The internet has created a space where we can be ourselves and yet I’m overwhelmed by how many of us don’t yet seem able to do this. There are so many of us whose posts seem to question (sometimes sub-contextually) whether we have the right to exist. So many of us want permission and advice but in choosing an online space to gain it instead of giving ourselves permission, it throws open the gates for those who want to tear down authenticity and who want to mislabel vulnerability and honesty as weakness.
I’m mostly grateful that the algorithm sends me what it does. I see a mix of people like me standing on the precipice of becoming, and those who have already reached themselves at a level deep enough to reach out to others in helpful ways. What the algorithm doesn’t show unless we begin to meaningfully connect with one another is the nuance between the two: the fluctuations between the states of becoming and being, of turning inward and reaching out, and how too much of either one sets back the other.
Our answer to this seems to be more ‘connection’ but I am overwhelmed by the imbalance within this. We are either following or being followed, consumed by how we are led and whether we’re getting it right, or consumed by keeping those who follow us on track, and this consumption, the diversions we ought to take, or do take, the changes and growth we endure and embrace by turns, are lost in the noise of reception or lack of it, and within the hum and static, our doubts begin to sever connection with ourselves.
In a simpler time, we’d attend a gathering, we’d roll the dice: maybe we find someone who ‘gets us’ or maybe we don’t, maybe we learn something abstract, maybe we pass on something we know, maybe we just enjoy a meal surrounded by other people, maybe there is music, maybe someone sings, maybe we connect to that at an emotional, cognitive, and physical level, and then when the day draws to a close, and we leave and rest.
Times now are more complex: in one hour, scrolling reels on our devices, maybe we’ve seen six things in common with someone we have never met. I’ve watched someone fall down and read the contrasting text brimming with an expectation of humour or pleasure and felt confusion and mild horror, I’ve been annoyed by the subtext of a parenting video offering unsolicited advice perhaps based on the fact that while in good humour the previous night, I clicked like on a video from an honest mum who wasn’t afraid to share how hard parenting is, and now she and I are flagged for life. In one hour, maybe I’ve seen someone struggling to come to terms with trauma, someone offering humour in the trials of miscommunication, someone creating waves of reinforcement from a crowd that laughs along with me at a racial injustice against us because we’re powerless to change it by any other means. Maybe within that one hour, I’ve watched a person skating in the wild open air, and seen art taking form, and I’m connecting because these are things that matter to me but for an hour, I’m also NOT connecting. I’m lying in bed, I’m fighting sleep or insomnia, I’m not creating, I’m disconnecting.
Even while I’ve resonated and connected, simultaneously, the connection is lost on both sides because I don’t matter to the creator on the other side simply because it’s a single click in an ocean of vibrations, and on my side, there is a realisation: if I cannot discipline myself to also create and participate, the vibrations of everyone else and everything else becomes its own oppressive entity.
It’s something of a danger I’m acutely aware of that overconsumption online changes not just who we are but what we’ve set out to do. The current obsession among us regarding the number of likes and comments is an amplified mutant of social acceptance. In simpler times, a person might navigate their way through life with peer pressure, with support, with antagonism at a base level; with social media constructs, these things are magnified while we as humans are still largely unchanged and unequipped to handle the magnitude of the amplification of social influence.
The result of this imbalance has created an intensified level of anxiety and mental anguish, inner turmoil that is at once relieved but rekindled by sharing our experience, which without extremely effortful discipline to establish and maintain boundaries between ourselves and others whether online or in person, can shatter our personal identities, values, and goals. It’s important to recognise that while the internet provides a space for us, we need to create space away from it.
