At a Thanksgiving party organised by an American friend, we went round the table declaring what we were grateful for. Usually, the tradition goes the way of sentiment or surrealism. This time, the mood became more nihilistic as each person spoke. A friend to my right, who has just finished cancer treatment, announced she was grateful for all the people in the world who didn’t get on and didn’t give a f*** about each other. She then lustfully licked her knife, as if to sharpen the point.
How was I supposed to follow that? I found myself announcing that I was grateful for disconnection – not just from the internet but from other people. I was sick of living in a connected world. I didn’t want to join any more WhatsApp groups or accept another invitation to connect on Instagram. My stomach turned at the thought of my X mentions. I was exhausted by how hyper-integrated life had become, disgusted at how readily I had outsourced my thinking – maybe even my soul – to the algorithms of Silicon Valley.
I surprised myself, a bit. For most of my life, I have possessed a fanaticism for human relations. Only Connect. When I was 11, my English teacher pushed EM Forster’s Howards End on me and told me I should live by his famous injunction. The idea of connecting the inner life (“the passion”) with the outer life (“the prose”) set off something profound in me. I felt exhilarated by Forster’s Schlegel sisters, two generous-spirited young women on an evangelical mission to connect with as many different types of people as possible.
I had justified my social media habit as a necessary function of my job, but I’ve always been seduced by the idea of a complex web of human connections. Perhaps it derives from a love of big polyphonic novels or growing up in a family riddled with divorce – this fantasy about knitting together broken threads. But the instinct for connectedness is with us from an early age. The other day, my four-year-old son was introduced to his new childminder, who revealed we had at least three sets of family friends in common. “Does that mean everybody who knows me knows everyone else?” he asked, thrilled by the possibility.
There are obvious dangers in this proximity to new, or potentially better, connections. I’m reminded of Margaret Schlegel’s concern that the more people she gets to know in an ever-crowded London, the easier it becomes to replace them: “It’s no good, I think, unless you really mean to know people.” In another Forster novel, A Passage to India, Adela asks: “What is the use of personal relationships when everyone brings less and less to them?”
The more familiar I was to people on social media and the more I placed myself at the beck and call of those who knew only my digital self, the more disconnected I became from people around me. Some of my real-life friends were even checking my Instagram stories as a surrogate for actual conversation.
In recent years, we seem warier and less curious with each other. I used to think it was post-pandemic awkwardness; now I wonder if it’s because we already think we know what’s on each other’s minds. Yet our virtual selves are not our inner selves, but behaviours drawn out from us by the social media platforms. It has left us unsure of how to deal with human complexity. Or is it just that we find our phones more interesting than each other? We have Netflix and TikTok and chatty podcasts: why then make room for actual humans who might challenge and change us?
It can, of course, go the other way: some use social media to claim an intimacy that is imagined. A neighbour with whom I’d only ever exchanged a few words began messaging and commenting on my Instagram posts multiple times a day, even banging on their window when they saw me leave the house.
For years I had been willingly occupying an online environment in which I seemingly had no claim to privacy or mystery; where I was misunderstood and misrepresented; where people could passively consume me. I was a hub of total connection. I was content.
A friend sent me a routine by the American stand-up Des Bishop recalling how before smartphones, we spent much of our lives waiting for people to show up, or “watching the condensation drip” on the bus: “We were mindful half of every f***ing day because we didn’t have a choice.” Another friend tells me that having quit social media some time ago, he still finds himself in the habit of picking up his phone to check it. Searching for an alternative hit, he will scroll through old text messages. We are so used to having our past and our present at our fingertips, it’s all too easy to succumb to our devices’ sweet caress.
The disturbing thing is that you can be abstractly aware of all of these traps – and yet still fall into all of them. I didn’t believe I was dependent on the dopamine hit of a “like” or a retweet. Now I’ve mostly been off social media for a month, I can see that I was. I’ve had to adjust to a different rhythm. To sit with intrusive thoughts or emotions and not reach for a distraction. To refamiliarise myself with my old brain circuitry, slightly corroded through misuse, missing a few capacitors and transformers, but still functioning, just about. Only by reconnecting with myself and all my messy, inconvenient, unformatted thoughts will I be able to reconnect with the world.
Johanna Thomas-Corr is chief literary critic for the Times and Sunday Times
[See also: Bill Gates: the Optimist’s Dilemma]
Content from our partners
Related
