It's usually around this time of year that I begin to regard my phone with a little bit of suspicion. As far as emotional attachments go, the one I have with my phone is borderline problematic. When I lost it over the summer, it took weeks for my replacement—bought mid-road trip in Monterey—to feel like it was really mine. It was too new, too shiny, too unmarked by the dents and tweaks that had made my old phone a true companion in life. Now, months later, it feels like the same cybernetic extension of myself that all my previous phones had faithfully been until I lost them, or broke them, or decided I was over them. But in those early days of acquaintanceship, I was locked out of my most of social media accounts (2fa? huge mistake don't recommend it), and I had no choice but to live my life without telling people about it. Most of my photos of those days spent driving around Monterey, Carmel and Big Sur, Paso Robles and Los Angeles are on film and now feel too irrelevant and precious to share online.
The impulse to document ourselves is fascinating to me. I pay a lot of attention to what parts of themselves people choose to reveal online and in what manner, partly because I myself curate my own online presence, but mostly because curation is a natural consequence of the nature of online communities today. We are all consuming and producing content that is broadcast, available instantly, created with the intent to share with a mass of people, and whether that mass is a hundred or ten thousand people large is almost irrelevant. Criticisms of this act of curation aren't interesting to me—the idea that our online personas would be, or should be exactly identical to our real-life ones is nonsense—but I am interested in why we do it. Perhaps we all suspect, or hope, that we will understand ourselves better if we understand how others understand us. I catch myself watching my Instagram stories all the time—a deranged, but ubiquitous habit apparently. We want to be the main character but we also want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. This, I think, is the promise of online documentation: it offers us a reprieve for our narcissism, but also a vantage point from which we can safely observe ourselves as others observe us. The current unedited, laissez-faire emma-chamberlain style posting deepens the lie that I think all of us want to believe: that being authentic on social media is indistinguishable from being authentic in real life, that if people online believe that we are funny, charitable, popular, beautiful, artistic, or politically aware, then surely, we are actually all those things.
The pandemic was when I picked up “hobbies” that required that I use my body, my hands and legs in some way. I took up painting watercolours, kneading bread, running on pavements, walking in the snow. Even prayer in Islam is a physical act, and I was surprised to find at times, more comfort in genuflection and prostration than in the spoken words in salah. Anything even mildly physical or tactile that didn't involve a screen made me feel more like myself. It reminded me that even as a large portion of my real life could only exist online, I also happened to inhabit a surprisingly capable body. In the winter months, I find myself returning to this form. My brain feels crowded and overloaded and permanently exhausted, either from the lack of daylight or the weight of a whole year lived, I don't know. And without even meaning to, I spend more and more time away from my phone, and search for literally anything else to do instead.
During these “breaks” (generous to call them that), I'm forced to come to terms with the fact that my usage of my phone is driven by anxiety more than I’d like to admit. I'm simply incapable of doing anything without pausing for a brief, cursory scroll of my phone to assure myself that I’ve missed nothing and seen everything. I dread not being in the loop. I want to see who’s getting food where, and who spent their summer in Europe. I want to see my friends’ cats and where they went to ski this year. I love seeing endless iterations on carrot cake, on stews, sheet cakes and one pot pastas. I want to flick through impassioned proposals and dispassionate celebrations, discuss celebrity gossip with mutuals, and keep up to date with the news, and the jokes about the news, and the jokes about the jokes about the news. I want to know what people think of the timothee chalamet cannibal romance and are saying about pheobe bridgers sza feature, want to know if people are having a good time, and I want them to know that I too, am having a good time, just in case they were wondering. It's a frenetic, exhausting, invigorating state of existence, lived in constant pursuit of information, of validation, of gossip, levity, stimulus. Hayley Nahman writes really well about this—“we have become a, public so immersed in a consumable, aesthetic, and narrative version of reality that it becomes hard for us to imagine our lives as meaningful outside that paradigm”.
It feels trite to list out all the ways in which being online has also brought me friendship. It has created the serendipity in conversation that can only be had with people who live in the same corners of the internet as you do. If you're a young person living in the 21st century, you're either “online”, or you're not, and this distinction matters because it says a lot about who you are. There is so much value in online community and shared commiseration, but it's also healthy to live in its absence at times, reevaluate its function in your life, and realize that some of it is actually quite pointless. This is what being on the internet feels like: it feels like it matters until you take a step back, and then feels like nothing. And your past self, the veritable snoop, the incorrigible stalker, the apathetic doomscroller, to whom it did matter so very much begins to feel like a stranger.