#11 Facing My Online Existential Crisis
To engage, or not to engage? That is the question.
Good morning!
Today’s newsletter is longer than usual. Grab your coffee. And enjoy the photos!
“Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.” - Marshall McLuhan
Please don’t go looking for these, but at one point in my life, I ran three very decorated, very cringey personal blogger sites. All at the same time. Why I needed three is something that, unfortunately, only my deranged teenage self can fathom.
Like any other millennial, I grew up with the internet. Blogger, MySpace, Friendster, Tumblr—name it, I had it. In those good ol’ days, most of us rode only one major virtual bandwagon, flattering each other with tastefully-made Friendster testimonials composed of half alphabet letters and half symbols.
And I loved it. This modest, harmless online life. I happily maintained my blogs, sharing my musings and the events of my life with shameless detail, uncaring of who sees it or if anyone sees it at all.
Today, most of us find ourselves switching between no less than a handful of platforms. Personally, I’m on every mainstream social site: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok.
The more the merrier? Err.
It’s exhausting. And it’s not even being in so many places that mainly overwhelms me, but the question of why the hell I’m still even in these places at all.
The rude awakening began in the most blessed of all years—when I quit my job only to be greeted days later by the news of a nationwide lockdown. Unemployed and stuck indoors, I did 10,000 things, one of which was to read.
The first book I read was 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Noah Yuval Harari. (If you ever feel like you want a total mindfuck and to question everything you’ve known about the world, look no further than this book.) If you pay nothing for your news and your content, Harari warned, “you get a low-quality product. Even worse, you yourself unwittingly become the product. Your attention is first captured by sensational headlines, and then sold to advertisers or politicians.”
In today’s world, Harari argues, “information and attention are critical assets”— a sentiment perfectly complemented by another book I read around that time: Deep Work by Cal Newport. As the tagline reads, the book provides “rules for focused success in a distracted world.” Newport’s third strategy?
Quit social media. Cold Turkey. For thirty days. Why?
To experience for yourself the truth that “they’re not really all that important in your life.”
As Newport writes, “Among the different network tools that can claim your time and attention, these services, if used without limit, can be particularly devastating to your quest to work deeper.” Your ex-best friend’s ex’s third-degree cousin is on Instagram? Look! Your grade school classmate who you forgot existed posted that she just got engaged? Of course, you have to know about it. “[Social media] offers personalized information arriving on an unpredictable intermittent schedule,” hence, “severely damaging your attempts to schedule and succeed with any act of concentration.”
Coincidentally, it was around this time that I discovered my passion for writing. As a baby writer hellbent on mastering the craft and unleashing her creativity, I’d read enough writing advice to understand that the fragmentation of my resources will get me nowhere. The top three things you have to do to be a good writer? Write a lot, read a lot, and notice the world—yep—a lot. In short, I needed to put as much time and attention into this as I could. Why wouldn’t I heed Newport’s call? Not just for thirty days, but… forever?
My writer roots, as you might know, are in self-help. And let me tell you, many writers of the genre will die on Newport’s hill: If you want to be great, productive, successful, creative, or to make something of yourself, don’t waste your time on social media. Actually, don’t waste your time on your phone. (Tony Stubblebine, the current CEO of Medium and the biggest self-improvement nut I know, wrote a modest guide on the optimal iPhone configuration for productivity, focus, and health. It’s a 75-min read.)
I can’t find it anymore, but there was a brilliant Medium essay about tech and social media where the author posed a haunting analogy. He said that, in the modern world, our minds are akin to this old form of capital punishment where a person’s arms and feet were tied to four horses, while all four pulled at each limb in different directions. The image of my brain being stretched and dismembered has never left me.
But the final nail in the coffin—the thing that convinced me to abandon all hope ye who engage in social media—was delivered by Netflix: The Social Dilemma. The docu-drama eerily portrayed how social networks nurture addiction, harvesting every bit of user data, drawing out patterns, and letting the algorithm push the right buttons. “Social media isn’t a tool that’s just waiting to be used,” ex-Googler Tristan Harris warned. “It has its own goals. And it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.”
“We get rewarded by hearts, likes, thumbs-ups, and we conflate that with value, and we conflate that with the truth.” As a marketer, I’d always had an idea that this is how it all works, and yet, I never stopped to think about my own responses to these algorithms. Whenever I would post, did I do it plainly to express myself? Or was I sometimes being performative? To what extent did I feed off of people’s likes and comments for validation? Because I certainly did. I definitely enjoyed those hearts and compliments. And I definitely wondered sometimes why Julie’s travel photo got considerably more likes than my travel photo when Julie and I have roughly the same amount of followers. Was my travel photo not enough? Was it too much? (It’s amazing how simply writing this out clarifies how crazy it sounds.)
And let’s not forget the Philippines’ 15 seconds of fame in the film. Touching on the proliferation of fake news and disinformation, there was a short clip of Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa where the interviewer asked her, “What does it look to be a country that's entire diet is Facebook and social media?”
