A phenomenon I need your help naming
Hello! I’ve had a goal of sharing my musings for about a year now… so here goes. I started writing after I got long covid — my brain fog often made talking hard, but with writing, I could control the pace. Since then, I’ve dabbled in exploring psychological topics (often related to my recovery), reliving strange experiences with ex-lovers, and flash memoir.
I’ve decided to start sharing my writing (I think weekly) both as a forcing function and as part of a commitment to do more things that I’m afraid of (I recently gave up snowboarding for good, this is my next act!).
If you’re reading this, I’m more appreciative than you know. It is my greatest hope that my musings can offer you a glimmer of self-reflection, or at least a moment of amusement.
xoxo, J
The other night, I joined my friend Donna at a Taylor Swift “rave.” It was the first time I’ve properly gone out in San Francisco in what feels like years. The crowd was resplendent: among the requisite fans in excessively sequined clothes, there were a surprising number of what I can only describe as authentic rave goers.
The currency here, I think, was one of surprise and delight. Of course each song would be Taylor. But which ones would play? How, specifically, would the DJ transform them to (admittedly, loosely) fit the EDM bill? For me, peak delight was “Mean" when the DJ sampled a song I know I know, but can’t name, and turned on green laser curtains.
“I want to make sure I can describe this,” I shouted, pulling out my phone. I took a 12 second video of the new riff after the chorus and my friend dancing (knowingly) at the camera.
For the rest of the night, and well into the next day, the video captured my attention. I replayed it over and over in my mind, but not through the immersive, frameless lens through which I’d first seen it. Instead, I saw it already cropped into a square, part of a carousel, my inner monologue trying different captions on for size. I played around with different phrases, or sometimes just messed with the intonation. I flipped through memories of the past quarter not as I had lived them, but as I had remembered them captured on my or Zack’s phone.
By the time the DJ moved on to “Shake It Off” (at least I think that was the song, I was struggling to pay attention at this point and as it turns out, no set list has been published for this event) I had honed in on two ideas* for my first Instagram post in almost two years (my last post was in commemoration of my first 10 months struggling with long covid, thanking those who helped my spirit in that time. I wouldn’t say anything more about this online due to a combination of my spirit tanking and a mandate from my attorney in my disability case).
As I architected my triumphant return to my 300-something followers, I was conscious of my shifting attention, the glitter of the rave dulling.
Apparently “Instagramification” is the phenomenon of experiencing life through the lens of social media. I don’t like how my thoughts jerked from the present dance floor to one online, how I engaged with them, wondering if strangers would think I’d gotten hotter in my time away from social media (had I?) — but at least the entire night wasn’t lost to Instagramification. I’d had a glorious hour reveling in the silliness and surprise of the event before I took that video; I didn’t walk in and immediately process the event through the eyes of someone waiting for a coffee, sitting on a toilet, staying up past their bedtime watching Twilight in their parent’s guest room — all of which would have made the night markedly less glittery from the onset.
And yet… this thinking still feels bad.
Overanalyzing it all, I have a flash memory from 8 or 9 years old. I was with my best friend and her mom, picking up her sister from a playdate at the pool. The moms chit chatted as the sun set. Bored, I walked parallel to the edge of the pool, skimming my inner foot every few steps. I lost my balance. I see my wet clothes in the car: sneakers, worn green cargo shorts, a blue tie dye tank top from The Gap. I feel the heat of embarrassment under the chill of my clothes and the car’s AC.
The memory is a bit on the nose. When I dip my toe into things, its always like that summer night. Two weeks ago, my return to Instagram started with “I wonder what AJ from my middle school church group is up to” and ended with trying to piece together who from middle school is still friends based on the limited evidence of recent wedding photos, all while Twilight played in the background. Is it this hard for everyone to moderate, to maintain their balance?
I don’t think the real cost is in the late night hours wasted (though there is a cost — I woke up the next morning feeling like I had eaten an entire pie with a side of Pringles), but rather the moments stolen as we shift to our online selves while standing in the real world. Moments like after I pulled my phone out at the “rave.” But it’d be cheap to blame Instagram for this. I weave tapestries of idealistic futures from scraps of reality all the time: 2 days into a 10 day meditation retreat, I’m focused on how I’ll tell my mom that this will save her; five minutes into a new dance class, I’m describing my new Monday night dance class routine to an imaginary book club.
But I have one specific tendency to fantasize that feels quite sinister, something I can’t find a name for: if I spend just a fraction too long online, I’m inundated with compulsions to construct posts about future events I have yet to experience.
Again, my memory as metaphor: once I dipped my toe and fell in the pool, now I dip my toe and am hit with tsunamis of my own imagination.
An example. A few Julys ago, I went on a backpacking trip in Wyoming. Just as soon as we planned the trip, I started picturing a post of myself sunbathing on a boulder next to a turquoise lake. I’m wearing a new black bralette and ratty athletic shorts, draping my limbs over the rock, grazing the water with my fingers. My eyes are closed. The caption would say, “if you need me, i’ll be here, healing.”
What the hell?
On the actual trip, I hopped in a glacial lake, half to say I did and half to clean those ratty shorts. I posed for a photo when I rolled a Yahtzee (Yahtzee!) during a thunderstorm. And I did lay on a rock next to a river, perhaps healing my tired feet, but no one took a photo.
After it ended, I felt a strange sense of loss for not capturing the photo of my daydreams. I had seen it as I walked through my neighborhood, as I ate dinner with Zack, as I washed my hair. If it had never existed, what had I lost?
The more time I spend on social media, the more I cloud my mental landscape with these versions of myself. I see snapshot after snapshot in imagined (or known, but glamorized) places, and I’m either scantily clad or looking extremely hip (both feel unrealistic).
As insidious as this feels, I can’t find anything documenting this specific phenomenon online. When I described the Wyoming example to ChatGPT, it called it Instagramification. But, this issue isn’t processing real time events through a social media lens, it’s in the future. It’s tweaking the angle of each limb on a rock before I even go to Wyoming, before I even know if that kind of rock exists, before I even know if I want to sit on it. It’s an alluring consciousness, a dream-like state whose only on-ramp is online. I wonder if these visions reveal how I want others to see me (adventurous, peaceful, sexy?), the same way our nights’ dreams reveal a deeper mind.
I have a vague recollection of reading about this once, but can’t remember where. I googled and googled, but mostly got hits on how influencers plan their content calendars. (One gem in my research: someone asked Quora, “Why do I imagine scenarios in my head all the time and talk to myself pretending I’m inside that scenario. Am I mentally ill?” You and me both, kid.)
Am I alone in this? I don’t think thats possible. But if everyone’s experiencing it, how are we not talking about it? Is there a name for it that I don’t know?
I can picture me on that imagined rock in Wyoming better than almost anything else from that trip. Am I doomed to remember these online fantasies more clearly than real life? I wonder if I’ll ever look back on anything from today as viscerally as I do that wet drive home from the pool.
The number of imagined convos I have in my head is unreal…. thank you for putting some sensible words to this odd experience!