I watched an extremely good documentary called Web Junkie today, and I want to talk about it.

It takes place in a military school style Internet addiction treatment center. The patients are all young males whose parents have tricked them (and in some cases, drugged them) into coming here, because as we all know, addicts don’t think they are addicts. They always think they have it under control.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that a lot of these kids have bigger issues than Internet addiction. All addictions are escapes, and so you always have to ask, escape from what?

In some cases, it’s just middle class malaise combined with an introverted personality. But in a lot of cases, the real issue is a terribly broken family dynamic or just plain extremely bad parenting.

It is a great documentary if, like you, you enjoy the occasional trip into the brutally raw heart of real world pain and suffering. I find such trips, harrowing as they can be, are often quite cathartic for me. Like their darkness and my darkness combine and heal one another.

Now of course, all of this has me thinking about my own life. I don’t consider myself addicted to the Internet per se, although I spend most of my waking hours either interacting with it directly or via video games. I have always assumed that, if something better came along, I could just walk away from it and never really miss it.

But how can something better come along if I spend all day online? Food for thought.

So I don’t consider myself addicted to the Internet, but I am not far from it. It’s next door. I am addiction adjacent. I don’t consider myself addicted because I don’t miss it when I am not using it. And I have gone as much as two weeks without it without going stark raving bonkers or knocking over an Internet cafe to get my fix.

But watching these young guys (18-25, I think) made me realize something : if the Internet had been around when I was a teenager like it is today, I would have become just like the kids in the documentary.

I was depressed, withdrawn teen, especially in high school. I had no friends, no social life. My life had a kind of eerie calm to it, in that nothing much happened to me and things didn’t change much, but I was miserable on the inside without even being fully consciously aware of it.

But I felt so very, very alone.

The Internet would have given me everything I needed. Friend, a social circle, group activities, maybe even romance (sticky legal issues aside). When I was that young and energetic and impulsive, I would have dived into the Internet with both feet and never come up for air.

And anyone who tried to come between me and what I undoubtedly would have thought of as my “real life”. the one on the Internet where everything was better, would have become the enemy. That’s the kind of unilateral thinking that addiction engenders. I no doubt would have elaborate and lofty arguments in defense of my right to live my life as I please and blah blah whatever, but it would really boil down to “don’t get between me and my addiction”.

So I sympathize with the subjects of the documentary. There but for the grace of God and being born too early go I. I would have been just like them if I had been born in 1983 instead of 1973.

That brings me to the nature of their enrollment in the program. I understand how desperate dealing with a teenager or young adult can be for parents, and I have no problem imagining why they think their children are headed to wrack and ruin and therefore very extreme measures are justified. I totally get that.

But if that had been me being tricked or drugged into going to this program, all my trust in my parents would have died. To abandon me to some stupid fucking touchy-feelie military school would be the ultimate betrayal.

And I would make both them AND the facility regret it. It’s not come up much in my life because, honestly, nobody has ever really tried to control me (they’d have to care first), but I have a very deep rebellious streak and I would resist the institution to a level to which they had never seen before.

Nobody controls me.

I have no inherent desire to obey. No matter how angry or forceful someone is, I will still take their orders as suggestions and obey or disobey as I see fit. This alone makes me a disruptive influence to any authority figure, because I learned at an early age that authority requires your cooperation.

With my intelligence, my insight, and my deep down refusal to be confined, controlled, contained, or conscripted, I would have sewn merry havok from the first time some jarhead came in and barked an order at my and I replied “No thank you. ”

That’s the power of the secret of authority. So much of how people try to control you simply disappears like smoke.

I suppose they would punish me, or try to. A lot of punishment also relies on authority. “Drop and give me twenty” is only a punishment if you actually do it.

Is all this making me sound bad? I can’t really tell.

Anyhow, I am not saying that my rebellion would have been a good thing. Honestly, I could have used some structure and discipline when I was that age. There’s something to be said for growing wild in the dark, and none of it is printable.

But I got good grades, so nobody cared whether I was happy or not.

And I wonder, why didn’t I ever act out? But I was taught to keep it all to myself and not attract attention to myself, and I would have had to leave the comfort of being part of the wallpaper to act out.

And now, well, it’s far, far too late.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.