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May 10, 2018 - The Matt Walsh Show
25:54
Ep. 27 - Break Free From The Internet And Reclaim Your Life

I make my living on the internet. The more time you spend here, the better for me. But I still think you should cut way, way down on your internet usage. It is harming you in immeasurable ways. Take it from me: you'd be much happier if you put down your phone and lived a real life again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's talk about the internet.
The internet is a dreary, garbage-strewn wasteland populated by barely sentient trolls and zombies.
The internet is a portal into the darkest, foulest, most disgusting recesses of the human soul.
The internet is, I'm convinced, a blight on mankind.
The internet is... Certainly a net negative for the human race.
There are some positive aspects to it, but the positive aspects are so vastly outweighed by the negative that it's almost embarrassing to bring up the positives at this point.
It's embarrassing to look at all of the destruction this thing has rocked on mankind and to say, well, yeah, but it helps me stay in touch with my friends and family.
And yes, I say this as a person.
I'm a person who uses the internet to make a living.
I'm using the internet to send this message that is anti-internet, and I am a person who makes a living on the internet.
I understand all that.
I understand the irony.
You may even call me a hypocrite.
Maybe I am a hypocrite. I hope I'm not.
I'm not trying to be. That's not my point here, but if that's the accusation you want to lob against me, you're free to do that.
What I've tried to do personally is I have tried to take this thing This awful, monstrous thing, and use it to speak some truth.
Because I noticed that, although there's quite a lot being said on the internet and shouted back and forth, does not appear to be a lot of truth.
A lot of real truth.
Anyway, there are a lot of people who are out there saying, I'm speaking truth.
I don't care what anyone thinks.
I'm just going to tell it like it is.
There are a lot of people on the internet who have that brand.
But what I noticed and what I noticed before I started doing this is that the vast majority of them are actually just saying all they're doing is pandering.
What they're saying is a careful calculation because they know that there's going to be a wide audience of people that line up to pat them on the back for saying this supposedly controversial thing.
And so I noticed that and I said, well, maybe I should get on here and try to say some things that perhaps most people actually will not say.
That's been my mission and what I feel called to do.
And I hope that I've had some success in that regard.
That's up to you to decide.
But what I can say is that it's—and so I'm not going anywhere.
Even though I'm saying all this, I still feel as long as God has given me this platform—and platforms go away.
Nothing lasts on the internet, especially platforms.
Somebody can have an audience on a platform one day, and the next day it's gone.
Everything just goes away like that.
And if and when that happens to me, I'm not going to cry about it.
I won't weep over it. It's God's will.
Right now, it seems that it's God's will that I have this platform and I use it to say things, and so that's what I'm doing.
But it is hard to make any kind of a lasting impression, to say anything meaningful on the internet is hard, and it's becoming harder and harder and harder because there are billions of people all shouting into the same void.
And even to have an audience online these days is no longer any kind of novelty.
It's not a big deal.
When I first started doing this five years ago or so, it seemed like there was a relatively small community of whatever we are, whatever we were, I don't know, internet personalities, whatever you want to call it.
There was a small community, it seemed like, of people who had any kind of real platform and audience.
Now though, only five, six years later, It's like everybody has an online audience.
Everybody has a brand.
There's not a big deal anymore.
It's not novel. And it seems every day I'm scrolling through Facebook and I come across some new random dude or woman Shouting into a webcam and saying things that are meaningless and pointless and hollow,
regurgitating talking points, taking these rehashed, regurgitated, microwaved talking points and feeding them to the audience some more.
Because it would seem like there are quite a lot of people on the internet who have an insatiable appetite.
For talking points. Even if they've heard those exact talking points a million times, they want to hear them a million more times.
And so it seems every day there's another person who becomes an internet sensation by saying the same thing that everybody else is saying.
And so I'll see some new random guy, because I'm curious, and so I'll look at their Facebook page, and I'll see that, oh, this person has a million and a half followers.
