I started writing something else to you this week, something clever and jumpy, and it felt dead.
Here’s what I’m chagrined to say. These days an Internet Therapist named Jillian has captivated me in my Instagram feed. She wears glasses and tells me how to be and not be in a relationship. She tells me I am enough! Her hair is very straight and brown and clean.
Jillian is an avatar of someone too familiar. A self I sometimes step toward. Wisdom-bearer. Clean face. Hip eyewear. She seems, on this repetitive surface, creating a Jillian for all my projections, a very unified whole person.
But there is no room for Real Jillian and Real Elaine to interact with that mythical effect/affect. Elaine is alone in her house with her phone hooked in a looped Jillian persona. It disturbs me that my brain needs to be reminded of this. Jillian is Very Serious About Your Self-Worth: today in aviator rims.
Jillian in tortoise-shell rims says I should not enter into situationships. That I am better than that. However, the larger vampiric situationship Jillian will never own is the one between humans & internet amplifying her persona.
The Jillian situation yields me, user, pausing/scrolling on her, attention-sucking conduit to my innermost relational fears — and then broadcasts more of her to me. Jillian is pithy reels and adamant quotations so mild that I immediately forget what she has said.
And she will never tell me to turn off my phone. This is the primary relationship she is extending, monetized and boosted. She would like me to keep having the same kind of problems in my love life and seek her out forever. (The best art I have ever seen about this feedback phenomena is on the television show Evil, Season 3, Episode 6, “The Demon of Algorithms”: so good.)
As someone who has been involved in this kind of marketing strategy (yes, I am dirty), I can tell you that my profession is strewn with smart people who call out the naked emperor of capitalism and the insane prince of digital marketing constantly — and no one can cut the cord except by disappearing. Not even Seth Godin, wise “outsider” of making marketers feel less dirty, can cut it. He’s strengthening it with the rest of us, working to get eyeballs on his own shit.
So I’ve been looking for ways out (I’m going back to school!) and for ways around (working only for ethical bizzes, people, nonprofits — “get the clients you want,” a Godin strategy). Reading helps me, as it ever does, especially the ideas in these books by Meghan O’Gieblyn, Mari Ruti, Connie Zweig, and Ross Gay.
I have started to turn off the phone in the evenings. Social media is littered with little hurts and comparisons. So many vampires of my own making. So many times I have thought: Why am I sitting here making content out of my life? And then, on the other side of this: I am thankful for what my friends telegraph from their accounts.
There is nothing evil about wanting to share with friends. That’s how all this social media bullshit started, how it always starts, and why we can’t rip ourselves from the marketplace. We find our friends there and then bat the bullshit away until it’s too much and we take our gold somewhere else.
This week’s poem is about our friend Narcissus. This poem reminds me: Don’t get sucked into the hall of mirrors. Any hall of mirrors. Or do, sweet person — and then turn away.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Stranger and Stranger to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.