this is (not) your real life
On or around December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered or a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that, but a change there was, nevertheless.
Virginia Woolf
It seems crazy to say that human character changed one December early in the twentieth century. But it seems equally as crazy to say that the twists and turns of the the world don’t leave their fingerprints on our porous and liquid selves.
Woolf’s puckish solemnity- “on or about-” actually underlines a massive truth that is so large we sometimes struggle to see it, like a skyscraper our back doesn’t bend back far enough to view fully: the world changes us and makes figuring out what’s real and what isn’t urgent.
What’s so strange about searching for a person’s ‘real’ self or trying to touch down in your ‘real’ life is that it’s really hard to know when you’ve found it. Vacations or nights out or dinner dance parties or might seem like the opposite of real life, but they usually feel like they’re written in indelible and neon ink. The exceptions are nearly always more memorable than the rules. They punch far above their weight. Are peak experiences when we are most truly ourselves, or farthest from whatever and wherever that is? What’s more real, the music festival or the conference call, Saturday night or Monday morning?
A year in, Covid has done its part to blur our sense of the real, suspending habit and routine, erasing our sense of moving through a full and vibrant world, limiting our ability to explore the world and bump into the people and places that will give us the shock that makes us feel more alive.
But the biggest challenge is not the physical constraint. It is the virtual boundlessness. The pandemic has made all of us more virtual, citizens of the internet just as much as the places where we live. Our digital bodies face none of the restrictions that our physical ones do, and so we spend more time with them and in them. It no longer quite makes sense to say at any particular moment that we are on or offline: the two worlds have merged, and the synergy is behind everything that we do. Even when our phones are in our pockets, our digital avatars are hard at work and play, garnering likes and accumulating matches.
Because our species has been analog for far longer than we’ve been digital, our language of reality still makes a distinction between the things that happen to our bodies and those that happen on the far side of screens. I think that is a vital line to hold: the truths of presence and intimacy and the raw awkwardness of being a person get flattened out and effaced when we become posts and tweets. We all know people who beam out images into the world that might as well have been formulated on Mars.
But with every day, that distinction becomes a harder one to maintain. More and more of the action of being alive seems to be happening online. What’s more real: seeing a sunset, or someone intriguing liking your Instagram post? Whole spheres of life- shopping, news consumption, dating- have gone digital. We were lectured after the election that ‘Twitter isn’t real life,” but tell that to TikTok creators or TV binge watchers or all of us who crave a ping of whatever variety. We underestimate the charisma of the internet at our peril, its ability to provoke and slake desire in equal measure.
It can feel that we are neither fully real in either the physical world or the digital one, or maybe differently real in both. What is undeniable is that living in two worlds has stretched our presence, made us everywhere and nowhere. Versions of ourselves live in profiles across platforms, fully or partially visible. Who are these avatars? What promises do they make to people we know and we don’t know? Who are we performing for? What do we want?
Sometimes we want the world to see us, and sometimes one person, real or imaginary. There’s so much yearning, so much wanting involved, the feeling that if we are just charismatic or witty or hot or cool enough the world will respond. That something will happen. That we can Snap and Gram and swipe ourselves into the life we want and feel we deserve.
I don’t think its as simple as renouncing social media or deactivating accounts with abandon. We need to live boldly and creatively in whatever channel the moment provides. But if human character is in fact changing, we need to be the first to know about it, and do our absolute best to ensure that it’s for the better. Or at least for the more interesting.
A