Happy 2022!! I do not know anyone who had a “good year” last year, so at least we are in this one together.
I’m feeling burnt out. Not by my work but by my existence during the pandemic, which is a tough thing because there is literally no escape from being in the world right now. I was trying to “rest” over the holidays, as my plans were slowly cancelled one by one, and I just could not calm down. I wasn’t working, I wasn’t leaving the HOUSE, and yet I was still reeling with stress 24/7. What are you even supposed to do about that? Meditate?? Drink celery juice??
A lot of people I know are “getting off social media” to help themselves feel better - eliminating one source of stress that we have control over. I think about doing this all the time, and then I’m stopped short by the fact that a significant portion of my social life takes place on Instagram. I haven’t seen many of my closest friends since 2019. I’m a huge fan of a long catch up on the phone, truly a huge fan, but that doesn’t replace seeing someone regularly and knowing the random and small things that are going on in their lives, and that actually take up much more space than the big things they report on the phone. So I’m still on Instagram, watching people make fun foods and go on walks and hang out with their pets, and it feels like I am a little closer to them, a little more aware of what their lives are really like.
Before Christmas, The Cut’s podcast did an episode on “parasocial” relationships, meaning those that feel intimate but are actually one-sided, specifically those between public figures and their audiences. The podcast came at these relationships from the perspective of the famous people - an Instagram influencer and a Youtuber - who talked about how weird it was to have random strangers treat them like their friends. As a non-famous person, I’m interested in these relationships from the other side. I catch myself all the time about to say “my friend–” and then realizing I’m talking about someone I have never met, but whose life I feel personally involved in because I follow them. And the line is getting blurrier, since so many people I HAVE met now only exist for me on the screen. They start to feel the same as the influencers, which makes them feel further away and the influencers feel closer, until they’re almost the same.
One of my favorite parasocial friends is Pia Baroncini. She is fascinating to me because she shares SO much - obviously I will never know how much because I have no idea what she’s leaving out, never having met her or visited her very nice home, but it seems like a lot. She recently had a baby, Carmela, and she announced while she was pregnant that she would not be showing the baby’s face on social media. However, unlike other public figures who do this (ie. Gigi Hadid, Tan France, or even people like Blake Lively or Joe Jonas, who don’t show their kids at all), she is an everything-but kind of person. We get incredibly zoomed-in videos of Carmela’s mouth chomping on baby food, carefully cropped videos of just her eyes and the top of her head in the bathtub, and strange photos in which one of her parents’ hands is covering a small part, but not all, of her face. It’s like Pia is trying to prevent a full-frontal shot that would show up on facial recognition software, but is not actually interested in the baby’s “privacy.” Or maybe the concept of what “privacy” even is has been distorted. I should also say, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sharing photos of your kid on social media, or choosing not to. Do whatever you want, I respect both decisions. But Pia’s attitude reminds me of the anything-but virgins I knew in college - both raise the big question: what is the difference between what you are doing and the “big thing” you are not doing?? Will baby Carmela grow up one day and say “Thanks mom, I feel so much better that no one saw my face as a baby but they did see my lips covered in green goop and also heard recordings of me screaming and also saw every inch of my bedroom and also saw my parents talking about everything I did”? I honestly do not know. Personally I would prefer to have normal baby pictures of me posted online than strange abstractions of my face, but maybe that is just me.
Anyway, I digress. I’m just thinking about friendship, as usual, and how the way relationships work has changed so much over the last two years. We’ve all had to navigate seeing people so much less, but at the same time, we see SO much of them online. I keep coming back to the verb “gamify,” as in, turn into a game. That’s how it feels for me. Like I’m trying to maintain friendships for the after-times, hoping they’ll still be there one day when I can actually do things. And also like I’m thinking about friendships in a transactional way - what can I gain from this? Not that it isn’t nice to share growth with friends, but I don’t love this vibe. The best kinds of friendship (according to Aristotle, but also according to me) are those in which you mutually value one another and feed each others’ spirits through ups and downs and boring times as much as interesting times. But those are so much harder to find on Instagram, and even in real life. Of course, to see people in real life at the moment we have to “choose” which socializing “matters” “enough” to possibly become life-threateningly ill from, or at least life-disruptingly ill. Talk about gamifying! It’s like, open this door and you get a free milkshake or open this one and you die! That is a game, that is not living.
Lots of people have reflected on how the pandemic has changed friendship, including the infamous New York Times article about taking the opportunity to cull fat people and smokers from your milieu (the article has since been amended to remove that paragraph). It’s clear that the way we socialize has, for most people, fundamentally changed over the past two years. It’s not surprising that all those Zoom drinks and Instagram lives started to blend into each other. But I’m really not sure, as I’m usually not, what to do with this observation. Would it actually serve me to unplug and try to be entirely present with the people who physically exist around me? I can’t imagine what that would look like, and I don’t know if it would be better. It’s a cool thing to have a window into the way other people make choices and order their lives. But it’s very different to the mutuality of being known and seen by friends, and I think that’s the thing that I miss so much. I know my Instagram friends, but they don’t know me. So I guess we’re not really friends, which I think is the heart of the problem. Friendship is mutual, admiration doesn’t have to be. I admire people on Instagram, but my friends know what my laugh sounds like and what’s going on with my cat and how I act when I’ve had too much wine. I think it’s ok to have both - the people you follow and the people who are your friends - but I’m working on remembering that they are not the same thing.
Some Other Things I’m Thinking About
Lauren Collins’s excellent profile of Alison Roman for The New Yorker
A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar, which was recommended to me after I wrote about Siena. It is a beautiful meditation on place and the ways we find meaning in life.
The Lost Daughter on Netflix, which I found to be exactly as unnerving and uncomfortable as reading Ferrante, in exactly the same way, which I think is a remarkable achievement by Maggie Gyllenhaal. It’s so hard to make a film FEEL like the book felt, but this does.
A concise and sobering summary of just how many ways Boris Johnson’s government is seeking to consolidate power and limit civil liberties in the NYT by gal-dem’s Moya Lothian-McLean
I really like Brandon Taylor’s newsletter, sweater weather. He writes about his feelings and his life, a type of writing which I think is often considered less important because women like to do it.
My No-bread-nuary lasted just one single week, I’m sorry but I love toast so much!!