At two in the morning, I dragged my desk across the floor hard enough to leave scratches in the wood. I rotated my lamp away from the bed so the light turned amber instead of white, and moved the mirror to the opposite wall as though a different angle of reflection might produce a different life. Rearranging a room at that hour carries a superstitious kind of optimism, the quiet belief that emotional ruin can be negotiated through furniture placement.
My mother slept in the next room while a beauty influencer softly explained how to contour a nose into looking “effortlessly feminine” in a video titled how to look alive even when you aren’t feeling your best, which I watched three times.
The internet enters people gradually. One day you are thirteen years old, googling “how to be pretty,” and a few years later strangers with ring lights and perfect lighting are explaining your own face back to you with astonishing authority.
Lift here. Blend upward. Conceal there.
Every instruction carries the implication that your current self exists in draft form, waiting to be corrected into acceptability.
At some point during adolescence, I became convinced there existed a correct way to perform personhood and everyone else had somehow received the instructions in advance. Other people seemed to understand where to place their hands in photographs. They knew how long eye contact should last before it became flirtation, discomfort, intimacy, or threat. They entered rooms without appearing to calculate themselves first.
Meanwhile, I moved through the world feeling unfinished, like a webpage that never fully loaded.
I learned social interaction almost entirely through observation. My education came less from books than from girls online explaining “how to seem effortless.” Entire industries revolve around manufacturing effortlessness.
A teenager in Ohio wakes up before sunrise to ice-roll her face before school. A university student in Delhi films a “Get Ready With Me While I Romanticize Burnout” TikTok after sleeping four hours. A girl in London buys an expensive serum because another girl with symmetrical features whispered “you deserve softness” into a camera.
Millions of people participate in these rituals with remarkable sincerity. I once watched a girl reposition the same bedside lamp five separate times before filming herself “accidentally” looking out the window.
Sometimes I think the internet recreated religion through repetition and scale: rituals, confession, aspiration, shame, redemption. Influencers feel both intimately accessible and completely untouchable. We build altars out of playlists, aesthetics, skincare products, and carefully arranged bedside tables.
My generation rarely asks, “Who am I?” in any straightforward sense.
The more common question seems to be: what shape should my suffering take?
Every form of distress arrives with a visual language attached to it. There is the academically validated insomniac, the hyper-feminine recovery arc, the detached nihilist with excellent music taste, the beautifully exhausted girl drinking iced coffee under fluorescent library lights. Even mental illness has developed branding.
When I was younger, sadness seemed private and shapeless. Now sadness arrives pre-curated. Spotify playlists have titles like songs for staring at the grocery store freezer section questioning your entire existence. Thousands of comments repeat the same sentence: “I thought I was the only one.”
I understand the appeal more than I would like to admit. Irony became a survival skill for many people my age because sincerity felt unbearably vulnerable. If pain could be transformed into something aesthetically pleasing, perhaps it could also become manageable.
Eventually, though, I began noticing how difficult it had become to experience anything without simultaneously imagining its presentation. I would cry while unconsciously considering how the lighting in the room looked. I would sit alone in cafés wondering how my loneliness appeared from across the room. After a breakup so minor it barely qualified as one, I thought: this could be a beautiful essay.
That thought unsettled me more than the breakup.
The internet taught my generation to experience itself from outside the body, like something being edited in real time.
Contemporary life encourages people to become archivists of their own emotions. Every experience risks transforming into content before it has fully settled inside the body. Even healing has acquired an aesthetic vocabulary. Recovery online often looks like linen sheets, expensive candles, pottery classes, indirect sunlight, and green juice consumed beside an annotated paperback novel.
A girl pauses her crying long enough to move her iced coffee out of frame. The reality feels far less photogenic.
Actual suffering is repetitive and administratively exhausting. It involves replying to neglected emails three weeks too late. It involves avoiding text messages because constructing a personality suddenly feels impossible. It involves carrying library books around in your backpack for months because returning them requires becoming visible again.
Recovery rarely resembles transformation. More often, it resembles maintenance.
Still, despite understanding all of this, I remain deeply attached to the internet.
This attachment embarrasses me because I understand exactly how manipulative these platforms can be. Algorithms profit from insecurity with extraordinary efficiency. Entire economies depend upon convincing people they are perpetually improvable. Attention itself has become fragmented into increasingly smaller units, and contemporary language often feels engineered for circulation rather than clarity.
Yet the internet also contains moments of startling tenderness.
At one in the morning, some stranger across the world uploads a video titled “if you feel lonely right now, sit with me for a while,” and loneliness briefly transforms into something communal rather than isolating. Someone posts themselves crying after failing an important exam, and thousands of comments appear from people relieved to see failure represented honestly for once.
Again and again, people confess the same thing: “I thought I was the only person who felt this way.”
People often argue that online life has destroyed authenticity, but I suspect the reality is more complicated. Human beings have always performed versions of themselves. We performed ourselves in classrooms, churches, family gatherings, offices, and tiny hometowns where everybody already knew our histories before we entered the room.
The internet simply expanded the audience and accelerated the performance.
What unsettles me more is the growing difficulty of inhabiting unobserved existence. A few months ago, my phone died while I was outside for the entire day.
At first, panic.
Then the world sharpened: a couple arguing quietly in a pharmacy aisle, a child dragging his hand against every metal fence he passed, an elderly woman applying lipstick on a moving bus with astonishing precision, the smell of rain gathering inside concrete.
For nearly an hour, my mind stopped narrating itself. Existing without simultaneously observing myself had become rare enough to feel accidental.
When I returned home, my first instinct was to tweet about the experience. That impulse still makes me laugh.
There is something darkly funny about becoming fully aware of the performance while continuing to participate in it anyway. Perhaps adulthood now involves recognizing the machinery and decorating your corner of it as carefully as possible.
Even so, I no longer believe performance automatically cancels sincerity. Constant performance seems to have intensified people’s hunger for moments that break through it completely. That hunger explains why strangers confess intimate details online, why voice notes from friends can feel disproportionately meaningful, and why sincerity keeps resurfacing every few years despite irony’s repeated attempts to bury it.
Beneath all the aesthetics and branding and self-consciousness, most people seem to be asking the same ancient question in increasingly modern dialects:
Can anybody witness me without immediately converting me into something useful, attractive, or consumable?
I still think about that night rearranging my room.
The makeup tutorial autoplayed in the background while I pushed furniture hard enough to scratch the wooden floor. Somewhere outside, a dog barked continuously into the darkness. My mother coughed once in her sleep. The influencer smiled gently into the camera and said, “Sometimes changing your environment can completely change your energy.”
I laughed suddenly, loudly enough to surprise myself, and for a moment I couldn’t tell whether I was laughing at the influencer, the sentence itself, or the humiliating part of me that wanted desperately to believe her.
Beneath the irony and self-awareness and exhaustion, many of us continue searching for small evidence that transformation remains possible. We keep believing a reorganized bedroom, a stranger’s playlist, a late-night video essay, a cup of coffee, a text message, a better morning routine, or a sentence written in exactly the right order might alter the emotional temperature of existence, even briefly.
Nothing in the room had changed except the angle of the light, which felt sufficient for one draft of a life.
Kumar Sen is a writer from Kolkata, India. His work has appeared in Reading into Culture, Unbroken Journal, New World Writing Quarterly etc. Trained as a mathematician, he writes in Bengali and English, exploring sensory detail and the subtly absurd. He is also a musician, composer and bibliophile.