Off the Grid
⤏ the price of online living
⤏ By Ciana Alessi
⤏ Graphic by Faye Orlove
Graphic by Faye Orlove
People often say they wish they knew they were experiencing the good ‘ole days when they were actually in them.
Or that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, or some other combination of nostalgia porn lyrics. As a hyper-introspective, incessantly reflexive person, I simply cannot relate. When things in my life are going swimmingly, I think about it compulsively, mostly in order to brace myself for the inevitable downward spiral. And yet, even with all of my mental prep and emotional fortification, I still lost my footing like a newborn calf when my long-term relationship ended earlier this year.
Before you start thinking this is a teary-eyed tale about being newly single in the big city, á la our coveted Sex and the City reboot, let me remind you that I’m an Aquarius moon. Being emotionally vulnerable on the internet is going to be a no from me dawg.
My months of wallowing in existential dread and the numbing acceptance of being single for the first time since 2015 led me on a consumption-bender. At any given moment, I was entering credit card information. I bought every limited-edition scrunchie, a $300 dress, and $40 vegan pizza. I bought everything I could get my grubby paws on. When I reluctantly took a moment to question why I was buying all of this shit I couldn’t possibly need, I realized that the culprit was almost exclusively my Instagram feed. Once I opened Zuckerberg’s purple nightmare box, I immediately felt the crushing weight to be better — to have better home decor, to make better use of my free time, to gain a better sense of my optimal angles. So I shopped my way into a fleeting sense of superiority.
“Once I opened Zuckerberg’s purple nightmare box, I immediately felt the crushing weight to be better…”
Then, one fateful night, around the usual time for making grand life changes (2AM), I deleted my Instagram app. In the morning, instead of immediately checking my IG feed, I scrolled through my three astrology apps and stared out the window until my dog’s morning walk forced me into motion. Throughout the following days, I found myself less and less anxious about my daily existence. I was living exclusively in a physical space. I got back into meditation and regular exercise, and — for a while — it was a net positive. I was undoubtedly happier, more relaxed, and my trips down to the mailroom became fewer and farther between.
But one day the tides turned, and things got damper, darker, and lonelier than before. In all this newfound time alone and offline, I realized I had little to no idea what was happening with my friends’ lives. I had no sense of the events and jokes that were being cultivated in my absence. I had no idea what pattern was finally going to derail the stronghold of cow print. I was on an island of my own making, afraid of getting sucked back into a feeling of persistent inferiority.
Think about how fucking weird it is when you meet someone who doesn’t have any social media accounts. As a digital entity, your function is to perform your existence for an audience, rinse, and repeat. But when someone is offline, their function isn’t the same as yours. Understandably, this creates a riff between your comprehension of personhood and their existence in this social world. If you aren’t online, how do you keep up with the breakneck speed of global news? The fleeting memes? How do you establish yourself as an engaged, conscious person? What are your political leanings? If no one can see your bandaid-clad selfie, did you even get vaccinated?
Because social media is so ingrained in the fiber of our lives, being offline is like sitting on the sidelines of a water balloon fight. It’s much easier to play the game, to join in on the fun. To refuse participation seems joyless to everyone playing along. And even though you might stay dry, you’ve taken yourself out of commission and become unintelligible. Whether you mean to be or not, you’re now willfully an outsider.
“Is it possible to break the digital dichotomy? To live a hybrid existence: offline in nature, yet tethered to a cultivated digital identity?”
Of course, Instagram is not a new beast and social media is now well-established as complicated terrain. Where we currently stand — at the tail end of a global pandemic — it’s inarguable that social media can be an incredible tool for community building, political organizing, and maintaining a sense of connection in the absence of physical closeness. While the power of social media can surely be wielded for good, it still disintegrates our connection to ourselves and depersonalizes our lives by forcing us to “perform.” This environment is a breeding ground for social anxiety, comparison culture, and competition. Studies have shown that while social media doesn’t directly increase social anxiety, “social comparison and [low] self-esteem,” generated from social media use create a perfect storm for a decrease in emotional health in social media users.
When I took a step away from Instagram, I was immediately struck by how little I knew myself. Surely this was also an epiphany that came by way of getting out of a 5-year relationship, but more than being a part of a twosome, being @cianaale proper was an identity I was constantly upholding without understanding who I, Ciana Alessi, real human girl, actually was. Using Instagram filters made me feel disillusioned when looking at my actual face, seeing successful 25-year olds at big media companies made me question my life path, and seeing everything everyone else was doing at all times made me feel like I wasn’t living up to my potential. Instead of interrogating these feelings and investing in my actual IRL identity, I continued to distract myself by performing my digital identity. For me, being that socially intelligible entity also meant being an internally unintelligible shell.
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity posits that individuals must be gendered in order to be intelligible as social beings. When a child is born, the normative, traditional declaration is of the child’s sex (and thereby, their imposed gender) before any other information is relayed about this fresh, new human. In layman's terms, if you’re not a boy or a girl, you don’t have any selfhood; you don’t exist as a socially recognizable person.
“WHEN I TOOK A STEP AWAY FROM INSTAGRAM, I WAS IMMEDIATELY STRUCK BY HOW LITTLE I KNEW MYSELF.“
Even in 2021, when the gender binary is being demolished by generations of young people who are being weaned off the teet of Western socialization, this argument rings true. Although we’re finally accepting that gender is an arbitrary distinction at best, in order to be socially recognized as a person, you have to exist within a binary in some way, shape, or form. Today, however, our modes of categorization are shifting into new territory: you are either online, or you’re not.
The binary between online and offline, although generated by technology, is a distinctly natural phenomenon. Human beings inherently categorize in dichotomies — there’s good/evil, hot/cold, Beyonce/Solange. Is it possible to break the digital dichotomy? To live a hybrid existence: offline in nature, yet tethered to a cultivated digital identity? Per usual, who the fuck knows. It’s probably best to just do whatever feels right for you.
If you have enough mental fortitude to stay entirely offline and diligently maintain your in-person network of friends, read physical newspapers, and go to local community events, defending your IRL status to confused virtual folk might be worth the effort. Maybe ignorance is bliss and not knowing which meta meme page reigns supreme is your ultimate form. But maybe you love being online, or maybe your friends are miles away and your relationships rely upon the sanctity of your wifi connection, or your mobility restricts your participation in physical spaces. Even if you technically have to live in the real world, your digital self can still be your preferred domain.
“FOR ME, BEING ONLINE REINFORCES THE FACETS OF MY IRL SELF THAT NEED FINE TUNING.”
No matter how badly I want this to be the case, no one can tell me how to be a person The Right Way. For me, being online reinforces the facets of my IRL self that need fine tuning, like my proclivity for comparison, my crushing FOMO, and my addiction to buying sustainable fashion. So although I won’t be deleting my Twitter app anytime soon, I’m not dying to go back to Instagram either. Instead, like a wellness guru, I’m prioritizing mindfulness. After more than a year of exclusively seeking out numbing distractions from the senseless pain, tragedy, and absurdity of real life, so many of us are confidently interacting with the world again.
In some ways, we’re all Geminis. We have these two faces to present to the world — one online, and one off — but we only have one earthly body. We’re left to juggle these two versions of ourselves, alongside the presence of our followers, friends, and delicate sanity. So, we try our hardest not to drop anything in front of the crowd. And even though it feels like we have to live with our audience, I’m happy to report that just like in the ‘90s and ‘80s and every other pre-digital era, we really just have to live with ourselves.