Lately, I’ve been grappling with a familiar feeling that certain observations stir within me.
One morning, while walking passed Starbucks, I saw a man I see nearly every day. As usual, he sat on a curb with his dog, hunched over, cigarette between his lips, and a venti cup of coffee beside him. With his gaze on his screen, his right thumb scrolled frantically on Facebook. He never looked up. He never does.
Another afternoon, at the art museum, a woman in a hot pink blazer stood beside me in front of a stunning charcoal drawing. She turned to me and said, “This museum is so small, there’s nothing really to look at.” She quickly glanced around the exhibit filled with drawings and paintings, pulled her iPhone out, scrolled Instagram, and with her head down, walked out. In another exhibit, I saw two college-aged friends side-by-side. Heads down, eyes on their iPhones. They were both on Instagram too.
Some evening, out at dinner, a man and his teenage son, sat across from each other in an awkward silence. The son looked around between his bites of tacos, while his dad’s eyes were locked in on his iPhone. At some point, the dad took a picture of their food, but I’m pretty positive his eyes never left his screen. I watched him shift between Facebook and Twitter.
These moments resurfaced the sadness that social media always makes me feel.
I could drop statistics about all the negative effects of platforms like Instagram, or Twitter, and use them to illustrate things like addiction or the percentage of people who feel like absolute garbage from using those apps, but those numbers don’t even paint the whole picture.
Statistics fail to capture something like the depth of invisibility and disconnection one feels sitting across from someone else more interested in whatever app is on their screen than your company. There isn’t a real way to measure the sinking sensation of feeling so unseen.
I can say that it's surreal – hanging out with a best friend whose company leaves you feeling lonelier than you would feel actually alone. It’s weird to witness them beaming in Instagram selfies, snapping pictures of moments that end up being miserable memories, or watching their face light up from pixelated hearts from strangers, between their very real moments of intense anxiety, insecurity, self-hatred, and sadness.
Statistics can’t capture what it felt like to watch that friend succumb to constant comparison and validation. You can’t see the countless conversations I spent reassuring that friend’s worth, while their phone buzzed with false attention and affection in the form of a stream of comments, DMs, and likes.
Watching someone spiral into that was frightening. I watched their personality become obsessive and dissolve into something else entirely. It wasn’t simply her choice of clothes or taste that changed. It was like all her thoughts, wants, and needs slowly became influenced by influencers until she became one too. She literally morphed into fragments of strangers she had never met.
It’s an experience I’ll never forget, but I wish I could. I hated the way it changed them and our friendship. It made me sad that they were never present and cared more about impressing people online than anything else.
And so, looking around me, and seeing others so glued to the social media on their screens instead of what’s directly in front of them, kinda breaks my heart in a way I can’t explain. I know those instances aren’t the same thing. But it’s the consequences I still worry about.
I can’t help but feel extra wary whenever I’m online scrolling on something like Twitter. Despite the positive possibilities and my desire to feel optimistic and reap whatever the benefits of these platforms are, it doesn’t change how unsettled I feel.
And in thinking about that former friend, I’m left wondering if their now 21.3k Instagram followers are enough to fill their giant pockets of sadness and emptiness that I always tried but failed to fill.
Thank you for checking out Sunday Candy and reading Beneath the Scroll.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with navigating social media.
Did anything resonate? Let me know.
WOP newbie here. Just binged through a lot of your home page. This one really hit home. Looking forward to more Sunday Candy.
I'm so sorry to hear about your friend. Social media commodifies and gamifies love & connection down into little heart icons and followers. But how can we put a metric on something that's actually immeasurable? It makes me want to grab a loved one's phone from their hands, chuck it off a mountain, and give them a big ol hug.