How 15 years of online relationships are forcing us to rediscover what really matters.

Social media has been more or less the same for the last 15 years. A shift from a few people being anonymous animals on the World Wide Web to an online world where everyone from international celebrities to grandmothers has a presence and represents themselves.

We can interact one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. We can share text, images, and videos; communicate in real-time worldwide. And we can get perfect skin and clean kitchen tables from crumbs with the click of a button.

But what now?

An increasing amount of research points to social media as – not only correlating with but – causing the loneliness and mental health epidemic we see globally. And isn’t it an interesting paradox that we are more connected than ever before but also the most lonely we’ve ever been?

I used to love the Internet. But I also learned that the Internet didn’t love me back.

Three aspects of anti-social social media

Early social networks – before algorithms – had mechanics that rewarded those with large volumes of contacts. So, to gain social status online, we were incentivised to focus on quantity over quality of relationships. We still use the number of connections, our “followers”, to measure how socially relevant a person is online.

Unfortunately, the feeling of love and belonging doesn’t arise from the number of connections in a database but how the number of people who will lovingly comfort us if we’re having a terrible day. If that number is 0, it doesn’t matter how many likes we get on our Instagram photos.

Internet vs Humanity: 1-0

Moreover, when social networks became social media – and content became central to our relationships – we started to share well-selected cut-outs of life in exchange for likes. On the constant hunt for social status, we curate our successes and hide the rest.

While this is similar to how we behave offline, our digital personas are curated more heavily without the possibility of glimpsing backstage. Showing off picture-perfect lives others could aspire to was also incentivised by algorithms optimised for engagement.

Human connection is not built on sharing perfect cut-outs of our complex lives. Relationships are built when we dare to share our struggles and fears and realise we are not judged for our imperfections. The more we socialise online, the less real it gets.

Internet vs Humanity: 2-0

Finally, consuming a person’s life through well-selected moments on social media triggers our storytelling brains. Our brains have a remarkable capacity to fill in the missing pieces when we lack information. We prefer a complete but made-up representation of someone over accurate but disconnected pieces, so we fill the gaps with a story that makes sense.

This makes knowing someone through social media feel like knowing them IRL. But it’s not. It is highly unlikely that our made-up story about our digital friends is even remarkably close to the truth. And we will be less accurate on the things that matter, the imperfections — which create the depth.

As long as we don’t spend time together in the real world, it is unlikely that we will notice. But if we do, we’ll experience a disconnect between our made-up version of people and who they truly are. And I don’t know about you, but I often feel very disappointed when I realise people are not who I thought they were.

Internet vs Humanity: 3-0.

How our online selves took over

Facebook launched the year I started high school, and I remember signing up the year I graduated. Consequently, I do not know how to present myself to the world without an online representation of my psychical being. My idea of self integrates these two aspects seamlessly.

But then, last summer, I reconnected with someone after 10+ years of following each other on social media. He said, “You’re a lot of fun, I had no idea”.

Ten years is a long time for people not to get to know you.

It made me reflect on how accurately we can translate our physical selves online and what goes missing. Most people experience the online version of me to a much larger degree than my offline self. And it made me feel a bit concerned.

You have no way to judge if I’m kind, fun, trustworthy or anything else that might tell you if I’m someone you’d want in your life. Someone to care about. It is like the Internet removes the qualities of people that truly matter and leaves us with – what?

The internet reduces my complex person into something resembling a baseball card—a standardised set of skills and traits from 1 to 5.

The dating app Hinge writes, “Members are required to have six photos or videos and three prompt answers. This helps to create a more three-dimensional picture of who you are so that other members can get to know the real you.”

The “real” three-dimensional picture of who I am, in six pictures and three questions. Sure.

And then we wonder why we are not feeling whole.

The exclusive experience of living IRL

The baseball card version of me performed reasonably well in life.

I still participate in some aimless scrolling on social media and offer generic content from my everyday life occasionally. But I don’t expect it to tell you anything about me. And I stopped online dating.

Instead, I spend time with people in the real world. Carefully inviting well-selected people to get to know parts of me that wouldn’t fit on a baseball card.

Slowly realising how cherished moments with the imperfect people you care about are the most treasured experiences in life. No social media content in the world will ever beat an honest dinner conversation with fascinating people being authentic and uncensored versions of themselves.

We’ve been doing it all wrong.

I just thought you should know.