Step one: Google boyfriend jeans, the game changers that will complete you. Marvel at the images of low-slung, slouchy denim in dark wash, light wash, distressed. Scroll and bookmark, scroll and bookmark. Ignore your screaming bladder. Realize you are half an hour late for an appointment.

Step two: Return home and settle in with your laptop. Skim Nordstrom, YOOX, Zappos, and Saks Off 5th. Discover ninety-seven boyfriend jeans . . . at Zappos alone. Filter for size, color, length, rise. Check slim cut. Check medium rinse.

Step three: Feed your two cats, who’ve gone from imploring you with their eyes to whining. Realize you haven’t eaten, either. Scoop out chicken morsels for them, Greek yogurt for you.

Step four: Pore over your filtered selections. Flex your skill as a curator with an eye toward cut, quality, and personality. Compare fabrics. Compare prices. Compare colors. Compare reviews. Move your selections to the cart. Repeat comparisons. Finalize selections.

Step five: Hover your finger over the touchpad and study your swag one more time. Click BUY and glory in the world righting itself. Savor the dopamine glittering in your brain. Take mincing steps to the bathroom to relieve your bladder.

Step six: Anticipate the arrival of your goods. Skip through your days with a spring in your step. Your big score is on its way!

Step six: Try on all seventeen pairs of jeans. Compare. Debate the right fit and style for your limited collection. Congratulate yourself for scoring not one but two styles that are ideal for your body, your aesthetics, your lifestyle. Return the rest.

Step seven: Return to website and buy doubles of your two glorious pairs. Tell yourself it will only take a sec. Check email. Check news. Check Facebook and Instagram. Check lifehack and lifestyle sites. Check the weather. Check op-eds. Check email again. Buy jeans.

I rarely drink, I don’t gamble, and I don't do drugs, not since flushing a heart attack’s worth of blue and white pills, chalky powder, and pebbly yellow meth in my mid-twenties. I procure products; I consume media. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll aren’t the only dopamine triggers. A computer may be less sexy, but it’s always there, a gateway to bliss.

I am dopamine’s bitch. My need for emotional escape triggers a ritual of procurement and consumption that borders on obsession. It’s less about the object of my obsession, which hijacks my focus and floods me with need, than the ritual. The ritual, and its resulting fix, fires off brain candy galore.

The Internet also rewards me by fake-linking me to the world. Each op-ed aligning with my own viewpoint, each social media “like,” each pixelated “friend,” each breaking news story makes me feel like I’m a part of things, even as I write at home with bed head and a trough of cashews. If that sounds like I’m alone, then think again. I have two cats! And a cache of jeans!

I’m being glib. I spend more time alone than the average person. Alone is my comfort zone, the place I thrive, create, and process the world. Okay, sure—sometimes it’s a response to not getting my needs met with others. You could argue that the reason I’m addicted to the Internet is that I lack sufficient human bonds. See how I buried the lede?

Hi, I’m Lux, and I’m an Internet addict.

Carl Jung had a wise view of addiction. He saw it as a kind of spiritual quest and proposed that the cure was a spiritual awakening and connection with other people. But what if your addiction is your so-called connection to others, and also your portal to the mystical and mundane?

Maybe I wouldn’t be trawling the Web if the people I love were willing, able, or nearby. Sometimes I’m not willing and able, either. But even if I hadn’t picked up my life and moved from my longtime home of LA, I’d noticed deep friendships there becoming less so as friends started businesses, moved away, had babies, got married.

That was just the tipping point of a long, slow pull to leave. My dreamy view of LA couldn’t compensate for the city’s flaws. The traffic unraveled me, the lack of friendliness wore on me, and the push-pull of the city drained me. Better to scrub the stars in your personal universe and adopt a life you know is for you.

After a decade-long love fest, I finally asked the hard question: Does LA deplete or nourish me? The answer was clear. I needed more mellow and less pretense. So I took charge and moved a couple hours south, to a serene community flanked by wilderness parks and lakes, with one-tenth the people of LA.

I dig people, to a point. Cyberspace is alluring to inwardly oriented people; it allows us to thoughtfully interact on our time, and unplug when we need to. I like skipping around my inner landscape. IRL, I overthink people’s expectations of me, get lost in observing others, and always try to be on. Juggling all that makes it harder to be myself. It’s easier to gather my thoughts alone and convey them in the ways and means that are true to me.

The Internet gets me. It never judges my oddball questions and always has the right words. It doesn’t require me to be fabulous and witty or wear eyeliner. It doesn’t judge my summer uniform of boyshorts with camis, or my winter look of silk and flannel PJs. I am never awkward, never a letdown. I am a whirling dervish of opened tabs and keyboard strokes and clicks and clever comebacks.

I roll hard.

The Internet has a special feature for people in the know: the rabbit hole. This feature isn’t for amateurs but has been hacked by the likes of me. I can research, say, when there’s a red moon for a story setting, crafting keywords and narrowing results at full speed, and still find myself surprised by nightfall three hours later, asking what the fuck just happened.

What happened, of course, is that the red moon search unearthed a bunch of related searches on natural (and unnatural) wonders, and I checked my email in case my agent had gotten back to me, and a wacky GIF popped up, and I got two DMs on Insta, and when I checked the feed Questlove posted about a legend dying, which led to a full hour of ugly-crying. And then an ad for pixie boots popped up.

