Lifestyle Honesty

Look, we don’t have to keep playing this game.

I know, I know, it’s the same as any other elephant in the room.

But I know you’re on your device at least ~10 hours everyday. We don’t have to pretend we’re actually seeing people or engaging with the world. Everything you want is an Amazon click away.

We don’t have to carefully waltz around how everyone lives a surrogate reality, of figments and other instant messaging entities. Maybe it’s mean to suggest it, to suggest viewing yourself in a third person — I mean, jeez, I can see the entire life of someone, ten years, laughing and crying at their monitor, dark room. Bed unmade. Clothes everywhere, trash too. Let’s keep dreaming in our tech neurosis.

I’ll keep pretending that I “go away” from this place, or another place, pretending that websites or different computer contexts are “different parts of the day” the same as a commute, and that I’m Working On Important Things and wagging my status around with my Big Dollars which I’ll use to purchase macadamia nuts, on occasion, though never to excess: the salt sears in excess. Because you and I both know that true status is how little you have to touch spreadsheets. How often you go skiing.

No, you haven’t “heard” that, you read about that. You read through all the forums about it. We can replay the conversation and pretend there’s something to “overhear” but there’s nothing to listen to. Are you sure you’re even reading what real people wrote? You should see the bot fleets. Parasociality isn’t something we can conveniently forget.

We can play a vacation to some place and walk around the ruins, if you’d like, but we don’t have to pretend it actually means much. All the power is concentrated to these devices; all of the magic green slips too. It’s natural to take an interest in it: it’s the very vehicle by which psyche is dismantled and rebuilt. Revolutions in hours, epiphanies that lead to another purchase.

The only way, nowadays, one “simulates” the old concept of “lifestyle” is either through traveling (big if), possibly city living (but why would you subjucate yourself to that…), and that’s about it. You can be a real hustler and do conferences and other social capital things, upkeep your connections through schooling, and yet half the time that’s another Discord server if you can still find meaning in it. These are all but downstream from the money making machines you tend to through your keystrokes.

People saying this, people saying that… People seem angry lately, disillusioned, they seem sad, happy a little: but just reading the generated text and accompanying images is a bit of a stretch to make these claims. My friend this, my friend that… There’s not actually a “we” here, necessarily. These aren’t people, but either bots or personas, a perpetual Seinfeld episode, strangers in each segment.

I’m tired of pretending, maybe you are too, that there’s a “life” to tend to.

A “life” of what?

What life? What roads? What city? What shared future? Who’s we?

You want to move around for a fresh take, get that currency arbitrage delight: okay, did it make a difference? Stranger still in another strange land: what does this add up to?

I’ll break your fucking to-go box in half, that’s what I’ll do.

I know you’re on your computer.