I occasionally joke that the 12,000-plus posts I’ve published on Afflictor over the years would be a good morning for Andrew Sullivan, but I win because I didn’t support the invasion of Iraq. 

Sullivan was, until recent times, a scary prolific blogger who seemed to turn himself into a machine in the process of working with them, running a sprint against a stream of information that never rested, never stopped. Finally, he stopped.

The writer wasn’t Zen enough to gladly accept the Bob Marley credo that “the day you stop racing is the day you win the race,” but he knew he needed help for what had become an addiction to a “constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego,” one that had begun to damage his physical as well as mental health. In the insightful New York magazine article “I Used to Be a Human Being,” Sullivan recounts the experience of using meditation, nature walks and quietism to break from this pernicious cycle, a piece which contains great lines like this one: “If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation.”

The thing is, he began noticing that though he was an early adopter of the antic existence of living-inside-the web, social media, smartphones, and apps had soon enough ushered a huge chunk of the globe inside. I wonder sometimes if being caught in an endless maelstrom of information caused Sullivan to lack distance and perspective to the disaster that the Iraq War was likely to become. Now I ponder the same about us all when we’re making vital decisions in this world of cold wars and hot takes. And once the Internet of Things is ubuiquitous, we’ll all be inside of a machine with no OFF switch.

The opening:

I was sitting in a large meditation hall in a converted novitiate in central Massachusetts when I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. A woman in the front of the room gamely held a basket in front of her, beaming beneficently, like a priest with a collection plate. I duly surrendered my little device, only to feel a sudden pang of panic on my way back to my seat. If it hadn’t been for everyone staring at me, I might have turned around immediately and asked for it back. But I didn’t. I knew why I’d come here.

A year before, like many addicts, I had sensed a personal crash coming. For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. And at times, as events took over, I’d spend weeks manically grabbing every tiny scrap of a developing story in order to fuse them into a narrative in real time. I was in an unending dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.

I was, in other words, a very early adopter of what we might now call living-in-the-web. And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone — connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once. Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. Users were as addicted to the feedback as I had long been — and even more prolific. Then the apps descended, like the rain, to inundate what was left of our free time. It was ubiquitous now, this virtual living, this never-stopping, this always-updating. I remember when I decided to raise the ante on my blog in 2007 and update every half-hour or so, and my editor looked at me as if I were insane. But the insanity was now banality; the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone.•