I made my first lifelong friend in preschool. Lenny and I argued every chance we got—over seating arrangements, over board game rules, over how to bake a rainbow cake. We argued like a married couple, our parents used to say. But our smiles, our laughs—they floated in the air. Free, untethered. We used to play tag ceaselessly, and I could never catch him, for he was faster than the wind.
Lenny always had a lot of energy. He’d constantly tap, fidget—his eyes roving around, searching for any new, exciting stimuli. And when we started high school, and those most quintessential years of adolescence ensued, there emerged new, exciting stimuli beyond belief; Lenny began to recount tales of almost unimaginable adventures—tales with alcohol and drugs and, God forbid, girls. He would black out and jump over fences and run away from cops. His life felt so exciting, so lived—especially compared to mine.
Lenny would post the coolest pictures on Instagram, send me Snaps from the coolest of places. He had thousands of followers and a Snapchat streak that bore a number I could hardly fathom. I thought that he was awesome.
But seventeen and eighteen brought about a change. Soon enough, Lenny couldn’t survive without a phone or weed pen in hand. He was mellow, subdued—our heated debates relics of decades past. And he was ravaged by a sort of lethargy, each step he took a trudge through molasses. His eyes would glaze over whenever we spoke, and would only refocus when he took another hit or another scroll. Smoke, tap. Smoke, tap. His one and only sacrosanct routine.
But we were still friends, and it wasn’t like either of us was going to give up on the other. We met less frequently, sure, but we remained close—and nothing was going to change that.
***
As with most hometown friendships, I started to see Lenny less frequently when we went off to college. Our breaks didn’t line up, nor did our summer plans. So we FaceTimed.
Every time the call went through, Lenny would be submerged in a cloud of smoke. He told me he had a roommate who smoked as much as he did, and they practically never left their room. They’d scroll through videos all day and night, chuckling as they took another hit. College was secondary to the thrill that only weed and reels could provide. ChatGPT was a north star, too; it was his new, steadfastly reliable best friend.
Each time we met up, Lenny would ask me if I wanted to try a different substance: weed, nitrous oxide, coke. And each time, as much as I wanted to feel that thrill, that complete rush that drowned out all else, I’d refuse. So I would watch him smoke, or inhale, or snort, and listen to all his epic stories about sex and drugs and EDM.
But by the end of sophomore year, I’d begun my own journey wrestling with the addictions that had seemed to engulf my mind. And I saw Lenny for who he was—a deeply troubled 20-year-old whom I still remembered as a boundlessly carefree kid. I’d compartmentalized his anxieties, his neuroses, his tangents about the bouts of existential dread that prevented him from climbing out of bed in the morning. I kept on wanting to think he was awesome.
***
When Lenny and I were at a Korean restaurant the summer before last, after a long day of walking around New York, my temper got the best of me. I could deal with the smoking, but I hated how he asked Chat for everything—how to comb his hair or what to order at the restaurant. The comfort and certainty he so desperately craved, that only hours and days on ChatGPT could provide.
We got into a vicious argument. I was worried that we’d drifted too far apart, on issues that mattered too much, to continue.
The next time I saw him, after a series of apologies and FaceTimes, Lenny was so buff he could have effortlessly lifted three of me. He’d started working out big time. But his smiles no longer reached his eyes. He kept on smoking and tapping, scrolling and Chatting. The actions had become so intrinsic to our conversations that they no longer felt like interruptions. I continued to justify it, brush it off—that’s Lenny, I thought. No matter what I say, he’s not going to change.
***
Last December, Lenny’s parents found out about the full extent of the drug use, and they sent him to rehab.
I kept on trying to text him, to WhatsApp him, but the messages sat undelivered. I figured he was on a long vacation. What I didn’t expect was a long FaceTime in January—him telling me that he’d finally gotten off the weed, the nitrous oxide, all the harder stuff that I thought he’d only experimented with but hadn’t regularly used. Now, all he did was vape. I was so happy for him, and we left the call with wide, eager, face-splitting smiles.
For a brief spell over spring break, Lenny was alert, almost as full of life as he’d been when we were kids. Vape as much as he wants to, I thought. He’s finally getting better.
The next time we met, he told me that he just wasn’t happy. It was agonizing, excruciating, he said. Life was so boring without the weed. What was he supposed to do with all that time, with all that control over his thoughts, his movements, his life?
He got back into weed soon after. But he still seemed pretty alert, in control of himself. And what’s a little weed compared to what he used to be doing? I thought.
***
I saw Lenny just a month ago, on a whole-day trip to Six Flags Great Adventure. You know when you’ve known someone for so long that you just instinctually recognize when they feel off? That’s how I felt that day, when we met up and hugged. He told me he’d only gotten three hours of sleep, so I thought that was the reason. He got some coffee to wake himself up, and we continued on our way.
As we were walking to my car, Lenny told me that he thought he looked like shit. “What?” I exclaimed. “You’re even fitter than the last time I saw you, dude!”
“But see the guys on my For You page?” he said. “They all look so good, so much better than me. Anyway, it’s probably ‘roids.”
