There are many reasons for why social anxiety might be on the rise, one which I discussed here, about how screens provide interactions without the fear of rejection, while real life is much scarier in comparison. But a lot of them basically boil down to "kids are becoming more socially inept" which is so overdone at this point that I would like to say something counter to that thesis here.
One aspect I notice is that in some way, it is easier to be genuine on the internet. It is undeniable that, by virtue of conversations being projected down to only text or speech, a great deal of nuances and expression is lost, and as such internet "relationships" can never be like the real deal.
But on the other hand, real relationships aren't very real either when you are young. Most of the times, we are forced to interact with one another within institutions, which also project down relationships and people to discrete entities which it can manage, and as a result the interactions feel fake. I never felt like myself while I was at school, it always felt like I was a cliché interacting with other clichés. 5 You could argue it has more to do with age than with school, but the latter and youth cannot be separated within the modern world anyway, and considering how genuine toddlers are in their expressions, I am not super convinced that age is the factor behind fakeness.
But no matter what the explanation is, the result is the same for me: I didn't feel like myself at school, university or the office, and so the internet feels like a "place" where I can at least be honest because I am not bound by power games or bullshit social dynamics. And I wonder if that's one significant aspect of introversion? It is not so much that some people do not like being social, it is that they do not like having to be fake.
I remember this quote—from a Spiderman Animated Series from all places—where the Green Goblin says:
We all wear masks. But which one is real? The one that hides your face, or the one that is your face?
A mask can be more “genuine” when you get to choose it in a sense. Of course, nothing can replace real life relationships, because the internet is fake in many ways, especially identity games, but my point is that school and the office aren’t very real either when it comes to human relationships.
3 This dynamic also shows up when young children start walking. When parents do not make a big deal out of the inevitable falls of the child, then the latter does not even see anything wrong with falling and will simply get back up and try again. Only when the parents treat each fall as a "failure" does it create an atmosphere of tension, which the child can feel because they do not even have a sense of self yet, and as such they are the environment, and so they become tense too. This aspect of children, that they take on what's around them very readily, is also why they can understand that their parents are arguing even before they understand anything related to language.
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2025-01-30