Instagram and a walk

Does social media satisfy that itch for social interaction? Really?

In the summer, I don’t have to leave my house for days at a time if I don’t want to and sometimes I don’t. You’d think after the pandemic, I’d make sure to get out of my house and see people everyday, but nope. I think this is one of the more insidious effects of the pandemic on our lives. Preexisting habits got broken and once they’re gone, they’re hard to re-establish.

My husband and I used to spend a good portion of the summer in one of our local coffee shops. We had our regular table where we set up our computers. We definitely got work done, but we also saw people. We had those casual five minute conversations with whoever stopped in. As it is for many people, it was sometimes the only time we talked to anyone else but each other the whole day.

Then the pandemic hit and the coffee shop shut down to in-person. We got out of the habit of going there. We built the party pavilion, a lovely outdoor space in our backyard. The coffee shop reopened and we went some, even when a lot of people probably thought we shouldn’t be. It felt good to be back there, but also, unsettling in a whole new way. After all, the pandemic reinforced the idea that being around people was bad. The media and the experts drove that message into us hard and it’s not easy to just throw it off like so much extra baggage now.

At the coffee shop.

That habit broke and it still hasn’t re-formed. I spend more time outside in my lounge chair writing than I ever did before. And after a few days of seeing no one but my husband, I start to feel low-grade antsy, a vague sense that something is missing. What is it? Right! Other people!

Don’t get me wrong, I love my husband very much. I read recently, “Marry someone you want to talk to for the rest of your life,” and I did. We have many conversations throughout the day about a thousand things no one else would probably find interesting. But no single relationship can meet all our needs (another silly lie we tell ourselves, especially about marriage).

I am a fairly self-aware person (this is hard-won self-knowledge…I was totally clueless up until my thirties), so I understand that the antsy feeling is about needing to see people. I think lots of people feel this need, even if they aren’t aware that’s what they’re feeling. Even if they tell themselves, “No, I hate people. I’m an introvert. I don’t need to be around people.” I think this need, to feel a part of a community, is essential to who we are, but has also been twisted to horrible uses.¹

And anyway, if you are aware that maybe you need to be with people in our modern lives, how do you fill that need? There’s so much effort involved. You have to text someone and arrange a time to get together. Prepare yourself to potentially be rejected. Ask them for coffee or drinks or dinner. Sync your schedules in a world where everyone is so much busier than they should be. Put on clothes and show up. Clean your house if they’re coming over. Make the drinks or the dinner. I think this is a large part of what we mean when we say we don’t like being around people. This is why so many of us claim introversion—because we’ve made seeing people into work and who needs more of that?

We don’t make it easy to see people in our world. But looking at Instagram or Facebook? That’s easy. I don’t even have to get out of my chair, let alone put on pants or make snacks. Looking at social media is something we do when we’re bored, but also, I’d argue, when we want to know what’s going on. To feel a part of something. We look at Instagram or TikTok to feel some brief flare of connection.

And sometimes, we do get a sense of connection from social media. It’s not impossible. I definitely have friends who I’ve met online. But also, I’ve been on a social media break for the month of July and I can’t say it’s made me feel any more isolated or lonely. There’s information that flows through social media that every now and then I miss having—like knowing what the lunch special is at the Taproom.

I’m lucky enough to live in a town where if I really need that social itch scratched, it’s not that hard to satisfy. I can go to the Taproom and talk to people without having to arrange anything, regardless of what the special is that day. I can still go to the coffee shop. On my Monday walk to the library, I had four conversations with people I ran into along the way.

They were casual conversations, yes, but we dismiss the importance of those casual conversations. Sociologist Georg Simmel called it sociability—interaction that exists solely for the purpose of interaction. Socializing as play.

But it’s more than that. Those casual conversations remind me that I am part of a community. They are, in fact, the way I experience that ephemeral thing called community. Truly, it’s the small things that matter. Those conversations add up.

I don’t know where I’m going with this and I’m feeling particularly rambling and long-winded this morning. Here’s what I can tell you. When I came home from that walk, I had a spring in my step. It was a beautiful day, but those conversations made it even more beautiful. The summer sun was gentler. The breeze was just the right amount of cool. I could notice and enjoy the way my skirt swished against my bare legs. I felt good and it was the physical activity, yes, but also the people. I never feel that way after spending ten minutes looking at Instagram (no, not even with the cat videos).

I feel lucky to have this. I don’t take it for granted. I wish more people had it, too.

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Thanks for all the comments and responses to Monday’s post, about how hard it is to be a human. People had a lot to say!

I mentioned (in the footnote, though…does anyone read the footnotes?) that one part of modern life (the internet) might make it especially hard to stay in the present moment. Other folks in the comments mentioned the loneliness and isolation of modern life as a big ingredient in our unhappiness and I think that’s absolutely right. I believe so much of what’s broken about our world today can be traced back to the decline of community in so many forms. We’ve forgotten how to do community and, systematically, we’ve made the doing of community difficult.

I was also interested in the idea that maybe these tools—like meditation—just aren’t designed to work in the lives we live now. They come from people living a monastic life and we do not. I know meditation helps me, but it’s not for everyone. And obviously, it would be lovely to change the larger structure of society—destroy the internet and (sorry, not sorry) the suburbs.

But in the meantime, meditation is all I’ve got—an individual solution to a structural problem. That and the wisdom to know it’s okay if I never achieve Thich Nhat Hanh levels of inner peace and enlightenment.

1. I can’t help but believe this explains the weird rise of conspiracy theories. QAnon gives people a twisted sense of community. Twisted because of how grounded it is in an us vs. them mentality, but that ‘us’ must still give some sense of belonging. People will believe a lot of crazy things in order to feel part of a community. See all of human history.