We continued to talk about it, and I kept on insisting that he was almost unimaginably fit. But he just didn’t believe it. “What’s the point of doing all this,” I asked, “if the point isn’t to improve yourself?” When the drive isn’t internal, but external?
He told me he agreed, but that he still looked like shit. And that he was never going to get a girlfriend unless he got limb-lengthening surgery and buffed up.
Lenny? The guy I’d seen get checked out in public, who got more attention from the opposite sex than me and the rest of my friends combined?
All his friends are so much better off than him, he told me. Look at this post or that post. “It’s like everyone’s competing to see who has the nicest life, dude. And I don’t have the nicest life. I don’t have the nicest life.”
“I look like shit. I wish I was taller. I wish I was fitter.” The day’s refrains.
I tried telling him it was all fake, just a highly curated selection of quick filters and great moments, but he just didn’t believe me.
Despite the adrenaline of the roller coasters and the thrill of revisiting a theme park we hadn’t been to in years, Lenny’s smiles didn’t reach his eyes and his laughter didn’t reach his cheeks. He couldn’t find a reason to be happy.
At one point, as we were waiting in line for the Jersey Devil, he told me that he spent maybe five or six hours a day on Reels alone, that most of the videos he watched were of people getting shot or of people getting jacked.
“Are you feeling depressed right now, dude?” I finally asked.
“I feel depressed every day, man. Every single fucking day.”
I tried as hard as I could to cheer him up that day—I cracked jokes, I complimented him on his fitness, I reassured him that he was going to find someone. And I told him my own story—that I used to feel anxious and depressed all the time, comparing myself to everyone and everything, fixating on likes and view counts and all the bullshit and trivialities that social media seems to perpetually magnify. Sure, I still have insecurities since I got off, I told him, but not in the same way—in a much quieter, manageable, mundane way. They aren’t thrown in my face all the time like they used to be, and they feel so much smaller.
He listened, his eyes often tracking the glare of his screen, but he told me on the car ride back that he thought I was an extreme case. What worked for me wouldn’t work for him, he said. Yes, he knew that taking his phone into bed with him wasn’t great, and that he shouldn’t be spending as much time watching reels of people getting shot and people getting jacked, but his insecurities existed because he was what everyone knew him to be—a sad, broken, irredeemable mess. Who would never be happy, who would never find love, who would never come close to realizing the life that all his friends possessed.
***
By the end of the car ride, Lenny promised me to at least think about some of the things I’d said. But I wasn’t optimistic.
***
Neil Postman, a celebrated media theorist, once argued that our society would conform more closely to Aldous Huxley’s imagined future than George Orwell’s. “What Orwell feared,” he wrote, “were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance…. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
You’ve seen the statistics, the op-eds, the rates. Are we so discomfitingly content in our discontent, so drowned in lethargy and inertia, that we perpetually neglect the possibility of change? There must be a better way—one with fewer, less pernicious dependencies and entrapments. There must be a better way.
***
A couple of weeks later, Lenny shipped off to Florence, Italy for a semester abroad. He sent me a stream of texts:
“Ive really been trying to reduce my screen time since I got to Italy I’ve been realizing how much it’s affecting my life, I spend all day on my fucking phone!!! It’s getting miserable…. The comparison to others is destroying me. Even when I have a good night out here, I open my social media apps and the only thing I can think is that everyone is having an even better time than me. It’s endless comparison for me, it really is the thief of joy”
“And the addiction to the short form media has just destroyed my attention span. Like starting classes again made me realize how short my attention really is… I think it was easy for me to get defensive when we were talking about it because I didn’t want to admit it’s been such a big problem in my life….
Thanks for talking to me about it at six flags I think my eyes are opening to how bad this shit is for my mental health. It’s harder for me to reduce screen time than to quit weed or any drug I ever did”
“But I appreciate you bro it’s 2 am here I should go to sleep. Been scrolling Reddit for hours 🤣🤣🤨”
***
Lenny’s recognized something that a lot of us have not. He’s recognized that maturity isn’t forced.
There’s no magical fairy coming to whisk away our devices, to snap her fingers and wish away our addictions.
Identifying dependencies doesn’t resolve them, but it’s certainly a start.
You either do the work now, like Lenny, or you do it later, or you do it never. But the comparison, the insecurity, the distrust, the cynicism, the anxiety and depression and loss of imagination and empathy and presence and connection and meaning—it’s not like any of them are going to be ameliorated on their own.
Lenny has made the exceedingly difficult choice of refusing to let addiction ravage his life. And there will be struggles, and bullshit, and backslides—but giving that monster, that wretched miserable parasite that exists in all of us, a good old fight is light-years superior to not giving it a fight at all.
Our lives have, largely, been stolen from us. And it is incumbent on us to get them back.
Ami Gillon’s column reflects on the technological forces that have wrought sweeping changes to our personal, social, and spiritual lives – changes with which we have not yet fully grappled. Each installment is deeply personal and anecdotal, for how else can one get to the truth of such matters?
