Sometimes I hear about these people who build completely false identities on the internet.
They spend hundreds of hours crafting a persona and a fully manufactured story. They claim they have eight children. They claim to have a lot of money. They claim that they are absolutely not.
You should not seek approval to pretend to be someone else. We shouldn't drift into the digital deep by about playing like little kids.
What is it? What can you learn from that? What does that mean to us?
A new kind of fantasy
It's a very modern phenomenon, that's certainly true. It didn't exist 50 years ago. It could not exist 50 years ago. There was no way to do that. There was no internet. There is no chance that we will safely withdraw from false digital reality.
And that's what it is at the bottom: a retreat to a more attractive world. A world where you don't have to do anything or become anything before. You can say you are anything, and that's enough.
It's a kind of fantasy escapism. Yes, of course, we've been fantasy and escapism for a long time. That's exactly what the book is. However, this is very different from the book. It's more interactive, more immersive and more engaging.
We live in an age of parallel worlds. There is a digital world and a real world. Retreating into a false digital identity that lives in a false digital world does not suggest that it is a setback from life itself.
How do you claim that you have 11 children when you're not there? When you live with your parents, how do you claim that you are a wealthy mogul? When you are 49, how would you claim that you are 27?
Same old fugitive
I think it will happen slowly. It starts with a desire to escape. To leave your life behind. To become someone else, someone who looks the same as you, without having to do the job to get there.
If you are happy, you will not leave your life. If you are satisfied, you will not leave reality. Think about who is zoned out every day. They are filled with their lives, so do they do it? No, they want to zone out as much as possible without dying.
The same is happening with a digital retreat. “Life is miserable, but the digital world can do anything I want,” that's the logic.
That's how it all starts. Then it accelerates. “Like” begins. Followers begin to increase. The manufacturer sees what works, and soon they are throwing lean meat at their mob. People eat it.
They see that everyone loves who they are. Well, not who they are actually, but who they pretend to be. “I'm not enough, but my pretend self is.” It must be painful, but like! can be overcome for.
Filling the gap
The above example is extreme. Thankfully, most people don't create false parallel lives due to the hit of internet dopamine. But the question of how to bridge the gap between digital and real people in a healthy way is a question that we all have to tackle. How do we maintain ourselves in the digital world?
Honesty. That's how we remain ourselves. We are either honest or at least not fraudulent. We don't have to tell the world everything about who we are. Strangers have no rights to ours. We owes no details to anyone about how we live our lives.
But we should not lie to ourselves or to others. We should not seek approval by pretending to be someone else. We shouldn't drift into the digital deep by about playing like little kids.
Living a parallel life is not natural. It hasn't evolved on the Internet. We're not used to it. Through human civilization, we lived only IRL. Now we live online with IRL. The dissonance of managing two conflicting identities simultaneously is not something we have ever created.
Bad for the soul
That's not good for the soul either. It requires corrosion that occurs when you live parallel lives in the digital world. Some deeper self-loathing is burned there. Self-deception must eat you up.
The most fundamental problem of losing yourself in the digital world is the fact that no matter how hard you try, you will never escape the real world. You cannot upload your brain to the clouds. We cannot escape the fact that we are stuck on Earth here. We cannot escape from the body, the room we sleep in, or the fingers we enter. As long as we are, the real world will always remain.
Offloading your energy and emotions into parallel identity in the digital world only prevents you from improving your real life in the real world. If you dislike it, it doesn't matter how much you like or how many followers you have. If your real life is miserable, it doesn't matter how exciting your digital life may seem.
The internet has given us an incredible opportunity, but it poses incredible danger. Don't lose your way in a fake digital world. We must always maintain ourselves both online and offline. This may be one of the major challenges of our time.
