Are You a Loser, Or Just a Real Person?

This past summer, I had the privilege of working two internships in New York City. On my walks to work, I would snuggle my wired headphones next to my eardrums, blast Taylor Swift or LCD Soundsystem, and daydream, usually conjuring up wild experiences in Ibiza with my future friends, or an intense love affair with an entirely fictional stranger. When I would get to the office, I would scroll on Instagram for fifteen minutes before starting my work. The single day I forgot my precious headphones on my bedside table, I was intensely bored on my commute. Gradually, I began to take notice of the world around me. The first thought that I remember having was that the man in front of me had a very pale neck, and he had sunburned ears, glowing like a metalsmith’s tools. Then I thought to myself, “what a weird thing to notice,” something like a description written in a Victorian book. A really ridiculous and self-aggrandizing thought, admittedly, but it ultimately forced me to consider why I was so surprised by these stark, but relatively normal, features on a stranger, especially when this felt like something that anyone paying attention would have taken note of. After all, a writer’s job is observation and description, so why was I so surprised by my mundane examination of this passerby? I felt stupid. But I realized that I might not be used to real-life human beings.

Like many of my fellow Gen Z-ers, much of my formative years were spent online. As a child, I spent an unregulated and exorbitant amount of time on the Internet. I played Club Penguin from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep; I unfortunately watched PewDiePie and the notorious Onision before I was even a preteen; and when I turned nine, I downloaded Instagram for the first time, beginning a long, arduous, and addictive habit of self-comparison to others who made content on the Internet. While everyone will tell you that the pictures and videos on someone’s social media profiles are the “highlight reels” of others’ lives –and it’s true– there is inevitably the thought that if your highlight reel doesn’t measure up to theirs, your life is still objectively worse. Not to mention, even the influencers that post the “expectation versus reality” content –in an attempt to break stigmas and make the internet a more honest place– are showing us their flaws through the modulating influence of a screen. The screen itself acts as a barrier to true acknowledgement of any insecurities or “abnormalities” we might be shown, blunting their impact and desensitizing us. In a real-life scenario, we aren’t prepared to confront these perceived “blemishes,” especially on our own bodies, even if we’ve seen them three thousand times on the Internet. That’s why I was so surprised to see this pale-necked, sunburnt pedestrian: he looked like a regular human being, one unpolished for social media, sweating in the midst of his commute. His noticeable features weren’t branded “insecurities” online, yet he didn’t look perfect either: he was a human being in an uncomfortable, active moment. 

This simple event in my life encouraged me to examine how many of my expectations for life –even my real life– have been fixed by an internet-entrenched childhood and adolescence. Like many other people my age, I struggle with self-comparison on social media platforms. The urge to assess our own social value and self-worth relative to others in our environment isn’t new. It is probably a leftover evolutionary urge, officially proposed by Leon Festinger in 1954 as “social comparison theory.” Extending from this theory is the idea that people compare themselves “upwards” (against people that are perceived to be more attractive, more successful, more intelligent, or “better” than them) or “downwards” (against people that seem to be doing worse than them). There is conflicting research as to whether or not comparing downwards actually improves your self-esteem and generates gratitude for your quality of life. Much of the time, this is a tactic that fuels bullying and cruelty, especially online, making the individual engaging in that kind of demeaning rhetoric ultimately feel worse about themselves. No one enjoys feeling like an asshole. And as you could have guessed, more people tend to compare themselves “upwards” regardless, constantly weighing their own lives, appearances, and personalities against those of people whom they perceive to be doing better than themselves. Therefore, on social media, more likely than not, I am looking at the girl that I view as “perfect” rather than the content produced by still-pretty girls displaying their belly rolls or arm hair. While this can be a motivator for many, it also damages their self-worth, as they are constantly interacting with reminders that they are inadequate. There’s further damning evidence that emotionally unstable or neurotic people –instinctively more uncertain of themselves, their surroundings, and their features– tend to compare themselves more with figures and lifestyles seen on social media. Adolescents and young adults who are depressed or struggle with self-esteem are more inclined to compare themselves to verify whether or not they are adhering to the expectations of the social order, considering themselves inherently unequipped to conduct themselves “normally,” much less reach the heights of the social hierarchy. When this comparison is upward –as it most often is– it reinforces the cycle of self-destruction and insecurity. 