Falling further into the rabbit hole of techno-pessimism, I learned the whole jargon. “Digital minimalism”—another book by Newport—was like Marie Kondo-ing the crap out of your digital life. We are in the age of the “Attention Economy”, where human attention has clearly become the scarcest, most profitable, and most gameable resource. We were all “doomscrolling”, watching the Covid numbers rise, thinking it can’t possibly get any worse than this. Spoiler alert: It always did. There was #BlackLivesMatter around the world and #JunkTerrorBill and #IbalikAngABSCBN in the Philippines. But “performative allyship” woke me up to the fact that plastering a hashtag across all your feeds hardly makes a dent in the discussion. Activism, as this piece points out, “can’t begin and end with a hashtag.”
By the end of the year, I felt ”digitally woke.” (What can I say? I’m a millennial.) I saw social media as pointless at best, and downright soul-sucking at worst. It was the barrier between me and my potential. The antithesis of substance. The cancer of the modern world.
I would boycott it altogether if I could.
And yet, I vaguely knew—much to my dismay—that that may not be the answer.
I came into 2021 with a massively reformed digital lifestyle. I designed my own minimalist phone, turned off all my notifications, and drastically reduced my screen time. I finally lost the “twitch”— that darn spasm to grab your phone the second it pings or you feel idle. And while I didn’t deactivate any of my social media accounts (I deleted almost all of the apps and just checked them using my browser), I was confident that they'd lost their appeal.
As the year progressed, Covid policies were still being strictly implemented, but the country gradually began to open up again. Nice, small joys became more accessible. I was enjoying my new job, especially because the company offered perks of the highest form: free food. There was food allowance even for virtual meetings! I looked forward to my assigned office days because there was, for sure, going to be free Starbucks. And we had a beautiful office campus that anyone would be proud to have on their Instagram.
Besides work, I had quite a preoccupied indoor life. I wrote, cooked, joined online dance classes, learned TikTok dance trends (that I never shot), and had regular Zoom meet-ups with friends. Eventually, I moved into my own apartment and took on a big refurnishing project! My previous social media-crazed self would’ve readily and proudly shared all these moments online.
And in those moments, frankly, I really wanted to.
If, in the previous year, I resented the fact that we couldn’t live without social media, in 2021, I judged myself for feeling the urge to still use it.
The following year, I kept the resistance, but decided to try a different approach: I would divorce my personal life from my creative life, and my online activities would solely revolve around the latter.
I never admitted this to myself until now, but I was flirting—half-assedly—with becoming a “content creator.”
So I abandoned my original Instagram profile that carried ten years’ worth of memories, 641 posts, and more than a thousand followers (who are mostly friends or acquaintances) and migrated to a new account. The profile description of my now-defunct profile dramatically reads: “I’ve moved on ➡️ @ria.ahrt”. Now I wonder what it was exactly I felt the need to move on from.
Unsurprisingly for a perfectionist like me, my expectation was no less than a meticulously-curated feed. I would share my writing and other creative hobbies and experiments in a coordinated and aesthetic way.
You would've thought that my biggest worry would be, “Does this go on my feed?” But this whole attempt just triggered a mini but recurring identity crisis: Do I really want to treat everything as “content”? Can’t I just be, like, a normal person who shares normal life things and feelings and quirks and stuff that I love? Should I portray myself as a writer or blogger or whatever? If this is sorta my creative platform, should I share something about the elections? (Even when I know I’m mostly going to reach people who are betting on the same candidate?) How does posting my yummy poke bowl add value to the world? What goes into my public stories versus my Close Friends stories?
Then the cynical, maybe even holier-than-thou side of me would simply ask: But what would even be the point of participating?
In 2021, a super typhoon hit several provincial regions of the Philippines, one of which was Cebu, my mom’s hometown. Because the largest news network in the Philippines was shut down the previous year, the calamity received limited coverage, and the only time it hit me—a person who lives in Metro Manila and thus was completely unaffected—how devastating this storm was when Sandra, a friend from Mexico—Mexico!—messaged me on Instagram, “Are you okay? I saw the typhoon on the news!” I felt so guilty for not grasping the gravity of this sooner, and it spurred me to start a water bottle drive. I created a poster on Canva then, like a zombie, resurrected from my online absence and shared it across all my social media accounts. I raised 38,000 pesos—which bought more than 3,000 water bottles—in three days.
Around that time, my friend Riggs who’s barely on social media asked me why I was still on Instagram, to which I meekly but instantly replied: “I need Formula 1 in my life.”
I was serious. My screen time shoots up on race weekends. I love following the season. The fandom. The drivers and—I’m completely aware of how weird this compulsion is—their wives and girlfriends. Plus, the teams’ social media accounts release the most visually amazing content! (Oh, do not get me started on the madness of F1 Twitter.)
Now I know that that was an arguable point (Per Riggs, “it’s a valid excuse, but an excuse nonetheless), but it makes sense given my recent career shift. And here comes the most ironic part of all this. The epitome of cognitive dissonance.
