Selfie Loathing

That's me in the spotlight, hating social media

When I was 27, I lived in Washington DC and had a therapist I really loved. He was wonderful – I still think of him fondly, all these years later – and he genuinely cared about me as both a patient and a human. (Having had therapists who I could honestly tell did neither, it really made a difference. This might be a low bar but when a therapist falls asleep not once but twice during sessions, you start to value anyone who doesn’t do that.) Of all the things I remember about our sessions, there’s one moment that really stands out to me. He looked at me and said, “Leah, I’ve never, ever met anyone who is as hard on themselves as you are.”

Now I know what you’re thinking: Everyone’s hard on themselves! We all are! We’re all our worst critics. But please keep in mind: A therapist said this to me. A guy whose job it is to listen to people, to hear their problems and hear them be hard on themselves. Even that guy was like, damn Leah, you’re tops.

(Ever the overachiever, I confess to having taken some pride in this. I’m the best at being the worst!!!)

In the more than 20 years since I last saw that therapist, I have worked on many things about myself, with varying degrees of success. Things like learning: Not everything needs to be said, even if your brain really, really wants your mouth to say it. Not all conversations are necessary. In fact, many aren’t. Sometimes it’s better to let things go and walk away. Maybe share slightly less about yourself at any given moment. You don’t owe anyone an explanation. And hardest of all, you can’t fix your fuck ups. Some people will forever think poorly of you, or even think really negative things about you, and you can’t control that. Plus, if you don’t much like someone, try not to care when it turns out they also don’t like you.

But the one thing that has seemed almost vapor-locked in my brain throughout all these years of therapy and self-improvement, my own immovable object of doom, is the way I think about myself. Rather than get better over the years, it’s stayed the same, on occasion even gotten worse. And I can’t help thinking that our old pal social media has something to do with that.

self-portrait, 2009

Now, just like when I was talking about getting older, I don’t tell you this because I want you to reassure me (or to give you some perverse pleasure if you’re one of the aforementioned people who doesn’t like me). I tell you this because my own journey – both as a Grand Slam champion self-criticizer and as a person who has been in and around tech longer than some of you have been alive – has forced me to think about self-perception way more than I’d like to.

We’re all familiar with the idea that social media has allowed us the perpetual opportunity to compare ourselves with others. Worse, it’s allowed us to compare our insides with someone else’s outsides. We’re stuck with our own messy selves, hyper aware of every flaw and mistake, while what we see of everyone else is what they’ve chosen to show us. Usually the good bits, but even when they show us the not-so-good or even the ugly, it’s a singular moment. We can’t imagine they’re like this for real, not for any significant period of time, unlike us with our piles of laundry and inability to stop spending and lack of any substantive plans every time a fun holiday weekend rolls around.

But more than that, I think, is the way social media has over time heightened the focus on The Self. This is something I’ve been fascinated by for a long time, and maybe I talked about it in an earlier newsletter. Think about the general trajectory of sharing online over the past nearly 25 years. After the early days of the web, when you had to make a whole site for yourself – remember those sites? All the stuff you were interested in plus important personal updates? I love when I still stumble on those time capsules – the first really big moment of sharing online came in the form of blogging. Even though a lot of blogging was really personal, you could write about your life, about what interested you, about almost anything, and still stay connected to and in conversation with your readers. Then came Flickr, which was essentially, for many of us, like blogging but with photos.

But after that came MySpace (more photos and more writing, but this time the terrible kind, at least if you were my ex) and Friendster and Facebook, and eventually Twitter and Instagram. Each of these allowed us to share and connect, but in a way that slowly, over time, narrowed the focus away from the individual + their interests and onto just… the individual. Readers or friends became followers, which implies distance and a lack of intimacy. Which reinforced the idea of the spotlight on the individual, and being in a spotlight does what? It makes you feel you have to perform. It completely centers YOU.

(I think this is one reason (of many) that TikTok has resonated so much with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The focus is absolutely not on the individual in the same way. There is more of a sense of everyone hanging out in the comments, which I think is because people reinforce social norms in a weird grassroots way, but that’s a whole separate conversation.)

Anyway, this isolated , centering spotlight experience that became such a hallmark of social graph-driven social media has made every single online experience feel like a friggin’ referendum on the self. Like people aren’t just commenting on something you wrote or a photo you took, or they’re not disagreeing with your opinion, they’re literally commenting ON YOU. And it’s easy to forget that everything isn’t always about you, that your truth or perspective isn’t the only one, that you are not the only one feeling whatever you’re feeling. It makes everything seem so heightened, so fraught, so high-stakes – when it often isn’t? Who cares if you hate a music star I happen to love? Who cares if I think your movie preferences are juvenile and dumb? But this feeling that we must constantly represent ourselves, our very beings!!!! at all time online – it’s exhausting. I know everyone blames online echo chambers and social media bubbles, but I think this constant, relentless centering of the self is a major reason things have gotten so horrible and tribal, and why we’re all already so on edge the second anyone disagrees. They’re not disagreeing with us, they’re refuting a fundamental part of us. They don’t just like what we like. They don’t like US.

self-portrait, 2009

For anyone who is in any way prone to self-doubt or self-recrimination or general self-loathing, the effect is a constant doubling down on the worst of our habits. When you are always centered, you are always up for debate – with your followers, yourself, anyone who can see you. The constant reinforcement of the self in the spotlight, the self in the center of attention also reinforces our natural tendency to do that in all situations, even as we are exhorted constantly to learn to de-center ourselves. Which, to be honest, is what we all need to do, not just when we’re learning about history or racism, but in all moments.

