slash-and-burn
I still find it pretty depressing to open my phone to zero notifications. Which is ironic, considering I made a deliberate effort to cut out the majority of social media platforms and algorithmic, attention-shackling apps that are out there. The ones I still use I relegate solely to my laptop. This makes it awkward when I meet new people who ask for my Instagram or whatever, but I thought I would feel better dropping off the face of the Earth instead of tapping through circles of people I don't really care all that much about.
What sucks about doing this is that things get, well, kind of lonely. Just a few years ago I would always have a constant stream of group chats, of increasing numbers ensconced within red bubbles. An ambient thrum of activity that I knew I could access whenever I felt the present moment wasn't entertaining enough for my short-fused mind. A thriving (tranquilizing?) digital ecosystem.
I started to equate this type of attention with the closeness I felt to people around me. Over time a correlation grew with how often people shot me a text or sent a snap or commented on an Instagram post and the importance of them in my life. Those that did this the most frequently, the ones most digitally engaged were those that I viewed to be the closest or most present people to me. People who turned towards me in any possible circumstance.
Most of this genre of people began to phase out of my life in the last year or so. Something flickered in me, and I suddenly was unmotivated to chase after replies in group chats or go on long iMessage back and forths or comment on every post my friends uploaded. Because of this, people stopped turning to me. In the moment it definitely was bitter to lose connection with a ton of people that I kept up with for years. It didn't matter that this ambient interaction wasn't substantial in my life, to me it was reassuring to feel relevant to the lives of other people — even if it was facilitated passive engagement. Then it all evaporated. At times I felt utterly isolated: I could no longer self-medicate my loneliness through microdosed communication, grey messages and little streak emojis.
Another genre of people in my life were of a more sporadic, yet durable kind: people I wouldn't text or engage with online for months/years, yet we could pick back up with a warmth like nothing happened in that forked-off branch of time. These friends I knew I could rely on regardless of the obstacles that materialized in our lives. I still don't know what draws the distinction between these two kinds of people: what makes some friends peripheral noise, and what makes some gravitational centers that incessantly draw you two closer together despite any distance. Maybe personality? Shared history? Mutual safety? Anyways, besides the point.
If there's any benefit to the deletion of these ambient parts of my life, it's that it has made me much more comfortable being alone. Not just physically alone, but alone in every possible sense of the word — especially digitally. I'm growing used to the feeling of sliding open the metal to nothingness, to no words, no thoughts, no check-ins, no snaps, no BeReal notifications, no follow requests. Only my reflection in the inky darkness of the screen’s auto-lock seconds later.
Putting it into words makes it sound sadder than it actually feels, but I find that the majority of my days are spent floating from place to place without any accompaniment, in person or online. If this was me a few years ago, this type of everyday life would have been incapacitating. I always had someone with me when I went out and I couldn't justify even going to a coffee shop by myself. I suppose stripping the murmurs of my digital presence was my first venture into understanding I don't need people to fill every gap of my life. It's the in-between, the empty, the liminal spaces where you learn to talk to yourself with complete honesty. Constant buzzing in the background disturbs the necessary (and I'll admit, sometimes melancholic) calm that comes with self-understanding.
There's that Tyler the Creator tweet from 2012 where he's making a joke about cyberbullying (and the online world as a whole) not being real because you can just walk away from the screen, and it sounds stupid of course, but in my own ignorant way I kind of believe in it. Despite the online world exerting more and more of its force to shape the physical one, absurdly dismissing everything that's happening in the digital landscape is a way for me to feel I have more control over my life by suppressing the computerized freight train hurtling down its track. It certainly feels painful at first, but knowing the right things to shut down is an important awareness to develop — the permission of slash-and-burn to restore what matters most.