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you and i are alone.
in sickness, we’re all alone. this has never been more true than today, when, on contracting the virus, no one you love can visit you. but we’ve been alone forever: the moment i’m out of the womb, i’m a singleton, a lone creature navigating viscous time without support. my body is my own, i need to tell it what to do, i need to learn that getting close to a flame will burn me, and that i drown in deep water. we’re alone in heartbreak, no one understands. we’re alone in our losses and small victories, and in our struggles. for who knows how far language and gestures seep in, whether you see what i want you to see. and nowhere are we more alone than the internet.
today, my selfhood is imbricated in these networked digital forums, twitter and reddit and instagram, but i’m all alone. intimacy is a struggle like never before: words travel across time-zones and gain new meanings for my recipient. pain traverses latitudes and is diluted to strobelight-black and white. dark mode filters every expression of joy. instant messaging and youtube comments birth small bursts of emotion that vanish before they sink in. memes are just that: images that only have meaning because they’re sent from user to user until they’re mere symbols of irony. and irony expresses nothing but disconnect, cynicism, the vacuum of sincerity.
in the old world, art and writing gave people access to each other’s minds. the home library was a portal to empathy. my grandmother escaped into her mills&boons, nora roberts and georgette heyers and discovered courtship and female sexuality. my mother watched annie hall and learnt about relationship struggles, the art of conversation, and new york city. and me? i googled “what is sex” at ten years old, and i’m convinced that this fragmented digital introduction was the beginning of my perplexed relationship with it. and i’m not the only one. so many of us feel alone even when we’re with our lovers: maybe because we’ve had access to so much impersonal, staged material on sex that we can only perform intimacy, not truly take part in it. sex becomes a cypher on cyberspace, a spectacle that’s hollow inside, a signifier with no signified.
we can’t escape loneliness on the internet. its very form seems to preclude real connection. the ephemerality of the digital world, and the facelessness of its users means that convenience is close at hand. a friend of many years blocked me rather than talk out the issues he saw in our friendship. i’m sure i’ve behaved that way to other people, by simply ignoring their texts. in the analog world, i couldn’t possibly have done the same. on tinder and hinge, matches are aplenty, but real friendships and romances are rare. dating app success stories are few and far between, and on hearing them, one feels more surprise than anything else. and it is a thing of wonder that two people overcame the sheer impersonality of a screen to form a precarious emotional bond.
in the mornings, i open my instagram and am inundated by pictures of my friends and acquaintances. social media is saturated with the highly personal, but the experience of trawling through this flood of content is highly passive, impersonal. every post is engineered to create a uniform “brand”: your profile is a curated agglomerate of media that could never convey nor elicit any actual depth of emotion. it’s so easy for a facebook comment section to transform into a seething, vitriolic, unempathetic mess. the web’s potential for housing endless self-expression leaves its users with no space to listen, feel, and understand. online debates aren’t a thoughtful exchange and consideration of ideas as much as each party laying out the details of their “brand”. no one is exempt.
but there are spaces in this net through which the light comes. people find ways to communicate solidarity and love against all odds. there’s the women’s art twitter account, consistent and joyful. there’s arts and letters daily, which brings together some of the most thoughtful writing on the internet. there’s reddit’s relationships sub, where the community advice is unfailingly kind, practical and heartwarming. netflix party makes it possible for me to watch films i love with people i love. a friend of mine helped recreate my alma mater on minecraft, and now i can walk through campus and look at the stars. i wanted to make music, and found that thousands of people had uploaded free beats for me to use. i watch my mother rebuild her tumultuous relationship with her siblings every sunday night on zoom. these pockets of true connection, it seems, form in the wake of sincere and nurturing communities built with effort.
convenience—technology’s primary boon, and the antithesis of outreach and struggle—means that the individual doesn’t need the community. you’re sad? shop on amazon. you’re scared? watch a sitcom about lovable cops and you’ll forget your fear. you’re in tears at the sheer scale of injustice in the world? post on instagram and go back to normal as the likes and shares rack up. but you will not have bridged the chasm between yourself and the other, because that takes real effort. and that means that you stay lonely.
in the quest to eradicate loneliness, quicker and easier doesn’t equal better. rather, difficulty is fertile ground for creating something that is perhaps not extensive, but intensive. right now, when institutions world over are collapsing, it’s near-impossible to have faith, to cultivate sincerity. but this is also the time when it’s most important to be open to sincerity. unironic investment in something that can be lost, that would be painful to lose, allows for someone to walk beside you in the “narrow aisles” of pain. irony shields you from everything, including love. when you cannot unlearn that irony, you cannot love, and as kierkegaard said, the one who cannot love is the unhappiest of all.