And I think, what?
That guy? Really?
A million and a half people?
He warrants a million and a half people listening to him?
And I'm sure many people have had the same thought about me.
I realize that. So...
These content creators, and that's really what people who make a living on the internet, what we're called, we are content creators.
And that's really an apt name.
Because for most of us, that's all we're interested in doing.
It's not necessarily saying anything that means anything.
We're not worried about substance, not worried about quality, not worried about being meaningful, but simply we're worried about pushing out content.
Just stuff for you to click.
Here, click this, click this, click this.
Here's some more stuff to click. Click this thing, click this thing, click this thing.
Watch this thing. Okay, stop watching that.
Watch this, watch this, watch this, watch that.
Look at this, look at this, look at this, look at that.
That's what content creators are doing for the most part.
Doesn't matter what the thing is.
Anything. If I can get you to click on anything, I don't care what it is, just click on it.
It's like, imagine if you were at 7-Eleven or something and you went to the refrigerated section where all the bottled drinks are and you saw a bottle, some nondescript bottle, and with some weird substance inside, some off-colored substance, and on the label it just said, content. Okay?
Whoever made this bottle of whatever it is, they don't even care what's in the bottle.
It's stuff.
It's a substance.
It is content. It is filled with something.
Now, here, drink it. Now, of course, you would never pick up that bottle and drink it, but on the internet, you do it all the time.
On the internet, all the time, you are consuming content simply because it is content.
And the content creators then are quite happy that the average American spends 25 hours a week online in addition to his 35 hours a week of TV. So that's 60 hours a week all told.
And that's a low estimate.
25 hours a week online.
I know you're thinking the same thing that I thought when I saw that statistic.
That sounds pretty low.
But remember, this is average for all Americans.
So 25 hours a week, that number is brought down considerably by the 65 and over crowd.
Who certainly are on the internet now more than they would have been even five years ago.
But grandparents and great-grandparents are bringing that average down.
I think if we were to look at average time spent on the internet for people between the ages of 13 and say 45 or 50, that number is going to go way up.
But on average, we're talking 35 hours a week watching TV, 25 hours a week online, that's 60 hours staring at screens.
Almost every waking moment now, as human beings, we spend staring at screens.
And that is not, even though I need you to stare at screens so that I can make a living and feed my family, I am telling you, stop doing it.
Stop living your life this way.
It helps me.
It's to my advantage.
I could have no ulterior motive in telling you to stop doing it, but I'm telling you to stop doing it because it's destroying you.
It's destroying all of us. This is not a life.
This is not a human existence.
A life spent doing this with your phone.
This is what life has become.
Just this. This is your whole life.
For a lot of people, your whole life is just this.
Just that. Staring at this and this motion, and that's all.
That's life. But that's not life.
That's not a life. That's not a human life.
A human life is lived outside in three dimensions, interacting with people and with things and with nature, and that's what life is supposed to be.
And we know for teenagers it's even worse.
What kind of people are we raising?
Teenagers, statistically, at this point, Basically never look up from their phones.
We're talking nine to ten hours a day.
Ten hours a day, on average, teenagers are spending consuming media.
Ten hours a day.
Again, I say that is not a human existence.
We all have the same stories.
And so this is a familiar complaint, but it's an important complaint and one that we need to deal with and we're not.
And that is, you know, if you're ever around, everyone is like this nowadays, but teenagers, for teenagers, it's even worse because this has been their life since they were babies and they've literally been raised on the internet.
And at this point, I think it's almost like a physical dependency has been formed But we've all been around teenagers and I wrote this, I forget what I wrote a few months ago, but I relayed this story from last year when my family, we went to a family reunion on my wife's side of the family in Minnesota.
We were at a lake house.
And so multiple generations of the family all at this lake house, and there's a jet ski, and there's fishing, and it's great, right?
And I'm having a blast. I'm with my brother-in-law.
We're fishing. We're taking turns on the jet ski.