The ostensible point of social media was, at one time, to connect. Although I think in some ways this is a retrofit narrative to hide the fact that really it’s about building social connections, which is of course a different goal, and one companies can actually use for their own benefit. You can’t monetize a really meaningful moment between two friends, but you can monetize a less meaningful moment of quickly skimming pseudo-personal updates or megaphoning some announcement to a million people.

And to be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with performing, or with sharing to everyone in a megaphone way. I don’t think social media must be social at all times. Just because you write or take a photograph doesn’t mean you want to have a conversation about it, and it doesn’t mean your audience has the right to comment openly, publicly, or expect a response. Because what’s the audience doing in that moment? Centering themselves.

The other day I was talking with a new friend of mine, the brilliant author of Totally Recommend, one of my favorite newsletters. As we were chatting, she asked me what I thought about writers turning comments off. I replied that not everything has to be a conversation or a connection! Not everything requires emotional labor or extra work or an explanation. That we expect things should is part of the problem, because it’s both requiring an endless performance that centers the creator but also centers the commenter by assuming everyone has a fucking right to comment. You can see this tension on social media all the time – someone shares something, another person comments negatively, other people jump in to defend, the commenter is like, well you share publicly, I can have an opinion publicly. And on and on.

One of the things I have tried to remind myself over the years is that, when you create something, like an essay or a photograph, and then send it out into the world, it is in some way no longer yours. You don’t have control over it anymore and you can’t control how other people will take it, what they will see in it, how they will respond to it. The funny thing is that it’s the same with our actual selves, but it’s like we’ve forgotten that. Or maybe it’s that social media was never truly designed to accommodate things like social cues, norms, actual human connection and behavior, and instead to reinforce the things that make us come back to it over and over. My friend at Totally Recommend wrote a piece called The Death of the Cool Girl, about how we look to fashion and clothing to literally transform us into someone better, more attractive, cooler, but it never really does so we keep hunting and buying. It’s the same with social media, right? Especially for those of us who already tend to relentless self-criticism. We’re like little lab rats, hitting the lever for the pellets that become less and less nutritious every day.

This example might seem weird, but sometimes I think about my experience living in Sweden. To be honest I think about it a lot, and there’s so much I could say about Sweden, but let me just focus on this for now: Being out of the environment that raised me and installed all my buttons and cultivated all my anxieties allowed me to take a step back and observe those. Living in a place where you don’t speak the language and, even more importantly, your self is really not at all reflected back at you, gives you a little breathing room. You start to examine all this weird shit and try to find ways to undo it, if you can. Like teaching myself to take entire days off. Or asking myself, what would it look like if I lived a life that didn’t reach for all the markers of the life I think I should live?

Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of markers in Stockholm that made me feel bad and less than (Sweden also destroyed my confidence in a very different way, which feels like a part two of this newsletter? maybe next time). And if you think you can replicate the cool, easy, magical-seeming vibes every Swede seems to possess, trust me, you can’t, very few non-Swedes can (and honestly a lot of Swedes struggle to do it, that’s one of their anxieties). But one thing Swedes are good at is living at what appears to be a perfectly nice life without having to also be a superstar overachiever prize winning whatever it is you do with your life. It made me wonder if, over time, I could learn to be gentler on myself, learn to be less superhuman in my self-expectations or idealized future states, maybe even be ok with a perfectly normal, quiet (read: mediocre, according to impossible standards) life. Spoiler alert, I have not managed this (I mean, I also live in New York City now so), but I think about it constantly.

What if the same could be true with social media? What if we stopped centering ourselves and didn’t expect to constantly be reflected back, responded to, acknowledged. I don’t know if we’d be nicer to ourselves, but maybe it would give us the chance to try.

Until next time!

Lx

*****

As a postscript, two brief points of housekeeping:

1. Immediately after telling you I was still alive and back to writing, I got sick with Covid. I am, as before, still alive, but Covid really knocked me out for a bit. Gotta say, getting RSV and then Covid within a month and a half of moving is not fun. So let’s hope that’s it for the year and I can get back to some sort of routine, including writing. If you’re still subscribing, thanks for sticking around.

2. I remembered the photo project I was talking about in the last newsletter: Days With My Father, by Phillip Toledano. Does anyone else remember this gorgeous photos series and book? The book is almost exactly 14 years old now (released on my birthday, in fact) and the project older. It feels both like a specific moment from another internet and like a timeless piece of work. Highly recommend looking through.