As I type this, my best friend is sitting across from me in the living room, gazing at her phone.
She’s lost in a trance, focused on nothing specific—just the screen. Is she working? Browsing? Chatting with someone, or listening? I can’t tell.
My toddler calls out, “Tía! Tía!” and without lifting her eyes, she softly says his name.
For over a decade, the language of addiction has influenced how we perceive our relationship with the Internet. We discuss dopamine rushes and altered brains. We tally the hours online as if they were milligrams of oxycodone. We recommend digital detoxes and “tech sobriety,” confessing to slips when we reinstall Instagram.
Oddly, the addiction metaphor brings comfort. It suggests that what we’re experiencing can be diagnosed, treated, even cured.
The addiction narrative does capture something real about our tech experience—the compulsion, the phantom buzz in your pocket, the reflex to check your phone even when nothing is there. Yet, while it tells us we’ve gone too far, it doesn’t guide us through the world reshaped by the internet.
At some point, we must accept that we won’t abandon the Internet nor live in a world untouched by it. Ban phones from schools, theaters, libraries, and social spaces all you want—we’ll never return to a time or reality where this technology didn’t exist, where it wasn’t in everyone’s hands. Soon, the same will be true for artificial intelligence.
Refusal isn’t an option. Adaptation, however, is.
Adapting begins by seeing the internet for what it truly is—not a drug, nor a set of behaviors, but a place we journey to, with its own geography and customs. It’s not physical, yet no less real. Anyone who grew up online knows the feeling of crossing that threshold: When you log on, time shifts, the body fades, and, as one early online pioneer said, “the selves that don’t have bodies” emerge.
Our earliest internet language seemed to grasp its essence best. The central question of cyberspace has always been about navigation. How do we traverse this world while staying human? What do we bring back from our online journeys? What unintentional bargains do we strike? And how do we return to the physical world when part of us prefers the online realm?
To thrive in an enchanted world like the Internet, we need stories that guide us through uncertainty and help us cross thresholds without losing ourselves. Folklore—myths, legends, and fairy tales—has long provided this guidance in memorable forms. Some of humanity’s oldest tales are about entering otherworlds, where ordinary rules dissolve, time shifts, and travelers risk losing their identity.
German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argued that myths emerged to help us manage what he called “the absolutism of reality”—the overwhelming scope of the world and its indifference to human concerns. Myths made the incomprehensible bearable. Building on Blumenberg’s work, Belgian philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh suggests we now face a new absolutism. The terror once felt from nature—floods, droughts, illness, and death—now comes from the technology we’ve created and no longer fully understand.
Once again, we face forces that exceed our understanding. And once again, we turn to stories to keep our balance, maintain our humanity, and emerge whole from these encounters.
The medieval Scottish legend of Thomas the Rhymer offers a map for navigating the otherworld. In the borderlands, Thomas of Ercildoune meets the Fairy Queen under the Eildon Tree and spends seven years in her world. When he returns, he gains the gift and curse of “true speech.” Thomas can never lie again, granting him prophetic power. Indeed, it’s a power, but one that distances him from his humanity. Thomas the Rhymer’s story suggests survival after crossing, but at a cost.
The otherworld rewards skilled navigators and punishes the careless: Treasures turn to leaves; fairy wives vanish home; hubris leads travelers astray, or worse, to demise. But many stories teach that brief, careful encounters with the otherworld need not destroy us.
Artificial intelligence presents its own dangers. With the internet, we cross into an otherworld. A.I. is like a creature from that world crossing into ours. Across cultures, stories depict nonhuman entities fulfilling our requests—or granting wishes—based on their logic rather than our true intentions, unable to discern what we meant from what we said, like a large language model following a poorly crafted prompt. These stories warn of more than just greed. They reveal the inevitable gap between intent and instruction, and the unforeseen consequences that follow. Whether a djinn, leprechaun, or large language model, these beings don’t adhere to human morality because they’re not human.
Old tales didn’t necessarily warn against interacting with the otherworld, nor did they label its inhabitants as evil. But they warned against misunderstanding their nature, against forgetting that some boundaries exist for good reason.
J.R.R. Tolkien, speaking in 1939, identified a clarifying power within what he called fairy stories: recovery, the ability to see the world as it truly is rather than through the “drab blur” of familiarity. Viewing the internet as a fairyland—an otherworld with its logic—isn’t about mystifying technology. It’s about seeing it clearly, as the strange and powerful environment it really is. In this way, enchantment restores what habit has made invisible.
The Internet is a place teeming with uncanny entities and enchantments. Sometimes, these enchantments reach into our physical world. If we hope to travel wisely, the old instructions still apply: Mark the threshold, remember that time moves differently there, and know that every gift from the otherworld carries a price.
Above all, keep part of yourself rooted in the real world—grounded, embodied, and connected to others. We’ve seen what happens when someone wanders too far. Remember all the lost souls who vanished into their rooms, emerging unrecognizable, like modern changelings. Or the many adults ensnared by conspiratorial thinking, drawn in like wanderers once lured by will-o’-the-wisps into marshes, seduced by lights that were always illusions.
My friend looks up from her phone. A moment passes before her eyes refocus—before she fully returns to the room. Nearly an hour has slipped by. Light settles. Walls reappear. My child’s face sharpens into clarity.
He studies her briefly, then reaches out to touch her cheek, as if welcoming her back home.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
