The Worst Trade Ever
I was ten when I had my first experience with addiction.
And since I already know what you’re thinking, let me address it off top – no I wasn’t drinking or doing drugs as a ten year old. Come on.
I was, however, addicted to something that, looking back, gave me a dopamine rush as if I actually was doing a certain powdery substance that is favored by both the twenty-three year old NYU grads who regularly do pilates at the West Village Equinox and their private equity MD fathers who fund their lifestyles.
This addiction consumed my innocent ten year old self.
I was addicted to Runescape. And holy shit, what an addiction it was.
I didn’t want to do anything else, talk about anything else, or think about anything else. I daydreamed about what I could achieve once I could embark on members-only quests. I cried when someone I trusted hacked my account and stole everything I owned. I cried when I was defeated in the wilderness and lost my very expensive armor that took months to save up for. I cried when I got “broken up with” by my “girlfriend” (who was probably another guy) because I wasn’t at a high enough level.
Ah, the lessons I learned that still serve me today.
My dad knew how bad my addiction was so he would only let me play on special occasions or during summer break, but best believe I’d figure out how to get at least a half hour in when he was out of the house.
One time he was leaving for a work trip, and having an XY chromosome himself, he knew that his troublemaking son would binge on Runescape until his eyes bled if left up to his own devices. His naive plan was to simply tell my mom to not let me play under any circumstance and to block the domain from Internet Explorer. Lol, good luck with that.
At first I planned to follow his orders, but an episode of Spongebob set in a medieval world lit up every trigger in my brain. Resisting the urge was impossible. My body tensed up and I couldn’t pay attention to the show anymore — I had to play Runescape.
After successfully guilt tripping my mom (it wasn’t hard), I opened up the separate browser I downloaded specifically for these glorious moments and typed “101lakerfan” into the pixelated login window. The intro music was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard. A few flicks of the screen later and I found myself in the merchant city of Varrock, ready to go to work.
Finally.
My next few hours were spent fighting demons and dragons, dodging scammers, and going on quests to unlock access to new worlds. I didn’t know what dopamine was at the time, but the rush was exactly what I imagine a drug addict feels when they finally get their fix after a long period of abstinence. The subsequent haze after my four-hour flow state was the comedown. The next day’s craving was the withdrawal.
Eventually my Runescape addiction gave way to a much weaker Call of Duty addiction, which fizzled out when I went off to college. But addictions are like hydras — cut off one head, and another grows back in its place. And by the time I moved into my undersized and overpriced dorm room, social media was firmly entrenched in our lives like a parasite, infecting our phones and thus minds with a virus that would turn us into hunched-over zombies.
My teenage self stood no chance against the army of data scientists with nine-figure budgets who had a singular mission: to enslave me to their algorithms.
This time, it wasn’t a video game that would consume me. The perpetrator was a little blue bird on a site called Twitter.
*
“Holy fuck. I can’t believe I made this. I actually made this.”
The best feeling I’ve experienced isn’t something I can accurately describe with words; it speaks to me in a language beyond language. But since I’m writing about it in English, it would be pretty stupid for me to leave it at that, and to assure you that reading this isn’t a complete waste of your time, I will label this feeling as victorious. Please understand, though, that no word can adequately convey how powerful it feels.
This all-encompassing feeling of victory presents itself when I’m producing music and create something that sounds so good, that hits so hard, that listening to anything else would be sacrilegious. It’s electricity in my chest, as if every time the bass hit, Zeus himself was spawning lightning inside of me. For a second I’m frozen with disbelief, like there’s no way this could actually be mine. But it is.
It’s more than just music. It’s an auditory universe I carved from the chaos in my own mind. A soundscape that belongs to me, and me alone. One day it’ll belong to others when I finish and release it, but for this intimate moment, it’s just the two of us – me and the vibrations emanating from my JBL monitors.
