designed to make myself, a lowly teenager, criminally uncool. Not only could I not interact with the games, music, and social media sites of my peers, I felt I was also falling behind in learning how to operate these systems, which would put me at a disadvantage later on.
In a situation particularly stinging to my pride, teenage-me was given the chance to play a popular FPS game. Upon accepting, I was handed an Xbox controller for the first time ever and told to “shoot things.” I spent the rest of the match figuring out how to equip and shoot one gun while slamming into walls, getting run over by tanks, and getting melee-killed and teabagged by my compatriots3. Another memorable experience involved me asking my high school librarian how to access the internet on a Mac. He reacted like I had asked which direction the sky was located4.
Every humiliating (to me) encounter involving my unfamiliarity with tech added more fuel for the fire of why I should be given unfettered access to the internet right now just like my peers. My parents paid no notice, only lightening the restrictions ever so slightly when it became clear that I would need some internet access to complete projects and turn in work for my high school classes. At the time, these decisions felt insufferable and smothering. Now, decades removed from that era, I believe they were the sanest moves my parents could have made.
For one thing, once I started using computers regularly in college, I easily caught up with my peers and in some cases surpassed them. I learned to navigate and use both Mac and Windows operating systems, which might seem trivial now but if you’ve ever tried to teach either one to someone who’s never used the setup before, you’ll quickly find out there’s a lot of instinctual movement and understanding you take for granted5.
In addition, I also got to experience the internet with an older, more grown-up brain. The further in life I go, the more this feels like a superpower. I have the ability to say “no more,” or “this isn’t helping” and turn off the screen. I frequently put my phone on silent, my laptop away, and unplug—not as part of a temporary cleanse or self-help program, but as a vital, everyday habit in my life. I can’t stare at a screen to long; I go crazy. The (thankfully rare) days when I do get sucked into an algorithm (I am human, after all, and the dopamine hits just as hard) it’s usually not a chore to rebalance the next day. I enjoy reading physical books, writing with pen on paper (away from the constantly surveilling eyes of Big Tech) and generally creating stuff. This isn’t meant to be a flex (lots of people do this stuff) but more of an observation. When I’m not online as much, I’m more creative and more productive during my creative time. When I’m online more, I get less done, less often. It’s a pretty simple cause-and-effect.
This post started as a discussion of my deep love of crafts (particularly of the string-based variety). But the more I started writing about where that love originated from, the more I realized it, much like my love of writing itself, is the product of an absence not a fulfillment. It was the outcome of 1) an abundance of time and 2) an absence of input.
Smarter minds than I have called it boredom. And my parents, by fettering access to the world’s premier anti-boredom machine, unwittingly produced it in all of their children. I had to write stories as a child; the alternative was to kick rocks in the backyard for three hours.6
The best definition of the internet I’ve heard comes from Bo Burnham’s song Welcome to the Internet from his Netflix special “Inside.” Stylized with a cheap greasy carnival sound, the song captures the feeling of surfing the web incredibly well, with lyrics defining it as “anything and everything all of the time.” To the undisciplined creative mind (read: myself) internet access is incredibly dangerous and distracting to creative work. The urge to do more “research” and then click on several dozen links and get lost and completely forget what you were originally doing abounds. None of it is actual work (work is hard, remember, and requires putting thought into typing out actual imperfect sentences that are never as good as they are in your head) but it fills the boredom void. It feels like an easier way of getting to your goal.
Except, it’s not. And at the end of a full day of distraction-numbness, I have nothing to show for it except a vague sense of sadness and shame over the wasted time. Fittingly, the best way to distract from that sense of shame is… you guessed it, MORE internet!
That isn’t to say the internet is all bad. You wouldn’t be reading this blog post without it, for one. (Thanks, by the way!) It connects people. It spreads ideas. It provides incredible services. It allows anyone with access to do deep-diving research on topics that matter to them. And so much more. But it is a tool and one I’m increasingly convinced needs to be wielded wisely, especially where kids are concerned. (I say this as an adult reflecting on her childhood, not a current parent, which I think is an important caveat. Having a tiny human able to constantly emit loud noises in your immediate vicinity has the potential to change a great deal of highbrow values).
This is not a condemnation or celebration of anti-or-pro-internet usage by the way, merely notes from my own life. I’m exceptionally grateful for the upbringing I had. While far from perfect, it gave me the skills to exercise creativity as an adult which brings a lot of joy to my life daily. If I could dispense one piece of advice from this post, it would be this: go be bored. If you dare.
That’s my plan, anyway.
Side note: here’s the cool bracelet I wanted to show off that sparked this whole post:
- For the youngins: dial-up internet was a way of accessing the internet through a phone landline** ↩︎
- **A landline is ah… like a cellphone hardwired into your house. It had a physical cord that plugged into your wall which is how people called you… you know I’m just gonna quit while I’m behind here. ↩︎
- This remains the most honest introduction to the experience of playing a multiplayer FPS I have ever had. Every FPS game I’ve played since then, regardless of my skill level has provided this experience to some extent. War, war never changes. ↩︎
- How was I supposed to know you click on the orange-and-blue circle in the bottom corner? At least Microsoft computers placed the words “internet” next to “explorer” on the browser icon! (This was one of many Classic Blunders committed by High School Bre. The most important of course is to never show weakness to fellow high-schoolers. But only slightly less well known is this: never wear a sparkly apple-patterned shirt and jeans to your first day of track practice.) ↩︎
- For instance, I had to teach my grandma that triangle means “play” and two vertical lines meant “pause” so she could watch videos on her phone. It’s stuff like that you don’t really think about that trips people up. ↩︎
- Or dig a massive trench, fill it with water, and call it Mudson River. My precision-landscaping father was immensely unhappy with the Mudson River project and its eventual expansion, Mudson Lake, but was unable to bust the Trench-Digger’s Union of myself and my two siblings. ↩︎
Breinthewild 
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