I started to notice something after I quit Facebook last year. Whenever I have to present "myself" or be socially present or even visible, I have this sickening gut reaction of wanting to evaporate into a mote of dust. I think, obviously, this is something to worry about because it seems mildly antisocial at best and sociopathic at worst. Still, whenever I'm in a situation where I have to share something of myself I instead pull it close to my chest like I'm afraid it'll disintegrate in direct sunlight. I know this doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it's almost as if social media has devalued thoughts by flooding the thought market. Everyone is so quick to share every little bit of information about themselves for the world to see that the value of secrecy has skyrocketed.
Here's a fairly common occurrence, for example:
I meet up with my friends and the topic of conversation inevitably drifts toward work. I'm pretty sure there's nothing I hate more than talking about work. This is because (1) there is nothing unique about my work situation. There's nothing to complain about that hasn't been complained about by decades of ALTs passed. There's rarely an achievement not yet achieved. Thus (2), talking about the work becomes either self-congratulatory when you talk about something good happening or masturbatory when you selfishly burden others with tired complaints just so that you can enjoy a moment of relief.
I was recently asked by a friend to watch a YouTube video blog that they'd recorded the night before. The most bizarre thing about this for me was the person in question still being in the room at the time. I don't know if this is true for everyone, but I usually get sort of weirded out when I see a video of someone I know. (Non-interactive) things happening on a screen are so far away from reality for me that my brain is never quite sure what to do about this blending of the real and the unreal. Multiply that feeling by ten when the very real person to my side is also inside a screen right in front of my eyes.
As my brain screamed "PARADOX!" at the top of its lobes, I swiftly hit that creepin' feeling over the head and swallowed, probably in a disingenuous, overly affected way.
So we're watching this video and I'm quietly freaking out and starting to get anxious about what kind of reaction they expect of me when all of a sudden they starts laughing. Imagine that! Laughing at a pre-recorded version of your own joke! Moreover, they were laughing at themselves in the video, too. You already know what's about to be said. You already laughed at it. And even before that, you thought of it. Some tired synapse in your brain engineered this moment and holy hell the selfy-ness in this room is thick enough to choke a yogi.
All of this is compounded by the fact that I didn't find the video funny at all. I realized instantly, however, without even a shred of conscious thought, that laughing at the video was a social imperative. If I were to not laugh at it, I wouldn't just be destroying their expectation that I would like something they liked, I would be damaging their expectation that I would like them (or to put it more accurately, find them entertaining). My friend was laying it all out here. For some reason, they decided to share much more of themselves with me than I would ever care to know in a moment so intensely sincere and self-aware it horrified me. It was downright pornographic.
So I chuckled and thought about death.
I'm well aware of the irony in posting this in a public Internet space. Truth be told, my diminished Internet presence over the past few months isn't just a result of being busy all the time. It's also a product of fierce anxiety over the constructed meta-me inside the screen. It's about growing up and starting to be a little afraid of people and a little angry about the world. And maybe my commitment to writing something every day is some sort of therapy. After all, hey, I'm only human.
If you think you might be crazy, LIKE MY STATUS AND RETWEET.
