The parasocial friends you'll never meet

hol up lemme break the 4th wall for a sec

The term “parasocial” refers to a one-sided relationship between a person and someone they don't know, such as a celebrity, fictional character, or social media influencer. In these relationships, one person develops feelings of closeness with the other person, even though they have never met. The second person, or persona, is unaware of the first person's existence.

Do you know me? What would “knowing me” even mean? I have a strong attachment to the notion of “honesty”, the feeling that I’m portraying myself and my life accurately. I pay close attention to the choices other writers make in the things they share, the life details they romanticize. So when someone says “I was having a strawberry in McCarren Park earlier today and reflecting on stillness,” I wonder about all the other moments in their life that are not so pretty and palatable. To be a “lifestyle influencer” is implicitly to say that your style of life is something other people ought to be aware of and maybe even emulate. So it’s worth trying hard to make sure the image you put forth for emulation is honest.

People talk about instagram being a highlight reel, and to some extent it is, but at least on instagram you are presenting your life in its bare physical form, there are no layers of rationalizing and interpretation. Text allows for the ultimate kind of selectivity: your constraint is not the sounds and sights of your actual life, but the depth of your imagination. When you share about your life over personal essays, you can hide your facial expressions and body language, your tone of voice. You can project decisiveness, self-assurance, and whatever else you would like the reader to believe you have. (Or really, whatever else you would like to convince yourself you have.) It’s a filter far more powerful than sepia or the latest AR sticker.

There is a flipside to this of course, the thing that drew me to essays in the first place: it allows for a different kind of honesty. Maybe you don’t know what I look like or the register of my voice or my daily access to touchable grass, but you know about my thoughts, you hear the things that reverberate endlessly in my head. There’s a unique kind of connection in that. It’s something you don’t get from stories and reels, and something you don’t even get from most conversations.

I guess what I’m trying to say is no one ever gives you the full picture, because the full picture is impossible to put into words, and it’s impossible to put into images and videos too. Essays, reels, podcasts—they’re all infinitesimally thin slices of our lives. I just want everyone to be aware that no one’s life is perfect or easy to understand, and in particular that the people who are happiest aren’t advertising their lifestyle on the internet. The ones whose lives are most enviable—judging by the actual quality of their inner life, and not just their material and social possessions—aren’t talking about self-improvement or introspection or connection. The people talking about self-improvement and connection are the ones who have suffered enough to have to spend time figuring out how to be happier, who are lonely enough to have to think hard about how to connect. I am one of those people, you shouldn’t have any illusions about that.

Whenever I meet someone in real life whose writing I’ve read there is both a sense of disappointment at the ways they’re not who I thought they were, and a little bit of joy in realizing the nice things about them that I wouldn’t have anticipated. Like oh hey, this person smiles a little more than I thought, or wow this guy is a little bit goofier than I expected. I don’t know if we’ll ever meet, if you’ll ever get the chance to see the ways I’m different in real life, but I want you to know that whatever you’re expecting, it will be both better and worse. When I was watching the acceptance speeches from the Grammys a few months back I kept thinking, man how crazy would it be to actually be in the room when it’s happening, to be face to face with all these people whose art has shaped my life? And you know, I don’t imagine it would be that different from my own parties with my friends, because in the fullness of their humanity I’m sure they are just as boring and annoying and interesting as the rest of us. We’re all just experiencing the world through the eyes of half-familiar avatars, consuming selective projections, surrounded by people we love but don’t know and people we know but don’t love. We live both unbearably close and infinitely far apart from each other.

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Thanks to Susie for feedback on an earlier draft.