Around 2012, when I was living in a 1-BR apartment in Queens with my ex-wife (then girlfriend/fiancee), I responded to Facebook comments and posts a lot, so people used to tell me I was “online too much,” which is a precursor to the new idea of being “chronically online,” which I also believe is now the title of a book. Looking back, I was indeed very much online, and often saying stupid stuff while buzzed. With the benefit of hindsight and self-awareness and more than a decade of history, I was probably doing it because I was sad and felt behind in my life. My dream job forever was ESPN; I got that, and was good at it, but over time I underperformed and had bad bosses and had since left it. Most of my friends were already having kids. I didn’t have a ton of “in-person” friends, although I had one good neighborhood group through my then-partner’s college friends. I just felt like I was lacking community and purpose, so I tried to find a saccharine backdoor, which was Facebook.
Now Facebook is significantly less relevant, but we’re even more chronically online. These days the main form seems to be TikTok, although I think Instagram is still hanging in there for a certain subset. That’s funny, because Instagram is essentially a pointless place for hot girls to congregate and TikTok might be a tool of the communist regime. But hey, let’s plant ourselves there!
One of the better examples of “chronically online” that I’ve seen of late is Pearl. If you don’t know Pearl, or “Just Pearly Things,” her real name is Hannah Pearl Davis, and I believe she’s 1 of 10 children from an affluent couple in Chicago. I don’t know her exact age, but she’s in the range where she grew up online and it very much shows. She pivots her views and opinions (such as they are) to get the most attention possible, whether that’s remixing “Old Town Road” (“got the horses in the back”) to sell printers at one of her first jobs, or become the female face of the Red Pill/manosphere crowd. This is a long watch, but it covers a lot of what I am discussing:
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