#4: I'm not leaving Instagram, actually
On staying close to myself in the theme park
I know I’m addicted to the glow of my screens. I mean, I delete Instagram from my phone every few weeks. I’m not on TikTok anymore. I bought an analog alarm clock and keep my phone away from my bed.
But, last week, my phone screen time averaged 3 hours and 29 minutes a day, which is lower than the average American, but still weighs in at 24 hours a week. When Instagram is gone, I scroll Substack. When that’s gone, I’ll scroll photos, sift through my email archives, or dig through old Slack channels with the fervor of an archeologist looking for a hidden city. I was doing it right before I sat down to write this.
I’ve noticed that my eyes sometimes feel heavy if I’m looking at something out in the world, and only lift fully when I have a source of bluelight in front of me.
I saw a post today on Instagram, a carousel of images depicting nature at different times of day. “Dawn,” read the first image, “Morning,” the second, “Midday” the third, and so on. The pictures were gorgeous, almost painfully beautiful when I paused to consider them. They made me feel good. Nostalgic and intensely hopeful at the same time. Good.
And this is the part no one tells you about drugs when you’re growing up—they feel really, really fucking good.
More than that, there is truth to that feeling. Drugs can be really good. In moderation, some of them can transform your life in deeply profound ways.
Then, it seems to me, there’s a tipping point. The moderation evaporates, and the good evaporates right along with it, and all that’s left is the rabid dog of your heart chasing after an experience you’ll never have again.
On the internet, for my generation and demographic, that experience is 2013 Tumblr. The scroll was chronological, full of blogs I followed, with no suggested accounts sprinkled in. I would get bored, after a while. Then my friends and I would spend hours outside with wild makeup and costumes and cameras, young artists developing our style. We would take our notebooks down under the old railway bridge and write poems and then go to McDonalds for the 99 cent cones and read each others’ work. We would post the best of the best, photos and writing and prints and sculptures, and our blogs felt like an extension of our real lives—we’d just grown a new limb.
Rose-colored glasses firmly squished onto my face (2013 was also the year I first started to learn about depression), I can say that’s the thing I’m chasing: feeling like my access to technology was making me so much bigger. Like it was ushering me more into myself.
And then, at some point, that self started to shift. Peter Pan’s shadow gaining sentience, stealing itself away. The version of me that exists online gained a voice, a style, aesthetic preferences, dogmatic alignments. A particular way it liked to be edited. A particular way it liked to consume.
Simulacrum n.
A representation or imitation of a thing. Something that looks like or represents something else. I’ve been mildly obsessed with this word since high school. Right around 2013. One of my teachers introduced me to the work of Jean Baudrillard, who argued that “a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal.”1 Put another way, a simulacrum is a representation of a thing that becomes more real than the thing itself.
The classic example: a child goes to a theme park and enjoys a jungle-themed ride. The child lives in suburban America, has never seen the jungle. This representation of the jungle becomes so real to the child that its hyper-green plants and mechanical birds become more truly “jungle” than the actual, real-life thing that exists somewhere out there in the world. The representation is more real to the child than the thing itself.
I’m scared that I am beginning to possess, or be possessed by, a simulacrum life. That my screen-self is starting to feel more real to me than the person it was created to represent.
I feel it when I’m scrolling and I know, presently, in real time, that the scroll does not feel good to me, that has not felt good for 5 or 10 or 15 minutes and has started to actually feel really fucking bad, and I don’t look away. I don’t put the phone down for another 5 or 10 or 15 minutes. What my real world body wants and needs has become less important to me than what’s on the screen, and I am aware of this, and I keep going.
The emotions in the screen are all bigger. We know this. More fear, more hatred, more love, more camaraderie.
When I finally do look up from the scroll, I deflate. I sink. The world looks greyscale, and it takes a while for the colors to come back.
And this happens multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. It happens quickly. I move past it, through it, whatever.
But it doesn’t go away, because I keep picking up the phone. I have spent over a decade of my life building a piece of myself online, a piece that looms ever larger and louder, and to stop scrolling now would be to sever a major artery.
There are real benefits to being online: news and community connection and creative outlets etc. etc. etc. This is not like other addictions, which can crumble your entire life to ash. I stay close with my friends on socials. I learn so much from the creators I follow. I work a fully remote job. I have this blog, which I’m starting to love.
And that’s the whole problem, right? I love being here, in the screen. It feels so good; it feels so bad; it feels so real.
Dawn and morning and midday and I’ll still be here, looking at pictures of nature instead of looking at nature—but that argument is so tired by now, so exhaustingly boring. The youths are experiencing life through their phones instead of out in the world. Yawn.
The world is right here. Hyperreal.
Maybe for some people it isn’t like this. I can imagine people who use their phones as tools, who never stuffed part of their heart here like Davy Jones’ lockbox.
I can imagine myself as one of those people.
But the world is here.
I am here. There’s a part of me who is only alive here.
I don’t want to abandon myself to this theme park.
So.
For now, I’m staying. I have no solutions. The rabid dog of my heart will keep chasing after its prizes. I’m going to let it. Sometimes those prizes are valuable here, truly. I wonder if that means this is not a drug, after all. I wonder if it’s something else.
Maybe there is a softer metaphor. I believe, truly, in the urgency of this crisis. I believe we are starting to lose ourselves to our hyperreal representations.
But I think what I’m suggesting, what I’m landing on after writing all this out, is that there is a path forward that does not involve sloughing off this hyperreality. Particularly when that feels next to impossible, on a grand scale (pending the collapse of civilization, etc.).
What if it’s not about getting out of the hyperreal, but about mending the divide between this world and the one out there, beyond the screen? Stitching Peter Pan back to his shadow.
Maybe this is like any other addiction, and what I’m suggesting is inane at best, but these last few years I’ve started to become less interested in what is semantically true and more interested in what works. What makes me feel most alive?
And while I’m certain the best thing would be to get rid of all screens outside of medical facilities and go live in the woods together with a massive community garden and a warm kitchen and make art—that’s not my life right now, and it won’t be any time soon, and I am so sick of waiting for something to come and save me from this version of my life.
I’m curious what would happen if I stopped trying to get myself off of the screen and started trying to get myself more in my body. What if I could bring my physical self closer to my digital self? What if I could offer that digital self a hand, instead of coming at them with a knife?
I’m not sure what this looks like in practice, yet. Everything is messy in dystopia. But cheers to trying. That’s what an essay is, isn’t it? From the French, to try.
Wikipedia, simulacrum.