I jumped into the industry that I’d been actively resisting: media and advertising. How this possible tension did not cross my mind earlier, I don’t know, and it is, in itself, an entire identity/existential/quarter-life crisis that merits its own essay. But suffice to say, as I scoured all these social sites because it is literally part of my job, I can’t deny their richness. How skillful people are! How many people want to create and share their talents, ideas, and art! Creativity has never been more expansive, discoverable, and accessible. In these platforms, I found inspiration not only for my day-job, but for my own creative pursuits.
In 2022, I wrote about my summer in Paris eight years ago and how it taught me the value of being alone. I posted a photo on my Instagram every day of my trip. And as I revisited them, the memories and feelings behind them sprang back to life. I was able to build my essay because of my Instagram. Similarly, this piece about regret was anchored on an old tweet.
A few months later, I went to Europe on my first solo trip. A warm, lovely Easter Sunday found me at the Schonbrunn Palace and Gardens in Vienna. And I just felt the urge to share the beauty of it all. So I did. This was halfway through my trip.
“Why are you only posting now?!,” Cesi, a friend who knew of my whereabouts replied to my Instagram story. I was touched. It struck me that my truest friends genuinely want to keep tabs on me in the same way that I’ve stayed on social media to keep tabs on them. Why was I being stingy with posting things?
It’s become clear as day: almost everyone who matters to me or who at some point was a critical figure or support system in my life is still active on these platforms. Be it a photo or a 15-second clip, I’m grateful to have a low-maintenance way to witness both their milestones and little joys.
Then, recently and surprisingly, my 15-year-old cousin who lives in New York and follows me on Instagram (of course he won’t let me follow him back) replied to my Instagram story. It was a photo of me at an Asian music festival. “Lucky I went to Pasadena,” he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Was this like a Gen Z thing and I was just too old?
Apparently, he went to the same festival in Pasadena the previous year. The last time I saw my cousin, he wasn’t even old enough to care about social media. Now we were chatting! He was interested in my life! And we were connecting! About music! And I approve of his taste!
And here’s the last but certainly not the least surprise: The people who have reached out on social media to tell me that they read my work, that it spoke to them, that they’re surprised—thankful, even—to see that someone writes so openly and painstakingly about her life. Old friends, loose ties, whole strangers—their messages are truly chicken soup for my creative soul. They help me remember that even as a small, independent writer, my story matters to at least one person out there.
And the way to reach that person? Yep.
After two years of sparing online activity, I’m back on most social networks—albeit with varying levels of engagement. I realize now that, in a roundabout way, being digitally woke and then digitally jaded and then making the choice to digitally detach has lent me more clarity about my offline self, my values, and my priorities, allowing me to now be on social media—and use it to aid that identity, those values, and those priorities.
Take my guilty pleasure: I love stalking myself. I love scrolling through my past. And when I take the trip down the virtual memory lane that is my feed, I don’t see a person who shared things because she was thirsty for people’s approval or who’s so damn precious with her content for mere aesthetic.
I see someone with a rather creative eye, a sense of harmony and style. Someone who finds editing and curating deeply therapeutic.
I see a person who loves experiences, who has been so overwhelmed by the love of her friends, family, and the communities she’s been a part of that she couldn’t help but capture it, spread it, and maybe even inspire others for it. I see a sentimental person who feels and thinks (and by extension, tweets) a lot. Despite being susceptible to the dopamine rush induced by likes and comments, she shares because she’s naturally expressive. She’s the girl who created three very decorated, very cringey personal blogs.
I’m not saying I completely know now how I’m going to go about my online life. But I guess author Jenny Odell had a point when she said that the way to resist the Attention Economy isn’t quitting social media, but to see this as “ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.”
Digital representation and means will always be flawed, but depriving ourselves of them, Odell suggests, might render us incapable of experiencing today’s world in full:
If it’s attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality, regaining control of it can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them. This process enriches not only our capacity to resist, but even more simply, our access to the one life we are given. It can open doors where we didn’t see any, creating landscapes in new dimensions that we can eventually inhabit with others. In so doing, we not only remake the world but are ourselves remade.
Obviously, this ongoing training has been nuts. I’m still hounded by so many questions on habit (When am I scrolling too much?), priority (What am I trading off when I’m looking at my screen?), leisure (What kind of content and entertainment do I feel is worth my while?), influence (What or who do I want to be influenced by? Who do I want to follow to make me happier, better informed, and more open?), netizenship (Is my perception of something fair and balanced or is it just my echo chamber? How should I air out my opinion, if I should air it out at all? Can I participate without adding to the noise and divisiveness?), selfhood (How does the whole process of posting—from publishing to getting feedback—make me feel?), creative sovereignty (Can I, as a content creator/online writer, build an audience while keeping my work free from the temptations of algorithms, the least common denominator, and a sellable “personal brand?”), and method (If, in these times where the digital realm unequivocally matters, I want to be a storyteller who shares meaningful and relevant stories, then how should I proceed? Are these platforms my enemies—or my enablers?).
In an increasingly complex world deluged by content and driven by profit-first institutions, maybe it’s not so crazy to err on the side of hyper-vigilance. To continuously question where you stand with all these technological shenanigans.
Our forever goal, I think, is to strike that alignment between our inner world, online world, and offline world. It may not be perfect, and it will take time, but in any case—I think it’s well worth the attempt.
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