With social media’s ubiquity and societal relevance, it is nearly impossible to avoid interacting in some way with the unrealistic standards set by the rich, beautiful, and powerful on the internet. Now, we have the opportunity to compare ourselves with as many people as we can scroll by, which is practically endless. Our tendency to self-compare has resulted in a kind of self-censorship, generated by a desire to approximate our own behavior to that of those we admire online. Serena Smith noted in her 2022 article for Dazed, “In defence of being cringe,” that we have begun to downplay our genuine interests and authentic personality traits, labeling them “ironic,” when in actuality, we are simply indulging in our true, but unfairly labeled “guilty,” pleasures. We’re beating the social judgment we’re afraid of to the punch and failing to embrace ourselves in the process. Especially following the COVID-19 pandemic, Smith argues, young people spent more time online, engaging with the thoughts and discourse of complete strangers. Entrenched in the smoke-screen world of social media, many of us have since become “chronically-online,” more fluent in the language of AI-generated memes, Coldplay affair scandals, and Love Island interpersonal drama than we are with the mechanics of the real world. COVID’s resultant decrease in face-to-face interaction, and the limitless opportunities for anything and everything, from the selfie to Benson Boone to high waisted paints, to be labeled “cringe,” has led to people with no social media being considered desirable. In a world that has normalized exposing practically everything, even the most intimate parts of ourselves, online, we have also given the internet the opportunity to pass judgement on those vulnerabilities. Those who still post unposed pictures with their families and friends aren’t considered chic, but those with extremely curated aesthetics can now be labeled as “trying too hard,” which is also apparently “cringe.” We’re required now to maintain the perfect balance of messy, fun-loving, and self-advertising to be seen as social and beautiful– and we can only pull it off if both extremely invested and able to facilitate a lifestyle conducive to those kinds of images. Cue the recent video of Addison Rae, the rising TikTok-famous starlet, who, when accused of “trying too hard” asked the critics if they “tried at all.” It seems that today, the only way to escape the accusation of “cringe” is to have no social-media. 

The fact of the matter is, when we are constantly comparing ourselves to others, contemplating the aesthetics of our lives, and self-censoring our own behavior, stuck in a cyclical debate of whether or not we are “cringe” or just “ironic,” we are essentially commodifying and flattening ourselves. We are turning ourselves into an aestheticized, image-based project rather than real human beings. Social media itself is a kind of self-surveillance. With just how much we interact with apps like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, our profiles have become the lens through which we see the world; our profiles are no longer where we display our unique visual perspectives. Considering how intensely the COVID mandates regulated non-digitally-mediated interaction, we can begin to unearth a pattern that correlates our increased self-comparison (and resulting self-commodification) to a growing sense of depersonalization. According to an online study published in Nature, one of the foremost scientific journals, the escalating volume of digital interactions –including social media, gaming, and e-meetings– during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge of depersonalization experiences, especially among youth. Depersonalization is essentially when a person feels out-of-body and also out-of-this-world, untethered to both themselves and the world around them. This sense of disconnection with the self and your immediate environment can drive you to further self-isolate, losing motivation to contact your friends and family, even digitally. Respondents who scored to reveal more depersonalization experiences in the digitally-dependent world of COVID were also shown to experience negative emotions more intensely than positive emotions. 

Thus, during COVID and in the post-COVID era, we’ve been increasingly disconnected from our own bodies and our sense of self, while simultaneously consuming vast volumes of others’ content, comparing our lives, appearances, “cringe” interests, and personalities to those of other people. I was surprised to really scrutinize and survey a real human being on my way to work because I have spent so much of my time alternating between my thoughts and my phone the past few years, masterfully tiptoeing around material realities of my own life, personality, appearance, and the here-and-now. I think in some ways, I have –as maybe we all have– forgotten what it is like to be connected to my body, to others, my interests, and to the world around me, in a physical manner. To put it simply, I spend most of my time thinking about what my life is not like, and what it could be like, rather than focusing on experiencing exactly what it is. Naturally, when you are disconnected from your own life, more likely to experience negative emotions powerfully than positive ones, and stuck in a loop of self-comparison –believing your life does not match the aestheticized, curated, and fantastical images of the people you see on Instagram– it is quite easy to find yourself circling the drain of spiraling depression. That depression probably encourages you to isolate further, spending more time on your phone: you can see how the cycle repeats. Chances are, you are actually not a loser, though you might feel that you are. You probably actually have friends, family members who love you, and others who are authentically interested in your “cringe” or “basic” interests. The thing in your life that might be failing you is actually your inability to physically be present with those people, to silence your mind, to stop comparing, and to release your grip on social media– whether you’re clutching your phone in your hand as you read this, or even more treacherously, structuring your thoughts, expectations for yourself, and your life based on the small glimpses you see of others’ lives. I’m not here to say that life-satisfaction is as easy as putting down your phone. For starters, if you look outside right now, the world is indeed hell. If the things that are haunting you are news reports rather than beautiful girls on the latest Revolve trip, unfortunately I don’t think this article will help you (and if you have any advice, email me!) Feeling proud of your life may actually be a lifelong struggle for some, especially for all of us that struggle with perfectionism. But I would advise you to, if and when you can, stop yourself in the middle of your comparison spiral and ask yourself, “Am I really a loser? Or am I just a real person, not a digital phantom, an aestheticized brand, a self-commodified labubu human being? Do I have friends that love me, even if they aren’t supermodels? Do I feel safe in my home, even if it’s not a Malibu mansion? Do I have fun watching Hamilton on Disney+ for the fifth time this year, even if it’s cringe? And why can’t that be good enough?” Ask yourself how it feels –separated from your own self-imposed expectations– rather than how it looks: you might be surprised by your answer.