Thoughts of the #ChronicallyOnline

Written by Asiah

years ago when we first logged into social media we had no idea we’d gradually be

crammed into these virtual spaces that abided similar standards and rules. and it

wasn’t in a sense of community, it simply begged for your insecurity. your own,

especially as you were the consumer. tiny faces on your screen all started to look

the same to please other tiny faces that were just as relevant and irrelevant as

the others, but it mattered. it mattered what they thought and you’d soon learn

that too. you’d listen to them, try to replicate them and you’ll forget that the

internet has no comprehension of diversity, it merely creates clones. and you did

the same. tiny faces were very pretty; almost perfect, features on apps curated

you to look so, so you followed. then the talks of attractiveness, somehow scaled

and quantified like a subject of mathematics we forgot to take; like a person was

valued by how desirable they are to a system that had no awareness of true beauty.

they talk of bettering yourselves and then speak as if it lies in the hands of

consumerism; a beauty product or cosmetic procedure. people before the internet

knew it was an inside job. we’re forgetting that now.

we lost the ability to disconnect between what happens online and offline; the

fact that people act differently behind a screen. the fact that the internet gives

them audacity, its taken over so much of our lives that we’ve now been primed to

think the way it asks of us. the judgement of thousands of pretty perfect faces

seep into you and you think the way they do, you look at people the way you expect

them to look at you.

the essence of judgement that a lot try to deny is how it says a lot more about

the person judging than the one judged, you will inevitably project whatever it is

that you’re condemning—whatever rubric you abide by back on yourself. and so it

becomes a sort of disease caused by the chronically online, easier to apply on

yourself than on others.

the internet cannot view anything beyond the physical, it merely sees what is

given to it, ignoring whats underneath that. and so the chronically online tend to

do the same. giving physicality a sense of grandiose above all else, and that

channels into how “surface level” people are now. this isn’t to say that every

user of the internet abides by this, i’m not pointing fingers at anyone more than

i am at myself. insecurity and judgement were always an issue but it wasn’t as

serious. everything is exacerbated now.

i hope we reach a time where both worlds of the internet and real life remain in

their own realm, in their own dimension, without one interfering with the other.

where our physical reality is just as legitimate just as beautiful, where we can

reverse the effect that the internet has taught us and see people for their

humanity and not just a tiny pretty perfect face. where we can exist by

distinguishing the two, and come to terms with the fact that the internet will

never lose its importance, we’ll just have to learn how to compensate with the

life given to us. the real one.

go touch grass.