The rabbit hole is a primo escape. It fills the addictive need for binge eating, binge shopping, binge everything . . . almost. The Web provides a high with zero calories, hangovers, rejection, or heartbreak. But while it is kickass for research, it is the enemy of creativity. It enables me as a consumer. It undermines my desire for deep work, that profound focus when there is nothing but me and the words I set to the page.

To move toward deep work, to be a creator, is to step back from the machine. To cultivate real life over online life. I remind myself how the Net reduces the real me to a set of data. I want to own my personhood, with all its messiness and humanness. I want utter nudity of self. The temptation to filter the shit out of a photo, or play up what’s going on in my day, or conceal tenderness with bravado is too great.

Our authenticity is our currency. I strive to be true and express something real. When I’m jonesing for “likes,” there’s something deeper at play, but it’s easier to post a selfie than explore unmet needs. Right? As much as I enjoy that steady narcotic drip of cyber “connection,” I know there’s something more at stake—we all do, even if we forget. The Web is a helluva drug.

So I staged an intervention. On myself. It wasn’t nearly as glamorous as a room full of teary-eyed loved ones enumerating how my addiction has hurt them, or offering to send me to an off-the-grid five-star rehab. It was more like, “AT&T? Get me off this crazy thing.”

Now to get online I have to go to the library. Bonus: renting a book! Did you know that you can actually check out books and read them instead of purchasing and then storing a literal fortune of words?! You’re welcome.

At the library I can yip with joy when the books I’ve requested arrive on the hold shelf, flirt with the shy librarian with the goatee, and join the human race for the time it takes to print out a Zappos return label or research Hindu Vedanta, skidding to a stop at the edge of the rabbit hole because the no-frills library chairs are made of steelized hardwood.

At the library people are not just data. Seated at the Online Express desktop to my left is a smartly dressed, straight-backed woman who smells of lavender oil; to my right is a man whose T-shirt hem falls just shy of his stained slacks, flaunting his love handles when he leans to dig through his plastic bag. This here is egalitarianism, with knowledge for all.

There is a designer library farther down the road, a kind of day spa for readers, with copious rooms and Zen fountains and windows overlooking lush gardens. Besides having to drive longer to get to it, I feel like I have to dress up. Since when do book nerds need to peacock while geeking out over Scotch-taped paperbacks? It’s comforting to come as you are. The library belongs to everyone, and I need that assurance. Libraries are real, the books are real, the people are real. I take heart in that.

While libraries are (usually) less hip than artisanal cafés, they provide an unassuming public hangout. For free. If you want a quiet respite from the world and don’t want to plunk down five bucks for a coffee or pledge your soul to a deity, the reading room is aces. Being in silence among other people, no interaction needed, is a bonus.

I still use my iPhone at home (personal hotspot, hello!), but I like a full screen, and my thumbs are hella slow. Plus, reducing the sheer potentiality of the Internet onto a handheld device feels kind of like sacrilege to me.

Still, my smartphone undermines my cybervention. I have to sequester it in the next room, knowing I’ll be too lazy when I’m burrowed in to get up. Still, it radiates a magnetic pull, wreaking havoc on my focus. It’s a constant barrage of diversions: Did I remember to update my calendar? I need to research some stuff! That hand soap isn’t going to order itself!

We need distractions or we’d go insane. If we were built to be zeroed in 24/7, we wouldn’t need sleep; we wouldn’t wrangle highs from poppies, peyote, Peruvian coca, or whatever our drug of choice: there’d be no Netflix. Some of us just take it too far. And distraction is stealthy.

The Internet is the Trojan horse and the phone, its gatekeeper. While you are tweeting and surfing and marveling at the wealth of knowledge at your fingertips, that horse is drawing nearer, ready to unleash all manner of whoop-ass onto your psyche. The daily mental energy required to deflect a Twitter meltdown, political shitshow, or human injustice is finite. You have to get ahead of it and do damage control.

Obvi, this is coming from an addict brain. Moderate people don’t need a neon skull and crossbones app warning them to chill. I try to be moderate but, you know, dopamine. Hence the intervention. It was less mystical inspiration than a Post-it with a purpose:

1. Pick up your phone.

2. Power off.

3. DO LIFE.

With my phone off and my home free of Wi-Fi, my laptop resumes its role as a creative tool. My once-narcotized brain is delighted by its own sway: “Yo, check out these words and shit! How cool was that metaphor? Look at me cognizanting and observating all over the place!” From my first writing class, when my adorable live-in beau bought me a PC with which to assemble my inner worlds onto Word docs (thanks, Danny!), I’ve loved me some laptops.

Since cutting off my Wi-Fi, hooboy. Despite the phone battle and my resistance to wake up, as Carl Jung urged, I have become the reader I’ve always wanted to be, devouring dazzling memoirs and Man Booker Prize novels and meaty essays.
I no longer numb my nighttime feelings with a huge tray of food and hours of streamed TV and movies. (Like, what if this is my life five years from now? Passing out in front of Netflix, bloated and isolated?)

I have reflected—like a conscious, sentient being, without a gut full of Oreos.

I have shown up and put myself out there.

I have created. Not because I hustled to nail my adulting between Internet benders and squeezed in a writing weekend. But because without the numbing distractions, time and space are freed to shift into a flow state. Ideas alight, and the natural cadence of creativity unfurls. Sometimes with a side of Oreos.

That’s my kind of awakening.