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Totally messed up from too much time on the internet during childhood
I feel like I'm totally messed up from too much time on the internet during childhood & teenage years!
I feel like I've learned a lot of things because of it, but I also feel like I've missed out a lot and now have pretty poor social skills. I've made better friends online than with people I know IRL, ugh. But nobody ever really invites me to things or w/e IRL and I do have some activities, but just, yeah. And I'm also a terrible procrastinator. I'd do so much better in school if internet (music, forums, news articles) wasn't distracting me all the time.
How could this impact me in the long run? I'm worried. Like pros and cons wise. I really want to make up for this loss of life experiences when I'm in college. Like I haven't even been close to getting a boyfriend or anything. I don't relate to a lot of my peers on experiences like going to parties on the weekend with people from school, sleepovers, etc. It's also cause I'm one of the new people in school, so it's just very horrid. I haven't even been invited to any event (birthday, hang out at house) in more than a year now. When I first came to my new school people were nice and things were good and now it's like everyone's ignoring me. I dont get why people lose interest in me quickly.. I'm an interesting person, a good friend and everything.. I don't understand what I do wrong all the time.
Like I could literally spend all day online and not get bored. It's not that I don't want to do other things.. trust me, I'd love to actually have friends IRL with similar interests and etc., or do more activities, but until I get a car I'm dependant on my parents for activities so I can't do so many, and actually finding a legit friend at my school is even more of a reach. i moved to this town about a year ago, too, and while things were better friend-wise at my old school, since i lived there a long time, i still had issues. it's just worse here. like no joke this school year has been the worst year of my life. i've also been having really bad procrastination problems that essentially have ruined my year. and idk what to do and dont have anyone else to talk to but random people on advicenators.
Like my life from age 8-17(now) has been extremely internet driven
i just hate having no friends. i feel so alone like all the time. i just fantasize what it would be like to have a good friend with things in common at school and everything so i dont have to be by myself and feel so negative. its just been too long, ugh
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Want to answer more questions in the Health & Fitness category?
Maybe give some free advice about: Mental health?
First, you have to take responsibility for your actions. The internet is just a tool, not a malicious entity inviting you to your own destruction.
As for why you use it, that is something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, there is content there that perhaps your friends didn't have an interest in. On the other, it was a symptom of the fact that you didn't really like yourself and so the chance to interact with people anonymously and where you could adopt any persona you wanted was kinda liberating.
There is also a cultural issue. it just could be that your immediate surroundings weren't necessarily a good fit for your sensibility. So you retreated to where you could find something more congruent to your thinking, the net.
Therefore, I don't think it is the internet's fault per se that you feel like you have no social skills or friends. In fact, you may be perfectly sane but sometimes you live in an area where it is like Cretintown and there is little you can do about it other than just grumble about the cavepeople who populate it.
Even though I basically enjoyed high school and played sports and all that stuff, if the net were available when I was a teen (in the 1970's) I also would have spent more time with it than socializing with other people because I have such a quirkily wide array of interests that few people do.
So now the question becomes, "where do you go from here?" The fact is that high school doesn't really mean that much (I partied my way through mine) before I buckled down in college. College is killer and I think you'll have a much better time there. So you have something to look forward to. And then after college, go live overseas. Totally good experience.
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Hey, I know what it feel's like to end up being more popular online than in reality, I was never liked and the internet became my escape. So I'm going to use my life experiences, to help you, (hope you don't mind that, if you do, just skip to the last two paragraphs).
First of all, most of my childhood was spent alone without friends, and when we got access to the internet I soon found myself playing MMORPG's, that was a kind of socialisation I never got, which helped me to a degree.
The thing I found most useful to my "addiction" was the ability to make the same mistakes the friends I did have were making without the same consequences and that helped me a lot, it also gave me much more confidence, as I had never had a boyfriend or been given any male attention, to suddenly be told I was beautiful on a daily basis was fantastic! And raised confidence actually helped me in school, like having the confidence to ask question's or check my answers.
The downside is, as you have realised, the lack of face-to-face interaction, parties and popularity were something I was void of until I stopped using the internet so much, people didn't know who I was and I had a reputation for being the "geek" that played games and never had a relationship, but eventually one friend accepted why I used online games etc. and slowly more people began to be my friend.
But the best thing I found, was based around forming relationships, as my current boyfriend said it's rare to find a girl whose going to university soon and not even kissed anyone, my experiences online taught me enough to at least act like I knew how relationships worked.
In conclusion, there are pro's, you learn a lot of things, can gain confidence and have an escape when life becomes too stressful, but, it's important you don't become so addicted that you spend every waking second on a computer/laptop, once you start socialising properly and going out now and then, people will invite you out more often!
Procrastination: I'm also the same here, and the only advice I can give to you is to go somewhere that has nothing to distract you, take the books for one subject and write notes for 15 minutes, then distract yourself for 10 minutes and after that, ask someone to test you on the previous notes you wrote that way you can get enough time to trick yourself into thinking your avoiding work, and still doing something at least!
(try to avoid places with the internet, or force yourself to be in a room with no computer/laptop)
hope that helped
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