Our False Sense of Connection

 

There's no entry for this delusion in the APA, but I think I suffer from Notable Letters Syndrome. Symptoms include wanting to write letters on a tablet of quality paper, with a nice fountain pen, at an antique desk while the camera pans in and a voiceover of what I'm writing, in cursive script, sounds over the classical piano background music. Additional symptoms include hungering desperately for a thick envelope of written note paper, hand-addressed to the NLS patient, and imagining that these letters will be hoarded in a university library collection, like C.S. Lewis' or Virginia Wolfe's.

No cure has yet been found for this condition, but it can be managed with the regular exchange of letters*, if said letters are esoteric, and philosophical in content. Discussions on the state of existence and purpose in life prove to be a soothing balm for the parched mind of a person suffering from NLS. 

I'm self-diagnosing myself with this syndrome after years of anxiety with each ping and buzz from my smartphone. There's no denying the convenience of shooting across a quick text, or a picture of a cute dog/cat, and, of course the sharing of memes that sum up a shared experience, but recently I feel like they're the sugar cubes of communication and connecting with loved ones vs. the nourishing substance of the notes my friends and I wrote back and forth in high school, palming them off to each other in the hallways, and the letters we sent to each other in college. 

This was especially brought to mind when an old family friend reached out to me, seemingly out of the blue, via Facebook Messenger, asking how I was doing. The truthful answer was: not great. It was the weekend and I had spent all of Saturday in my pajamas, having slept until noon and not in a way that was restorative or restful. But FB Messenger, to me at least, doesn't seem the type of place to pour one's troubles out, so I punted and responded "doing alright, how are you?" And then we were engaged in the short, impersonal uninformative exchange that constant ability to get in touch with someone is marked by: what have you been up to? How's life? What's new? How's your family? These all seemed like quick little knicks, or paper cuts; they don't require much effort or thought with answers like: not much, life is good, family's alright. But it's so fucking unsatisfying. I think I once described networking to my therapist as though I'm looking to join a vein with someone, and since that's not the purpose of the event, no one else has their vein freshly cut to join to mine and thus I'm just dripping dripping blood all over the carpet (figuratively speaking, of course). Similarly with this chat I would much rather sit down and write a letter to the person, open up my vein and bleed ink on the paper, send it with a stamp across the continent and have it nourish them enough to open up their vein and pour it into my own soul. I even said as much in the chat: "I don't very much like chatting in messenger style chats, is it alright if I send you a letter?"

Also, in this particular case, the question about my family struck me as unusual: this person is in more regular contact with my family than they are with me, why are they asking about them?

Because it turns out they're a fucking scam artist who hacked my friend's account. This was setting me up to email Joydiane17@gmail.com regarding, and I quote, "the United Nations yearly promotion that was sponsored by the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, to help commission and set up organizations to help people financially all over the world Facebook pick random users, UPS delivered my own winning money and I saw your name on the winning list when the claim agent came to deliver mine that's why I ask if you received your package"

Yes, that is all one sentence.

Beyond the obvious shitty-ness of masquerading as someone's friend just to convince them to send their personal information to an email address obviously not associated with the UN or Facebook, I feel pretty grieved to the lack of connection, or maybe the false sense of connection with this person (I haven't yet made up my mind which one it is). 

Ever since Facebook opened its membership beyond email addresses that end in .edu people have questioned or defended the benefits of social media, insisted it's doing untold damage to kids, teens, and young adults, or pointed out that it also serves to connect them with people and cultures around the globe. And I guess the only inexpert thing I can add to this conversation is:

Yes.

An Instagram account I follow, emilyinyourphone, talks about social media as a digital town square. This is the reference I vibe with the most, in that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter X, TikTok, and Reddit are tools to share resources, like a recipe, or a news article (or, ahem, a blog post), or publicize events like city hall meetings, or to broaden perspectives. I also really appreciate Reddit's Ask Me Anything (AMA) interviews as an efficient way for someone to do a wide-reaching conversation with people interested in their areas of expertise. I think about how the notion of what's trendy, what's in fashion, or what's popular has become so open these days as people are able to find their preferred look, be it coastal grandma, cottage core, athleisure, Danish Girl (can you tell I'm just tossing out terms like a 39 year old woman who's completely checked out?) and wear it because there's a hashtag of it with thousands of pictures of people looking good and happy in that style, plus instant connection to the Amazon vendors that will sell the cottage core dress of one's dreams. I imagine the days of being a pariah because you wore red tag Levi jeans to school and not orange tag Levi's are gone as someone in the shallow waters of tiktok has made red tag Levi's cool (and again, I'm 39, and have no idea what's cool anymore).

That being said, I think we can no longer ignore the devastating effects social media has had on the mental health of people everywhere. This eloquent blog post from last November puts it the the conundrum of the illusion of community as created by social media very neatly. What especially stands out to me is the way the writer puts the micro-encouragements: 

"Being able to follow and “interact” with these people offers a false sense of connection and value that is hard to replicate in the “real” world."

These are my aforementioned sugar cubes. Very tasty, and, in moderation, rewarding little treats. But one shouldn't live on sugar cubes alone, at some point we should sit down to the desk/table, and spend the time to nourish others and to be nourished.

*emails are an adequate substitute for some variations of NLS