We're going on the pontoon. We're having a great time.
I put my phone away.
I had it off for probably four or five days.
I didn't even look at it. I loved it.
I just loved it. I took vacation days, so I didn't have to.
And I was completely out of the loop.
I was oblivious, and I was loving it.
But the younger generation there at the family reunion, the teenagers, The really 10 to 20 crowd, they don't look up from their phone the entire time.
We could be out on the pontoon, they're looking at their phone.
We could be playing cards at night, they're looking at their phone.
They're looking at their phone. They do not look up from it.
Ever. Again, I say, this is not human.
This is really bad.
Guys, it really is. I know everyone complains about it, like I said.
But this is really bad.
I don't even think we understand yet.
We cannot even comprehend the consequences of raising a generation like this.
It truly is unlike anything that the world has ever seen.
Yeah, every generation has their new technology.
Every era of human society has some new technological advancement.
And yeah, there are always people who are concerned about what that technological advancement will do.
But this is different. This is life being condensed down to this.
And you know, one other thing about that, when we talk about, you know, anytime somebody starts wringing their hands over the internet, you're always going to have the people who say, yeah, but you know, people did that with cars.
Everyone worried that cars were going to destroy society.
Everyone worried that TVs would destroy society.
Everyone would worry that phones would destroy society.
And society turned out fine, didn't it?
And every time I hear that, I always think, Did society turn out fine?
Are you so sure that those people issuing those prophetic warnings about cars and TVs and everything, were they really wrong?
I don't think they were totally wrong.
Now, I'm not saying that we should all give up our cars.
Or that necessarily the world would be better without cars, but actually even something like the automobile has had some positive effects, but it has had some very serious detrimental effects to society that some people early on saw and knew that was going to happen, and they warned us. And their warnings actually came true, and yet here we are looking at them and saying, see how wrong they were?
They weren't wrong! They were right!
There were people with cars who, for instance, warned that, okay, now that we have cars, we have the ability to go anywhere we want, what you're going to find is that the family is going to break apart and people are going to spread far apart.
They're going to spread far away from their families.
They're going to spread far away from their jobs.
Children are going to leave their parents and be far away.
It's going to lead to the breakdown of the family.
There are even people that warned that with cars, you know, people aren't going to be going to church as often because now the kids are going to be getting in the cars and going off and doing something else rather than going to church.
So with the internet, and of course there are people with the TV who warned, the TV is going to take over our life.
It is going to undermine the family, and now the entire family, the existence of the family is going to be centered around the TV. There were people warning about that in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and they were right.
That is what happened.
I don't know about 30s.
When was the TV event?
I don't know. So with the internet, I think there are a lot of warnings being issued that are correct, that are right.
And this is to say nothing of all the porn.
You know, I've talked about all the things, problems with the internet.
Probably the biggest problem is that it has turned us into a race of people who are completely obsessed with pornography.
And don't give me that, well, there used to be Playboy magazine.
Okay, yeah, there was Playboy magazine, and even that is pretty recent.
But you didn't have billions of people across the world who were spending hours and hours and hours of their week reading Playboy magazine.
You do have that with the internet.
To be precise, and this is just on one website, Pornhub.
Pornhub, they release their statistics at the end of every year.
How long, how much time do people spend watching videos on just their platform?
And right now we're at the point where on average humanity spends four and a half billion hours watching porn on just that site.
That's 500,000 years worth of porn in one year.
That means that over the next decade, humanity will spend five million years collectively watching porn, and a sizable portion of that audience will be children.
That wasn't happening with Playboy magazine.
The Playboy under your dad's mattress, which is the stereotype, people weren't spending four billion hours looking at Playboy.
It's different. And it has had an effect on us.
Studies show Americans, between the porn and everything else we do online, Americans, our memory has suffered.
Our attention spans have suffered.
We can't remember anything. We can't pay attention to anything.
We need constant stimulation.
We can't stay focused on one thing at a time.
