For most people, “sharing themselves” online means carefully curating an identity that exaggerates some qualities while repressing others that they consider to be undesirable.
Online, no one has acne or dark circles or a temper; no one washes dishes, does laundry or scrubs toilets.
Mostly, we brunch. And we take exotic, rarified vacations. We pet sea turtles. We throw ourselves from airplanes.
They are beautiful, unblemished lives. But sometimes I think that when we deny what is worst about ourselves, we also deny what is best. We repress our ignorance, and thus we deny our capacity to learn. We repress our faults, and thus we deny our capacity to change. We forget that it is our flawed human self, and not our avatar, who creates things and reconsiders and forgives and shows mercy.
But ultimately the real problem, as the writer Zadie Smith has pointed out, is that sharing a self is not the same thing as having a self.
Your avatar isn’t real. It’s a projection. It’s not terribly far from a lie. And like all of the lies that we tell, the real danger isn’t that others will believe it but that we will come to believe it ourselves. That we will come to identify with our virtual self (who looks so beguiling in photographs, whose life is bright and free and literally filtered).
In this way we become alien to ourselves. Who is this person who spends so much time studying? Washing dishes? Taking care of grandma? This is not how I see myself.
Over identifying with your idealized self is a deeply alienating experience. It is a form of self-rejection. Because what you are saying to yourself is: I’m not good enough the way I am.
So today, I would like to pause for a moment to appreciate the parts of you that you don’t put online. I would like to mount a defense of them. Of your boring, internal, book-reading, dishwashing, thought-having life. Of the parts of you that can’t be captured by any technological medium. It’s a concept that I’m going to call “the un-instagramable
Everything of any significance that you will do in your life will be done by your un-instagramable self.
-Tara Westover 2019 Northeastern
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