I’ll listen to this half-finished concept of a plan on repeat for hours, indulging in every detail. Maybe I’ll tweak a snare here and add some filter movement there, but I mostly play it over and over and over again late into the night. I don’t give a single fuck about how much sleep I’m sacrificing — the thought of not listening to it is more painful than the exhaustion I’ll feel the next morning.
And the second I wake up, the obnoxious screech of ambulance sirens substituting for an alarm, I immediately play it again, allowing it to draw energy into my veins that even the strongest pre-workout can’t match. Nothing can.
What a feeling. Common sense would dictate that I would chase it all the time, right?
But nope. I run away from it.
???
Who runs away from euphoria? From victory?
I run away because the process is messy and frustrating. The high of listening to my creation eventually fades and is replaced by the pressure to turn it into a full song. This is where I get stuck — every new layer I add sounds like shit and ruins what I already made. I don’t know what to do anymore and face the brutal reminder that my taste far outpaces my skill. The momentum slows until everything grinds to a halt.
And once the momentum is gone, it takes a Herculean effort to pick it back up. I’ll absent-mindedly spend an entire afternoon scrolling through samples on Splice like I’m lost at Costco, but instead of trying to find my mom, I’m frantically searching for a burst of inspiration that I know will never come.
The doubt creeps in. The resistance builds. The mountain of victory I stood on just days before collapses under the weight of my expectations and turns to rubble, piling up higher and higher until it hardens into a wall, firmly separating me from that feeling I so desperately crave. Trying to climb its jagged edges or push through its monstrous weight leaves me battered and bruised, like I slipped a disc in my back mid-deadlift.
It’s so exhausting.
Even just looking at the wall zaps me of the energy that the feeling on the other side once provided. I swell up with shame and avoid listening to it as if it never existed. In the rare moments where I summon the strength to listen to it, I only hear the flaws – the parts I don’t know how to improve, the sections I don’t know how to develop.
It used to set my heart ablaze. Now it reflects my inadequacy.
So I press T on Chrome. I don’t have to go through any trials or tribulations to get dopamine from Twitter. I don’t have to push through some ugly wall. Why bother when scrolling is so much easier? Why feel the shame of incompetence when I can distract myself from it?
With every refresh, the algorithm serves me up another platter of fresh garbage that I anxiously devour until the fire in my chest is snuffed into an insecure wisp of smoke. I know it tastes terrible. I know I would be happier if I worked on my song instead. I know I should demolish the wall so I can once again drown myself in the bliss that lies on the other side.
Yet I continue to scroll.
*
Look, you’ve already read enough content about how bad social media is for you (ironically, you probably found most of it on social media). I have very little to add to the broader conversation, so I promise this won’t turn into another “delete your social media and free your brain from the clutches of the evil algorithm!!!” post.
Instead, I’m simply going to reflect on (complain about) what my Twitter addiction has taken from me.
But first I’ll justify it. Lol, typical addict behavior right?
It’s not a bullshit justification though — I’ve gotten so much out of Twitter and truly am grateful for some aspects of my addiction.
I’ve met people through Twitter who’ve become genuine friends in real life. I’ve come across ideas and concepts that shifted the way I see the world. I’ve discovered accounts, half of whom are anonymous, who taught me more than the professors who had the nerve to give me a grade in college.
I’ve even spent thousands of dollars on courses from people on Twitter — a lot of them sucked, but a few were so transformative that I can’t imagine where I’d be without them (go give some money to River Kenna and Tej Dosa, you will not regret it).
And if fate dictated that I get addicted to social media, I’m glad Twitter was the chosen one instead of TikTok or Reddit. My ceiling and floor are both higher because of it.
If only that’s where the story ended.
*
It was the day before Thanksgiving, basically an extra day off in the corporate world.
I made big plans for my five-day break: I’d spend hours producing music, crush a few workouts, and lose myself in reading and writing.
But first, I had to check Twitter. A few minutes wouldn’t hurt.