We can't interact with other human beings.
Our written language has deteriorated.
And you can see that. You can see how our language has kind of plummeted back into the Stone Age.
And now we're using hieroglyphics again, but we call them emojis.
And you have all these people who can't communicate You can't convey an emotion through the written language without using a smiley face or a frowny face.
Me happy! Me sad!
Look at smiley face! That's what you have college-educated, literate, supposedly intelligent people who cannot communicate happiness, sadness, whatever, through sentences, so they have to use pictures.
I truly believe that your life would be so much better if you cut out the internet, or at least you cut down on it drastically.
Drastically. And I think you would become a much happier, more fulfilled, more serious, more intelligent person.
You would lose nothing.
I would lose something if you cut down on the internet.
I would lose your clicks, your traffic, your attention, and the money that comes with it.
But I'm willing to lose that if it means that more and more people are starting to live human lives again.
And then you free up time once you start reclaiming your life and detaching yourself from the phone and from the internet and from TV. Then you free up time to do other things like play with your kids or read books or do anything else.
I don't know. Train for a marathon.
Become a beekeeper. Learn how to garden.
Learn anything.
Pick a subject and become an expert in it.
Not because you Googled it or you look at Wikipedia or you watched a YouTube video, but become a real expert.
Just pick a subject, whether it's a historical subject or anything, a scientific subject, literature, history, art, any subject at all.
Pick a subject and become an expert.
Say to yourself, I'm going to read 15 books on this subject over the next year and I'm going to know it.
Why not? That's how we become interesting people.
That's how we become interesting, substantive people when we know things and we have real interests.
Facebook is not an interest.
YouTube is not an interest.
It's where we go when we have no interest.
So what would you be missing if you cut your 25 hours a week down to, say, five or one?
Five hours, I think, is a good...
Why not that? Let's do five hours a week.
That's one hour a day, Monday through Friday, which is still kind of a lot.
And then no hours on the weekend, so you have your weekend entirely free of that.
And I think that's great. That's moderation.
That would be fantastic. That'd be a great start, wouldn't it?
But I think this process of reclaiming our lives from the Internet You have to do it one piece at a time, I think.
If you want to break a habit, you got to break it into pieces first, and then you can break the habit.
And so let's focus on, I think, if we're going to work on this together, let's focus on it one piece at a time.
So let's start here. You got to start somewhere.
What if we just start with this?
Start with the morning.
Take the internet out of your morning.
Now, I don't know about you, but I have, and I wrote about this a few weeks ago, and since then I've been trying to correct it, not totally successfully.
But I, in the past, have developed a very bad habit, and I know that statistically this is what most people do, at least between the ages of 18 and 44, most people are just like me in this regard.
The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I look at my phone.
I have my alarm, which is on my phone, so I pick up my phone, turn off the alarm.
Well, actually, I hit snooze on the alarm, and then put it back, and then I hit snooze again, then put it back, then I hit snooze again.
And now, finally, when I'm ready to actually get up, now, but I don't just put the phone down, because now I have the phone in my hand, and so I, it's very easy to just turn off the alarm, and then just click on one more thing, and now, here I am in cyberspace.
And that's how I start my day, on the internet.
At least up until recently.
First thing I do is I look at my email.
I look at my personal emails.
And I see all the spam and the junk and all the stuff.
But I look at my work emails.
And then for me, I look at my public emails, which are emails from readers and fans and people who hate me and all that.
And so that's great.
For some reason, I have felt the need to begin my day looking at that kind of stuff.
And which means, invariably, there's going to be at least one message overnight that'll say, you know, something like, Matt, you're a piece of garbage and I hope you die.
And then, okay, great. I'm glad that I could start.
I'm glad that I read that and I know that about, and so now I can start my day.
That little dose of self-loathing to start the day is great.
But then the next thing I do is I'd scan the headlines.
Then I would check social media.
And there's this whole process.
