Very insightful and not something I’d have thought of. A large part of me feels as though many of the issues of today can be blamed on the fact that nobody actually talks to eachother anymore. Socializing has been replaced with social media, where you see curated snapshots of your “friend’s” lives which only show the good, and get invested in the curated snapshots of the lives of celebrities. You look at your friends and random celebrities doing things instead of doing them yourself or with your friends. And in turn, you post your own curated snapshots to make yourself look good and feel like you’re participating, thus continuing the cycle.

This state of knowing only about the cool and fun things other people are doing while simultaneously never actually speaking to them causes you to feel left out because your life isn’t anywhere near as fun as their lives look, and the fact that people tend to only post good looking pictures of themselves online makes you feel bad about your own appearance, because you don’t look anywhere near as good as they make themselves look.

With how pervasive the atomization caused by the internet is, I should’ve known that even its greatest strength, its ability to deliver information, might have harmful side effects. Indeed, I wonder how many conversations I’ve not had the opportunity to partake in because I found what I wanted out of them on Google. Or books I haven’t read because I got what I wanted out of them on Google. Convenient, for sure, but perhaps it takes a little bit of the joy out of finding new information, whether that joy comes from the other stuff you learn along the way or the human interaction which occurs in the process.