This is one of my favorite times of year for so many reasons.
Even though I live in Southern California most of the time, autumn is still the absolute best season. On the East Coast, you’ll get the leaves changing and the temperatures cooling and all of the fall smells and flavors*. When I was a kid, my favorite days were when it was chilly outside, but no snow yet and still warm enough to run around and play and then when the sun was just about to set, coming back inside to a warm house and an evening of whatever I wanted.
*I get the hate for Pumpkin Spice. I really do. That shit is coming out in August now, which is still summer for most of the country and they’re putting this obvious fall flavor out there like it’s peppermint and the Christmas holiday season. On top of that, it doesn’t really taste all that great. That said, everyone has to chill with their zesty asses on this one. It’s Pumpkin Spice. Let it go or go to therapy about it or something. We have bigger fish to fry
So I’m a big fan of autumn, no question.
One of the things I love most about this season is Back to School. And not just my kids going back to school, which is really awesome, but what I really love is seeing everyone’s kids in their photos with their little signs*. For me, this is one of the more wonderful developments of the last 20 years. In many ways, I know people I haven’t seen for many years through the growth and development of their children. I know the names and ages and faces of the children of people that I’d have loved to keep in touch with but lost to the realities of life, time constraints, international pandemics, etc.
*I took my daughter’s last first day of non-college school and I have to say that was far more emotional than I was even expecting
But this phenomenon cuts both ways. We have never been more connected but also we have never been less witnessed.* We’re proximate to people without being next to them. Digital connectivity optimizes exposure. Human connection requires vulnerability. My sense is that one of the biggest problems today is that we’re mistaking visibility for intimacy.
*It’s hard to exactly remember, but I think I’ve talked on this blog extensively about how, even though it has generally speaking delivered advancements that people only could have dreamed about 40 years ago, the internet as a whole has evolved into a pretty big societal net negative
And that’s the paradox of proximity these days, isn’t it? We can FaceTime anyone at any time, DM them over Instagram or Snap or TikTok*. If they’re online enough, we can track their life in real time and see all of their meals, vacations, workouts, opinions, all perfectly curated as the best version of themselves. It really feels like we know the people we’re looking at.
*About a year or so ago, I rededicated myself to moving some of the things that the pandemic drove me to do online to do in person again. And I’m here to tell you that while human interaction can be frustrating and uncomfortable, doing these things in stores and with others has changed my life
I’m guilty of this myself, though I’d argue I’m about as vulnerable as I can be through these posts. When was the last time someone who follows you online saw you hesitate? Or notice that something was wrong before you even said anything? When was the last time that person sat with you in silence or saw you fail? Connectivity gives us access to all manner of things, but connection requires presence. That’s the one thing that’s absent from all of these parasocial relationships we’ve developed over time. That’s where the fracture lies.
And the creator economy* has only intensified this. Humanity lives in imperfection, but the screen has taken all of that friction away and friction is where empathy forms. You have all these people out there broadcasting and performing and polishing and then optimizing to what gets the most eyeballs. And no one is being unfiltered or work in progress or any degree of imperfect because the algorithm doesn’t reward doubt or insecurity or growth, even though those are the most human things. The algorithm reward the cleanest edit, the loudest take. The best version, not the real one.
*This is gonna come off as some real grandpa shit right now, and I’ll preface this by saying people should make a living however they want or can, but the stuff that my kids follow on TikTok and YouTube Shorts is breathtakingly stupid
I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground here, but the psychological cost of all this is huge. And there’s a couple of different layers to it. Writ large, if everyone performs online as their best self, what does that say about someone who is struggling with a version of themselves that’s lesser than that? Imperfection looks abnormal. Struggle comes off as failure. Doubt projects weakness.
And if you never show your lesser self, that version of yourself that exists in the real world, perhaps you start to reject that version of yourself internally and lose tolerance and understanding for that version of yourself. Maybe you even perform when you’re alone. You stop being a person and you start being a packaged version of a product.
I’m an adult, but even I fall into the trap of feeling like my imperfections are flaws, rather than just a part of what it means to be alive and human. What does it mean for someone in their teen years, when you struggle MOST with what it means to be different or develop at a different rate, to be exposed to only the most perfect versions of the world? There’s a quiet damage there that I think we all underestimate.
Because there’s a really profound difference between be watched and being seen. All of this watching we do that drives metrics, follows and views and likes, is a 15 second dopamine hit with absolutely no real attention. The people who actually know me, the people who see me, those people can notice when my voice changes or sense when something is off with me. They remember what I said last week in a way that’s profoundly moving to me. Seeing me requires the kind of continuity that comes with actually knowing me. Not watching me through the patchwork of moments that I choose to expose on my Instagram Stories*. So people see pieces of me, not the whole.
It’s also worth mentioning here that this may be intentional in many cases. People may not want to expose the whole of themselves to the world. Perhaps they’re a public figure and there’s a danger to exposing their entire personality. That’s adjacent to the point I’m making, which to be very clear isn’t that we need to be the whole version of ourselves online all the time, but that we mistake watching the online version of people as knowing them fully, which I think is particularly true of public figures. We feel like we know them because we see them online all day long.
*And also, my Instagram Stories are rarely anything other than something profoundly ridiculous
This isn’t an anti-technology screed. Even if my strong belief is that the Information Superhighway* has been a net negative, the internet in broad strokes has done amazing things. It’s reunited families. It has enabled communities and supported the kind of niche belonging that you used to only be able to find in the rarest of places. Even more importantly, it’s allowed marginalized voices to find each other and created social momentum at incredible scale. You only need to look at the Arab Spring or BLM or Me Too or any one of the number of government protests that have emerged in the US over the last decade. That’s all real and it’s important.
*Still love this term, not apologizing for it
That same system also incentivizes curation and compresses nuance. It amplifies loud voices and mutes others for imperfection, vulnerability, thoughtfulness and empathy. The internet provides the tools we need for connection, but it not only doesn’t guarantee it. It almost actively discourages it. Because real connection requires a whole lot of things that you can’t see through a screen. The net effect of protecting people from the kind of discomfort that enables true connection is protecting them from the kind of intimacy that allows real relationships to flourish.
Maybe the real crisis isn’t one of loneliness. Maybe it’s one of being overexposed, but underwitnessed. If we’re amplifying perfection, we’re deemphasizing humanity. And connection without humanity isn’t connection at all. It’s just proximity.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this week’s underlying subject: human connection and intimacy. Ultimately, human connection to anything is what drives empathy. You see it in all walks of life, where people don’t realize the broad impact of something until it impacts them personally and they feel it. The more human connection we can find, the better off we’ll be.
And in that vein, I’ll be in NYC twice in October, twice in November and twice in December, so perhaps we can find a little of that human connection and catch up.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, friends.