Starting the day. And all of that would take about five minutes.
You know how it is with the internet. Even though I'm checking five or six different things, do it in five minutes.
A nice concentrated little shot of anxiety and vitriol to start the day with.
And I think it's just toxic.
It is a toxic, awful way to begin your day.
So if we're going to cut down drastically on our internet and media usage, I think maybe we begin here.
Because consider also, most people, they check their phone first thing in the morning like I do.
They also, their phone's the last thing they're looking at at night before they go to bed.
And there are even, I read, apparently there are people who are so addicted to the internet that their brain wakes them up in the middle of the night so that they can check social media.
So there are people who, they're checking the phone before they go to bed, they're waking up to check it, and then they go back to sleep and they wake up three hours later and then they check their phone again.
And then they go downstairs for breakfast and they're on their phone again.
And they never put down their phone.
So what if we all pledged?
It's a modest way to begin here, with our end goal of detaching ourselves from the internet and not being dependent on it.
What if we begin by making a pledge and we say to ourselves, we're not going to look at our phones in bed.
That's it. Barring an emergency and somebody calls and there's been some terrible thing that happened overnight or whatever, barring emergency, we are not going to look at our phones in bed, period.
Not going to look at them. And even though it's only a comparatively small amount of your day that you spend in bed before going to sleep and after waking up, It's still, think about, you free up that time.
You sever it from the internet.
And what can you do with that time?
Now there's this nice little chunk of time.
It's an important time, too, because it's the time right at the beginning of the day and right at the end.
And so this decides how do you start and how do you end.
So it's important time.
It's precious time. What are you going to do with that time now?
You're free. It's like, oh, I'm free.
I don't have to worry about Facebook or Twitter.
What are you going to do with that time?
You could read a devotional.
You could read the Bible. You could pray.
It's just anything.
You could do anything. You know another thing you could do with that time?
You could do, and this is great, and I think we've lost this in modern society.
It's maybe one of the worst things about the internet is that we've lost this.
We've lost the ability to do nothing.
What if you took that extra time and you did nothing with it?
Nothing. You have simply silence and stillness and nothing.
And maybe you lay there and you look at the ceiling and you think, you form Thoughts.
You contemplate.
That's how we become real thinking, substantive people is when we have time to think.
And I think this is, we know that the internet has intruded on our social lives and changed the way that we interact.
It's changed kind of our exterior lives in a big way and mostly in a harmful way.
But Even worse than that is that the internet has taken over our interior lives in that we don't think anymore because any extra time that we have where there's nothing going on, you're waiting in line, you're whatever.
I was in a waiting room recently.
I don't forget what, I think it was, I said the dentist in a waiting room.
And there was a bunch of people all sitting around.
And of course, every single one, myself included, we were all just staring at our phone.
Because the idea of sitting there for 30 minutes and maybe talking to the person next to you or saying nothing and just sitting there.
We can't even conceive anymore of the idea of simply sitting somewhere and doing nothing.
But that's Up until the internet and phones came along, that was a very common thing for human beings.
You had plenty of moments like that where you were sitting and not really doing anything.
Those are important moments because that's when you live within yourself, and we need to have that.
But we've lost that now.
People think the internet does our thinking for us.
The internet literally completes our sentences for us.
And now we can, instead of forming a full thought, we can follow a half-formed train of thought all across the internet.
And people we know oversharing online, rather than having thoughts they keep inside themselves, thoughts that they otherwise would have kept inside themselves and should have kept inside themselves, now we can spill it all out on the internet.
Get it out there.
So maybe you do that with your time.
Just a suggestion. But I think this could be a good place to begin.
So maybe we can make that pledge together.
And I think we'll all be happier for it.
And if I get a few less of your clicks and your views, maybe because that's the time you spend when you read something that I wrote or you watch a video of mine, that's fine.
I'll make that sacrifice.
Because I think it's better for you, it's better for all of us.
Well, thanks for listening to this on the internet.
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