Stop Looking At Each Other

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook run on users’ feelings of inadequacy and loneliness, providing an endless, scrolling loop of aspiration, virtue signaling, and doom.

People change their behavior when they know they’re being watched. And on social media, somebody can always look at you.

The constant self-analysis, the picking-apart, the internal work . In collusion with capitalism and social media and the digital panopticon, seeing ourselves through a therapized lens means regarding the self as the ultimate project. It’s easy to forget there are other ways to live.

All people are flawed, a mix of good and bad, but we tend to see others as only one thing. The philosopher Amartya Sen calls this a “solitarist” approach to identity. And as we are biased toward negativity — a bad apple spoils the bunch — we are thrown off by a person’s bad character traits or past actions. Even minor ones. We identify people by th... See more