I haven’t been writing.

My silence about how I’ve been can be blamed on the mindless business of the daily grind. To be honest, it was easier documenting and writing about my life when I did it the analog way: black ink marking the passage of days on crisp notebook pages, photos taken and seeing the light of printed day. They made my thoughts and experiences feel intimate, immediate, and truly mine. Intention and privacy are key.

It doesn’t mean to say that I haven’t been taking note of how I feel—I have, I always have. I’d expound sincerely on the state of my affairs, but these days, whenever I try to write about life, it reads like just another trite realization about being a 20-something. There’s nothing wrong with shared experiences, but it’s just so tiring to rehash something that I know my peers are going through as well.

I’m going through a phase of trying to transcend the disappointment of having similar experiences and expectations with other people my age.

Arrogant? Yes, you could say that. Frightened? You fucking bet; I’m shaking in my third-world tsinelas. It’s probably the result of social media’s omnipresence (yep, here we go, another jaded, special snowflake-y generalization from another millennial), but even our dreams and our ambitions are starting to look the same. I mean, we’re all practically ticking the same things off our bucket lists! We’re all putting the same experiences, the same destinations, the same regurgitated platitudes on our “reel”. You know what the reel is, don’t even pretend that you don’t.

Sometimes, thanks to our almost collective need to survive and find meaning in and out of the rat race, our journeys across the world and into ourselves have also began to feel like another kind of insidious race of its own. It’s not enough to be merely on a successful career or livelihood trajectory—we also have to be visibly better at being a well-rounded human being, via, well, our 21st century criteria of what it means to be a well-rounded human being. And by visibly better, I mean that our barometer for doing well are the highlights. We have a compulsive and fetishistic need to document the minutiae of our lives; the highlights are akin to thought bubbles saying “look, I’m done with this hurdle, now how about you lol”. We have become ruthless editors, pastiching the best and the interesting moments as the entirety of our existence.

It’s simple: we have become our own brand ambassadors. To me, nothing has been quite as depressing as that realization.

No one says it, but everyone thinks it anyway: you’re only as relevant as your likes and followers.

Older generations will say that they have crawled through the same sticky existential murk in their 20s, have had the same insecurities and concerns, yet lived to tell the tale—I will give them that. But this is me, in my 20s, earnestly wondering if my dreams and desires are still valid and genuine if they are so commonplace, if they are trending. (Goosebumps, and not the kind that I like.) If Augustus Waters feared oblivion, then I fear inauthenticity. In an age of such hyperawareness of each other’s lives, how can I be so sure that I’m not unconsciously misappropriating the mores and attitudes of my peers? That my dreams and desires, even though they seem to resemble so many other people’s, are still truly mine?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not vying for a technological coup. I love Instagram, I love my iPhone, I love the breadth of opportunities that the current digital infrastructure of the Internet has given our generation—I’m a child of our times. But sometimes, I feel like going through a quarter-life crisis has just gotten way harder because we’re all witnessing each other’s highly-filtered journeys in real-time, constantly feeding off each other’s successes and neuroses, all in the palm of our hands.

Opting out does not exist as a real choice.

You can say that I can cut back on social media, on technology, on using my phone when it’s not important. But you see, it’s not about the length of time that you’re perusing other people’s lives; it’s about the awareness that you are simply just another human being in an era where even when you choose not to participate, you’re still inundated with the mores and expectations of the milieu in an increasingly pervasive way. We have technology and our preoccupation with interconnectedness to thank for that. Having said that, perhaps it’s completely nothing new. The printing press, radio, and television may also have had the same effect. It’s just that it’s a hundred times more in your face today. What more in the future?

The takeaway, at least for me, always seems to be that while we may not be mirror images, we are leading similar lives: the so-called human condition, magnified ten-fold. Even if one chooses to live the life of a technological recluse, it won’t save them from cultural expectations in a global, or should I say human, culture, that has been and will always be molded by its technology. Abstinence is simply choosing not to live in the present, and to someone like me who is a slave to all kinds of possibilities, that’s already a sordid death in itself. So, nope. Going offline is not an option, because I want to be here. Here, as myself.

So am I doing the right thing?

Is it possible to completely buy into the richness of our increasingly social landscape yet still be a genuine individual? What, then, is the conclusive answer to the question of “what should I do with my life?”—the crux of all the decisions I will be making in the next few years? One day, I know most of this will feel like masturbatory intellectualizations, but for now, it is my reality. As long as I have to pay taxes and have a base need for feeling like a genuine, functioning adult (with a soul) instead of a 14 year-old playing at one, I have my hands full.

In a sea of selfies and differently-worded epithets on “finding myself”, “being mindful”, and “#YOLO”, who am I, exactly, and what do I stand for? Is it authentic?

Is it me?

That’s my 20s, in a single interrogative. And no, I still don’t know the answer nor can I write about it. Not yet.