Digital loneliness

Bipop Upreti
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

A good friend of mine (let’s call her Amy) is what i like to call a high intensity social media user. She has maxed out her connections in facebook, has more than 10,000 followers in instagram and frequently goes out on dates using online dating websites. From an outsider’s perspective who lurks around her social media she has it all. Boys, Toys and no nonsense noise. Yet people will get baffled when I tell them that she is suffering from an acute form of depression.

Amy suffers from depression because she has two different lives. Amy lives majority of her time online where she has created a faux persona of what she believes the world wants her to be. However, since Amy is a living breathing human being she has to spend her time within this world as well where she has almost forgotten how to be social. The reality that she has constructed around herself online and the reality that has been constructed around her by those platforms has essentially made her a handicap as to how to deal with people in the real world. The resultant gap has made Amy unable to cope with her existence in the real world.

There are hundreds of thousands of Amy’s around the country and around the world with millions more to come as the new generation comes of age. Most of these people fail to comprehend the stringent divide between the digital world and the real world that we live in. Constantly pushing to become a “perfect” version of yourself online is pushing a lot of people into this feedback loop sort of like getting addicted to a powerful stimulant. At the beginning you are in control of how much of ‘you’ you are willing to let out within this platform. You use the platform to benefit you. However slowly you start to lose control without realizing the fact that you lose control. The only difference being, with stimulants you can physically feel the alteration within your body whereas with the former the realization is much more difficult. Its gets even more difficult when the learning algorithms that the big companies try to hide the negativity associated with using these platforms.

I think an essential part of being a human being is to be able to connect with other human beings and empathize with them. For most of the human beings in this planet that connection happens when we see, hear, feel, touch and smell the other person. When we are only using 2 out of 5 senses (usually just one) to understand and empathize with the other person, the balance just doesn’t strike. It always feels like there is a vital piece of the equation missing. So to all the millenials and Gen Z out there who feel lonely even though we are connected like never before know this that you are most probably not the only one with similar feelings. I also would like to apologize to the future generations because ultimately it was my generation that is to be blamed when eventually we realize that we as a species have diverged the goals that these platforms originally set out to achieve.

Bipop Upreti

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