Lmao. How naive. Apparently I didn’t learn from the other thousand times I said that. Twitter took over my entire morning and gave me nothing of value in return — just a scattered mind and an inability to focus. I can’t remember a single post I saw, but I do remember how fucking horrible I felt.
I call this feeling “TV static mode” where it’s like my brain is being submerged in white noise, each thought being drowned before it even has a chance to develop. I’ve perpetually lived in this state after years of getting beaten down by the algorithm, but this time my response was different. I was infuriated. And then I was disgusted.
Right then realized I had to cut myself off. I ripped out my IV drip of dopamine and committed to five days of being disconnected. No social media, especially Twitter, until after the holiday break.
It felt daunting — another wall to climb — but the thought of spending another long weekend in a haze was worse.
Since doom scrolling wasn’t an option, I loaded up a song that I had abandoned a few months prior and decided I would once and for all expand it into a full song. I spent the next hour fumbling through ideas, discarding each one while resisting the urge to chuck my laptop out of my eleventh-floor window.
Everything sounded like shit. I felt like shit. And I didn’t want to do anything other than doom scroll. This was the point where I would normally press that stupid fucking T on my keyboard. It was so painfully tempting to smother myself in a blanket of TV static.
But I couldn’t. I had no choice but to push through my avoidance.
And then something clicked. I grabbed a dusty synth patch I made a year prior, dragged it over my chord progression, and watched as the idea snapped into place as if it was waiting for me to find it the whole time. Not only did it pave the way for the rest of the song, but it sparked new ideas that made the first half even stronger.
It was the missing piece I didn’t know I needed.
I sat back, stunned at how incredible it sounded. The feeling I missed for so long knocked on my door and tackled me as soon as I let it in. It didn’t seem real. And yet there it was, my old friend sitting before me like it never left to begin with.
My next three days were spent listening to my beautiful brainchild on repeat, basking in the flames that were reignited in my chest. I finally climbed over the wall.
Only then did I realize what my addiction had stolen from me. It was more than my ability to focus — it was my ability to feel alive.
*
Despite how much my ego tries to tell me otherwise, I’ll always have more to learn. And considering how much I’ve learned from Twitter, it’s tempting to spend hours digging for the next life-changing Tweet. So fucking tempting. But endlessly refreshing my feed in search of it is no different than dumpster diving for a memecoin that might 100x overnight. I could get lucky, but is it worth the cost when I’ve already squeezed out 90% of the value Twitter has to offer? Chasing that last 10% is pointless when I could be living in the real world instead. Or better yet, the world I build when I make music.
I want to keep justifying my addiction by pointing to the people I’ve met and the lifestyle changes I’ve made, but it’s just not worth it anymore. My next phase of growth won’t be sparked by a tweetstorm from an anonymous account with a Greek statue as their profile picture. It must come through experience, not through scrolling.
The price I paid for my Twitter addiction goes beyond music.
A few years ago, I was taking care of my dog, Jasmine, while my parents were on vacation. I’d wake up at 5am for my commute and wouldn’t return until 7pm, drained from cold calling plumbers and electricians all day long.
When I finally made it back, she would greet me as if I had been gone for years. Instead of returning her excitement, I’d distractedly dump food into her bowl, throw around a toy for a couple of minutes, and retreat inside to stare at a screen for the rest of my night. She’d then patiently sit at my feet, loving me unconditionally even though I was nothing more than a mindless zombie.
She didn’t ask for much — just a bit of attention after being alone all day — but I ignored her so I could sit on the couch and let a bunch of useless Tweets rot my brain instead. Now she’s gone. The regret I feel for neglecting her hurts more than any song I left unfinished.
That’s not who I want to be. That’s not how I want to treat my future kids. While I can’t apologize to Jasmine, I can change my behavior starting now.
Breaking my social media addiction isn’t just about destroying that wall so I can make more music. It’s so I can take back control of my life.
p.s. I just dropped a new song. It’s not the one I reference in this post but still gave me that same feeling when I was working on it.