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Hi. My name is Holly, and I’m an Internet addict.

I actually told a psychiatrist that, back in the mid-1980s. He just looked at me like I’d grown a second head. I figured, with two heads, he’d want to charge me double, so I left his office and never looked back.

Now “Internet addiction” is a legitimate diagnosis. Like I need to pay someone $90 to tell me this?

Rejected, but Not Dejected!
One of the most important things to learn, as a writer, is how to handle rejection. Sometimes, it just spells better opportunities in the future.

PayPerPost rejected my blog (not this one – a former incarnation of this one, back in 2006), presumably because I missed that one little detail about it needing to be 90+ days old. To tell you the truth, though, I’m relieved. Amen, hallelujah, sanity restored! (Somewhat.) The only thing I want to sell from this blog is books: mine, my friends’, and the ones I’ve particularly enjoyed reading. To that end, I have an little book store on the site, and from time to time, I may include a little link to my favorites. If it comes up naturally, in conversation.

I’ve entered a few contests, written a sponsored post here and there – but mainly because they sparked a thought or two and seemed like something fun to write about. Yes, absolutely, the “Goddess of Google” wants the Google fridge!! Duhhh! I can write those without compromising my integrity or risking a conflict of interest with the day job.

I do have a Google AdSense account, mainly because I find no end to the amusement of seeing what Google finds “relevant” given what I write about. (I think my current AdSense balance is like $6.27, folks. It’s not about the money. And I stopped using it during the 2008 elections, when it started running ads for FOX News and the Republican Party.? Now how did Google figure that was relevant to my blog? Apparently, even smart geeks can write bad code.) I once spent a happy afternoon at work, GMailing mini-rants to a colleague while AdSense prepared our getaway vacation plans. Want cabana boys to serve us tropical rum drinks with little paper umbrellas while we laze on the beach? Special rates at the Del Coronado Resort! Want to learn to surf, while we’re at it – but don’t want to be laughed at by all those tan, muscular surfer dudes? Try learning at SurfHER, a surfing school founded and run by a woman! It mapped out the nearest retail stores for the gear we’d need, and even suggested some lovely restaurants. I love Google ads – in GMail.

Pay-per-post and pay-per-click schemes are addictive, and here’s why, according to Dan Reiss’s Getting the Cyber-Monkey Off Your Back:

What exactly constitutes a Net addiction? According to Dr. Cash, who has treated over 300 such cases since 1995, “the neurochemistry of all addiction really comes down to dopamine, and activity on the Internet really stimulates the dumping of dopamine on the brain,” which results in “the euphoria that holds an addiction in place.”

Didn’t I learn, two decades ago, with Gemstone III, Imagine*Nation, and MUDs? How about Themestream? WBM and TheVines? It’s not the money. It’s not even the lure of “make money in your sleep, without doing a damned thing.” Well…for some, it’s all about the easy money to start with, right? For me, it would be about sleeping, or working from home in my bunny slippers. But this notion of “monitizing your blog” is just so NOT me. (Truth be told, I wonder how many MMO folks out there are really just rationalizing their gambling habit. Seems to me the breaking rocks in the hot sun would be an easier way to earn a buck.) I have a good job, and stressful as it may be, some days, it’s a lot easier than scrambling about, trying to scrape pennies here and nickels there. But as Reiss points out:

Web addicts crave the positive feedback they get from a game or fellow chat-room buddy, or from finding the exact bit of information they were looking for. “So much of Web activity is unpredictable,” said Cash. “You never know what you’re gonna get [online.] You get that high, you want that again, you keep working at it. It’s like gambling.”

It’s the unpredictability of it. It’s knowing that you might not make enough money to earn a minimum payout in the next six months, but believing you could just hit the mother-lode and earn enough to retire in five years, like all the “monetize your blog” and “increase your SEO” or “usurp their SERP” (yes, I just made that one up) folks promise.

It was just one of those “pretty shiny things” the Internet dangles in front of us all. I cringe, remembering the time I sat at the Roulette table in Vegas one night, $800 ahead, looking to make it a “nice, even $1000″ before I quit for the night and went to bed. At $2 a bet. I wish someone could have pointed out to me, that night, that $800 was a “nice, even number, too.” I was playing the idiot’s game: $2 on black. If you win, you keep two and let two ride. If you lose, you double the previous bet. Stick to black. (Realistically, your odds are just as good with red. Psychologically, who wants to be “in the red”?) It’s a slow, painful ride to Hell. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 – you computer geeks can easily take it from here. It’d all be good – how likely is it that you’d have an unbroken streak of red long enough to drive you to your knees? Ahh, right – let’s not forget those devilish little green spaces. Green just throws the odds off remarkably fast. I’m a writer, not a mathematician. I concentrated on the wheel, willing the little ball to drop into a black space and stay put. Red. Over and over and over again.

When you finally win – IF your funds can hold out while the chips you need to bet increase exponentially – you only make $2. I was lucky to leave Las Vegas with exactly the same amount of money I had when I arrived. But it’s weirdly addictive, even when you’re losing. Even when the ROIE and ROIT (Return on Invested Energy and Time…sheesh, don’t you Finance and MBA types know anything?) are nil.

So, thank you, PayPerPost, for the tough love.

Good thing we working writers don’t cry over rejection. Some of us even know when it’s a good thing.

About the Author Holly Jahangiri

Holly Jahangiri has decades of experience in tech writing, freelancing, fiction, poetry, and editing. Writer, wife, and mother, Holly is the creator of Trockle and instigator of the Puppy-Guppy Rebellion.

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