A Social Media Update

Things you won’t see on my feed.

I’m back. For a while I was on holiday. For a longer while after that, I was recovering from that holiday, reluctantly acclimatising to the glaring dullness of my life.

Surely you've heard of holiday hangover, but this was different—it’s always different. Because it’s not about the holiday; it’s about the series of mind-numbing habits masquerading as my life. When I take a break, I realise how deeply the humdrum has seeped into my skin.

The jet lag was particularly bad this time. I was inexplicably sad through the day, waking suddenly in the middle of the night, failing to recognise the bedroom I had furnished so lovingly. The normalcy of a well-adjusted individual wasn’t calling out to me. I wonder if prolonged jet lag is my floundering attempt at remaining in a different time zone, dreaming of a different life in that parallel dimension, where the newness of the undiscovered and the nostalgia of the familiar add delightful contours to my day. 

I unpack my suitcase most languidly, attempting in vain to preserve the smell of holiday laundry (I don’t bring back dirty clothes) as it threatens to mingle with the indistinct smell of my own wardrobe. As I pull things out of the suitcase and put each one back in its place, I suffer a special kind of pain. The party is over. It’s time to go home. Only if I knew which place to call home. 

---

Photo by Selwyn van Haaren on Unsplash

So, where have I been? What does my social media feed have to offer? 

Nothing. 

No indications of my latest transatlantic holiday. No shots of the countless exhibits that inhabit the many museums of the Museum District, where you can take as many photos as you like (India is a photo-phobic society—photography is prohibited at most museums, and even at some public parks!). No whiff of the bluebonnets in season at Hermann Park. Neither a splash of the oat milk latte I drank everyday, nor a morsel of the particular tofu banh mi I waited to eat for years, then ate on repeat. No pictures to tell you where I’ve been, whom I’ve been with, what I’ve been wearing, seeing, doing.

You won’t see me walk along the High Line, or saunter down Fifth Avenue on a gloriously brisk afternoon. You won’t see me watch the dogs get off their leash to frolic on the grass in Madison Square Park (one of the most delightful sights of the trip, really). You won't see me stand outside MoMA, and wonder if I will later regret having skipped The Met. 

I saw but didn’t show, until I could see no more. 

And, so, what you also won’t see is portraits of my puffy face struck with Covid, as I lay in bed, losing day after day of precious holiday time.

Every holiday is a countdown that begins with touchdown. I still have five more days, I assure my ailing self. And before I know it, I’m writing about everything in the past tense, weeks since having returned to the uninterrupted monotony of the everyday, where I can barely tell one day apart from another. 

What’s five more days, but an empty, self-regenerative promise?

And then I recovered, as one does, and went to Portland (Oregon, of course). You won’t see me plodding up the little hills that line the city. You won’t see me discomforted by the ethnic homogeneity of the populace. You’ll see no glimpses of my left-leaning, verging-on-vegan, coffee-obsessed, literary self at the place I believed I would belong to, but belongingness is more complex than you’d think. 

You’ll see no pictures of what I bought in the bountiful land of buying, and you’ll never see pictures of the things that I almost bought, but keep closest to my heart in a photo album laced with longing, called “Things I Covet”, using the passage of time to test the vein of that desire. A desire is a desire only as long as it is unfulfilled (or should I have written, “A desire fulfilled is a desire denied”?).

When I was taking picture after picture of a nondescript street in Portland, my cousin, a local, who was kindly showing us around, asked me where I would post them. Post them? I had forgotten that that was a thing. I had forgotten that it is customary to see only to show. 

Thousands of photos of the eventful and the ordinary lay quietly within the confines of my phone and in the free skies of iCloud, accessible only to me.

Pictures aside, I’ll also save you the opinions on Twitter, the quasi-intellectual haven for short-form text-based commentary. It was once novel to post pictures of food, leisure and travel. Now, when everyone’s already seen everything, it’s the events, the milestones and the opinions that set you apart. To be vocal is to be visible. “Create jobs, not food coupons,” I could caption a scene from Portland. Opinions are the new holiday pictures. 

What you will see on my social media, though, is my absence. A strategic, conspicuous absence. In more than five years, I haven’t posted a thing on Instagram.

Except for a variation of this photo: 

The characteristic slant of the mellowing afternoon sun was creating magic on the B&W frames, which was impossible to keep to myself.

---

Why I don’t post life updates on social media

It’s been a while since I’ve had to explain why I choose not to update life events (and non-events) on social media, and why I’m often noticeably absent from the platforms for self-aggrandisement. It’s not that I think my life doesn’t lend itself perfectly to social media’s template of exhibitionism. Even if that weren’t the case, there’s nothing that a filter called omission won’t fix. 

Reason #1

Within the discourse on mental health preservation, digital detox and social media abstinence are perfectly acceptable arguments. With the number of people who report feeling terrible about themselves every time they scroll through their feed, I wonder if the only idea is for it to acquaint you with your deficiencies. That’s where the age-old phenomenon of buying and selling begins. Thankfully, it’s acceptable to refuse to be caught in the rut of selling and/or consuming in the social media marketplace.

Reason #2

I could give you more reasons as to why I don’t display my life on social media. Mental health and meaningless consumption aside, I’m a big fan of privacy. In the name of privacy, I live in some kind of secrecy. But what thrills me the most is to keep people guessing.

You won’t see all that did happen, but you also won’t see all that didn’t happen, and so you’ll never know what actually happened, and you’ll also never know what didn’t really happen. And this is how my social media goes. An update from me will rarely, if ever, erupt on your refreshed home feed. The update will always be that there is no update. 

Reason #3

I have observed that the only time I have been tempted to post a picture of the good things in my life is when I have, in some manner, felt one of these things: unsafe, unhappy or insecure. Not saying that this is how everyone feels, but these feelings have almost always preceded the urge to post a life update, and I manage to check myself in time. 

Reason #4

Another reason to abstain from posting updates on social media is to avoid introducing an audience to my experience. A wedding is different from a marriage (alas, the terms are used interchangeably sometimes) because one has an audience and the other doesn’t. When there’s an audience, there’s playacting. 

When I take a picture to show it to an audience, I am already experiencing that moment on behalf of an audience. That’s not something that I can deal with.

This is also why you’ll never see pictures from my wedding. A friend of mine almost refused to believe that I am married. She had to take my word for it, which was harder to believe than a social media announcement.

Reason #5

And, finally, if I really wanted you to know something, you’d have known it already. Because I would have told you, like I did through this post.

(If it’s not on social media, I’ll let you believe that it never happened.)

---