Who am I without the internet? I have had an online presence in one way or another for over 20 years. I am 34, so I can remember a time before the internet, and a time when the internet wasn’t such an omnipresent part of everyday life. Even ten years ago, there wasn’t as much pressure to create and curate an online persona, a positive reflection of my own self-perception to present to the world. I wasn’t burdened by constant stimulation from an all-knowing algorithm delivering an endless feed of short-form content curated specifically for me. And ultimately, I just didn’t know that much about other people. I was more authentic, less influenced by the choices and decisions of strangers.
I like to think, at age 34, I have a strong footing in who I am and what I’m about. I go to therapy. I journal through my feelings. I meditate. I have had traumatic, character-building, self-affirming life experiences in which I’ve been forced to face myself at my lowest, and had my strength and resilience tested. But who am I? This kind of existential question stresses me out. I’m someone’s son, of course. Someone’s brother, someone’s husband, someone’s friend. Of course, of course. I’m a healthcare worker. I’m a redhead. I’m a cancer survivor. I’m a gay man. I’m bilingual. I’m a person with a unique story that’s worth sharing, but that same story is also worth holding close and not submitting to the democratized storyboard of social media. Am I the main character in my own life story? What does that even mean?
Having an online presence made it start to feel like I was the main character in the story I was able to craft and create and present to the community of profiles who were following me on platforms like TikTok, Twitter and Twitch. I was sharing pieces of my life with strangers, bits and pieces of my personal history, my sense of humor, my interests. But at the same time, I was finding my interests and sense of humor influenced by these new connections. It felt like I was creating this version of myself to share with the world online, and the way I was perceived by this online community was, in real time, molding and shaping this version of myself I was presenting.
I felt like I was losing my sense of personal identity because, like a sponge, I was absorbing the personalities of everyone I scrolled past online. When I was on TikTok or Instagram, at my worst, I was spending hours every day scrolling endlessly, absorbing the opinions and quirks and interests and life details of strangers who shared openly and comfortably. In turn, I was sharing things about myself, influenced and inspired by the videos I had seen other people create. The content I was creating was not original; it was taken from what I’d seen online. Much of the content I was consuming wasn’t original either. I would find a video I enjoyed, or that made me laugh, or made me think, and then after I liked it or reposted it for my followers, new copycat videos of that same video showed up on my feed. Or was the original video I liked and shared just a copycat of another video? It became increasingly harder and harder to tell. Does it even matter? The longer this went on, the more hollow I felt.
This hollow feeling started to manifest in short-form content becoming my frame of reference for sharing humor and insights with friends and family. If someone shared a story or reference with me, I found myself jumping to relate that anecdote or story to a TikTok I saw. “Oh, that’s just like this TikTok I saw…” I was getting annoyed with myself as the words came out of my mouth. I can only imagine what the people in my life were thinking. Really? Doesn’t this guy have any thoughts of his own?
I was letting TikToks I’d seen or comments I’d read on videos shape my opinions of things on which I hadn’t taken the time to form an opinion. I would watch a video, and before the video was done playing, I would be scrolling through the comments, reading the opinions of the commenters. By the time the video was done (if I’d even stayed long enough to finish watching it) I already had an opinion on it that wasn’t actually formed by me, but instead was something I’d read in the comments and just agreed enough with. What did I actually think about this? About anything? Why was I outsourcing my own opinions?
What’s even worse than this were the times I had tried to explain a more serious or complex subject I had “learned” from a TikTok video, but couldn’t properly articulate what I watched. Because of the nature of short-form content, that informative video I was referencing was often one of hundreds I had seen on that day. I hadn’t truly spent enough time with the subject matter in that specific video to be able to relay that information properly to another person, and so it would lead to a dead end of thought. I would end up just tapering off without completing my thoughts, trying to change the subject and hoping the person I was talking to wouldn’t ask me any follow-up questions.
I have been off of TikTok for over a month and I’m starting to feel like myself again. I think. Or rather, I’m finding my personality no longer feels like an amalgamation of the shortform content I’ve been consuming. I’m no longer thinking about things and filtering those thoughts through a lens whereby I can translate them into an easily digestible script that I can recite to share with my TikTok followers. I’m tired of mining my own brain for content. I have been enjoying just being. The very act of writing this up and posting it to my blog for no one in particular to read is a practice in just being.
Leave a Reply