It's Hard, Isn't It? Being a Person?

This week’s newsletter title comes from the film Sometimes I Think About Dying which I finally saw earlier this year and it really resonated with me.

I was initially inspired to write this newsletter because a microinfluencer I’ve come to enjoy watching throughout the past year had a bit of a "crash out” about how she is perceived on the internet. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot the past few years, how I want to show up on the internet and how to be seen as “authentic”.

And then, she posted a link to a Substack she read recently that kind of addressed something similar to what I was going to write about. Whoops. Seems like it’s a common thought!

Overall, I agreed with Hill’s assessment that everyone is boring because we’re all trying to gain attention from the same people. And I think this is ultimately why I personally keep retreating from places I used to love. It goes both ways for me.

For instance, during the pandemic, I really got into Booktube and was following so many. But then, they began to bore me because almost all of them were saying the same things as everyone else about popular books. Or they went against the grain and said they hated the popular books everyone was talking about. I began to not trust any of their opinions because they swung pretty squarely into one of those camps, and I no longer believed they were genuine.

But that’s a me problem. Except Hill has noticed it too, and he’s called out nerd spaces where yes, they used to be the underdog, but it’s hard to continue that victim mentality when they’re making billions of dollars. (Oh, but they still try! It’s why I’m avoiding most of my fandoms too!)

Growing up, I had a lot of self esteem issues and resorted to people pleasing in order to make and keep friends. I would keep my “weird” interests to myself and pretend to like the things the other girls liked. And to go even further, I once had a routine where every day of the week, I would try to model myself as a character from a TV show I watched. Because I thought they were cool and they had friends, so they must have been doing something right. But all of this proved unsuccessful for the most part and by age 13/8th grade, I vowed to no longer do that.

Then social media entered society. Thankfully, Myspace only came around toward the end of high school for me, but I’d be lying if I said that the advent of Instagram didn’t affect my mental health even though it didn’t come out until I was a year out from college. It was bad enough as a kid hearing about sleepovers and hangouts you were excluded from, now you were SEEING it happen in real time.

And you weren’t only trying to impress your current friends. Oh no, now you also could impress people from all over the place if you were cool or aesthetic enough. Much like its importance for companies, now you, a person, could be a brand, and the goal is constant growth. But you can’t be too niche or else you’ll never get anywhere. But getting too big had its downsides as well. I played this game as much as I could, but ultimately that’s not for me. I like social media to share silly things about my life, not monetize it. And there are people who can do both, but I don’t envy them.

Because like the microinfluencer mentioned above, she started to feel boxed in by her content. And that’s a big struggle from influencers and creators. In order to maintain constant growth, you as a person are not supposed to be grow, or rather, evolve. You want to try a new activity? Audiences might not respond. You no longer like something? Your follower count drops.

And while it seems like I’m trying to convince you that they deserve our empathy, that’s not really my goal here. What I’m trying to say is that it’s so hard to actually be a person when you have all these extra things going on. Sure, we can disconnect, delete our accounts, but then we may lose parts of our community. Everything is a balance. And more and more, we’re seeing people crumble under the pressure of living.