On the internet, everything is forever. At least that’s what we were told as we sat in the library for grade school web safety seminars. Forever sounded nice to me, like something magical, the end of a fairy tale: They lived happily ever after, forever and ever—but this was a bad forever, the librarian said. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and it’s coming back to get you.
My parents were Gen X tech-savvy, and street-smart enough to install parental controls, ban me from creating a Myspace or Facebook account, and disable the free chat feature on my Club Penguin. There would be no talking to strangers if they could help it. They tried to instill in me a distrust of corporations and a disdain for people who made posts about their mundane lives. So I just clicked around and consumed and consumed. This was long before the algorithms were strong enough to lead you down a set ideological path, or toward the mind-numbing avant-garde popular content of today (like the Elsagate videos, dark content seemingly geared toward children, and the terrifying Skibidi Toilet web series). Being a kid alone online was exhilarating, but the world inside the computer felt fraught, small, and in need of constant attention. Virtual pets starving from my lack of regular logging-on haunted my dreams. My igloo was bare and my penguin naked, so embarrassing.
I’d love to trace the digital footprints that led from that naked penguin to becoming someone with a web of 10 Instagram pages—among them main Insta, Finsta, backup, visual memes, main memes, edgy memes, religious memes, social justice, and my stalker alt account—that I posted on like breathing and devoted Adderalled hours to name-searching myself and making a document with every nice, mean, and in-between thing anybody had ever said about me. I moved to New York in 2020, COVID summer. At a rooftop party, I realized that everyone from the internet was there. I had stepped into the Explore page. Digital acceleration of time—memes going stale in days, newborn myths suffering sudden death—was starting to happen in my real life, too. It was fun at first when I’d see other people post my memes, but then it was scary, the dopamine fading. “Are you a robot?” tests became harder and harder for me to pass. I became a hater, screenshotting others’ story posts I considered cringe and filing them away like the NSA. In the past, I’d been proud to be cringe.
It had all been so sweet once. When I got on Instagram in 2010—“It’s for photography”—I posted sparkles on a page of Alice in Wonderland, heavily filtered photos of daisies, and blur-faced self-portraits. Because my early internet memories were all about playing, it just felt like another game. Everything online did then. Dressing and undressing on Omegle was no different than playing digital paper dolls. Strangers were strangers, there on the screen and then gone. On Polyvore, I made collages of outfits for fictional characters and events. Here’s what to wear as a Gryffindor on a winter trip to Hogsmeade; here’s what a shy goth girl should wear on her date with a vampire boy. I had no idea it even had an e-commerce side to it; I thought it was all just for fun, and seminars. that that was the way it would stay. But not everything on the internet is forever. When I recently typed in the Polyvore URL, I was redirected to Ssense. Playtime was over.
I’d always loved playing pretend. Social media is sort of the ultimate game of make-believe: I make you believe I’m having fun. You make me believe you’re having fun. We play characters and eventually become them. Everything was a reflection of a reflection, infinite confusing screenshots of screenshots. The feed felt dirty, and posting was like littering, adding to the digital debris. I felt like I was probably making people feel worse about their lives. And then feeling crazy for even thinking that, like, who am I to think I even have that power? I started overthinking every single post, seeing it not as myself, but as if I was every other person who might see it. It wasn’t a game anymore—or maybe it was, and I’d lost.
I developed mimetic rivalries and assumed that others were doing the same to me. The whole feed felt like a mirror. I had once loved gazing into it, but fear had officially replaced curiosity. These parasocial relationships felt so real. But real is often just a feeling. I had thought New York was the internet come to life: In the same way that you can scroll past a tradcath, a mommy blogger, and a Nietzschean bodybuilder in five minutes on Instagram, you can meet this same agglomeration of archetypes downtown. It was magic. But the reverse was also true—the ugliness of offline had seeped into the internet. Someone told me, “Hate and love release the same amount of dopamine for me.”
It felt like making memes had become asking people to think about me, which I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be loved or hated. I wanted to tell stories, and the two no longer felt the same. I was done being perceived; I logged off and left NYC. I didn’t delete the accounts, but I lost the passwords. I became an occasional scroller, a consumer of content and researcher of old internet ephemera instead of a tapped-in content maker. Online, life went on without me. Posting had been like breathing, but if you think about breathing, like you are doing as you read this, it’s annoying and manual. Maybe that’s what growing up is.
There’s a theory of development that says children stop engaging in pretend play when they enter the concrete operational stage—the stage of accepting the logical, the tangible, the rational; the stage of under-standing that the amount of water is still the same in a new glass—because they become able to accommodate reality and no longer need to assimilate it to their wishes. I guess now, (un)fortunately, I can accommodate reality. Maybe being online tricks you into thinking you’re shaping reality. Or maybe it’s not a trick. But the infinite possibilities for creation and play have to come to an end at some point, like all good things. There were years I called offline “IRL,” but they seem a long time ago.
A version of this story appears in the June/July 2024 issue of ELLE.