You're Not Behind in Life. You're Just Chronically Online.

Sophia Irvine

11 hours ago

5 min read

Is social media to blame? Absolutely. Are we watching people become richer, more successful and more beautiful? Constantly. Is it real? There is legitimately no way to know, but we buy into the vision, and as our brains rot and our greed increases, we have forgotten how truly lucky we are.

How lucky we are to have dreams, to have access, to connect with like-minded people around the world, to have the leisure to be bored and the opportunity to pursue our full potential. If we are not in survival mode, we are blessed, but it doesn't feel that way.

You can try, but it is more difficult than ever to hold on to the feeling of gratitude. What happened to being content? It's been replaced by an insatiable appetite, which is perfectly healthy and positive if it didn't stem from a world moving so fast that a quiet moment in our careers, love lives, beauty or success feels like a giant step back in the pursuit of our purpose. These times used to be interludes.

Today, they can sink even the strongest of us into a haze of sadness, with a tinge of jealousy.

In wanting more, striving to be better, keeping up with the Kardashians and yearning for a life that's grander than we're willing to work for, we forgot the basics: how lucky we are to have a boring, loving, beautiful life.

A roof over our heads, a mum to cuddle. Hell, some of us get paid to do what we love, yet we are always wanting more. We are constantly moving on to the next thing, the next accomplishment. We feel as though we are perpetually running late to our own lives, constantly playing catch-up with people we think we know from the internet, but we don't.

Comparison is truly the thief of joy, and nostalgia has become some form of grief because we've lost something that only a startling loss, or a hell of a lot of discipline, can return: our gratitude.

This era, this world, has taught us to dream big and know that whoever's life you're watching on your phone can be yours. And in this fast-paced evolution, we forgot the basics. Food, water, safety. A life devoid of tragedy.

I stumbled upon this idea after a week of internally freaking out about my next job, my career path, my income and my potential, which always feels so out of reach. A frequent occurrence that I should realise is a luxury. How my dream self can feel so close but always so far away. How I think I am grateful, yet I'm constantly looking for more.

“Luck, you must have luck in your life,” my doctor told me when my regular check-up was briefly interrupted by her friend reaching out to help her and her ill husband.

“I agree, but I don't know that I have it.”

She looked at me like I was a moron. She pointed to my family, my partner, and reminded me that love and partnership are expected of women but are still among the rarest miracles.

To love someone and have them love you in equal measure is nothing short of magic. It is rare, just as a family that you love and that loves you is also rare. To dream of being a writer and then get paid to write (albeit not often), well, that is a lottery.

And I forget that. I forget that all the time.

I remembered a story my aunt told me. My half-siblings' mother died when they were young, too young. My brother, being two years old, was with my aunt at the beach when he ran up to a woman with long blonde hair and yelled, “Mummy!” shortly after his mother's death.

My aunt followed, apologising to the young blonde woman and hiding her absolute devastation from my brother and fellow beachgoers. Because they had dreams, but those dreams stopped when her brother was widowed in his early 30s and her nieces and nephew were now motherless, with very little warning.

Because that was what life dealt them, and with a great deal of sadness and hardship, they moved forward in the best way they could. There was no time to observe strangers and worry about success and fame. No one gave a fuck about being thin or attractive anymore. Life did not allow them that luxury.

And as I remembered this, it was as if reality had slapped me in the face and reminded me how lucky I was to be worried about my writing career, how blissful it is to have a life that allows you to keep dreaming. To realise that what you see is not always real, and our greed has grown, but how could it not under the circumstances?

We are hit with severe world tragedies and Nicole Kidman dancing at the Chanel show within the first minutes of opening our phones. We want to be at Chanel; it is OK to want that. But then the tragedies fade away as we dream of being Alexa Demie, and ultimately get sad because that life is literally in our hands. It's in our phones, and yet it can feel light years away.

We forget about the tragedies and move past the fact of how blessed we are to be reading about them and not involved in them because, simply, it's too much to handle.

I don't think we were ever meant to have access to this much information. Information we haven't purposely sought out, information we never asked for.

And as the majority of us land somewhere between the haves and the have-nots, it is human nature to want, to strive for more. Gratitude is a practised art that is fading away from our natural humanity.

You're probably thinking, get off your fucking phone, and you are totally right. But that is where my work is. It's where I connect, get inspired and eventually, hopefully, God willing, get paid to do what I always dreamed of doing well before social media existed.

This is the world we live in. I'm here, I was born in this time, and so I must reckon with my insatiable appetite for more and the reality that I am insanely lucky, blessed, chosen even, even if my bank account, my social media and my name in a Google search say otherwise.

I must, we must, be better at handling the duality of life if we are to survive the consumerism, the greed, the jealousy and the comparisons we can feel every day simply by being in the habit of opening our phones.

There is nothing wrong with wanting more and having drive, but we must balance it out by looking at the basics we have access to that so many do not.

And we have no idea why, and that is extremely hard to contend with. Why us? Or, more frequently, with a quick morning scroll, why not us?

There is no answer, but I know the collective greed outweighs the collective gratitude, and that trickles down to every single one of us.

Holding two truths at once is incredibly hard, so I often return to one of my favourite films, based on one of my favourite authors, featuring some of my favourite actors.

Virginia Woolf's final lines in the 2002 film The Hours:

“To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away.”

Greed and gratitude, luck and tragedy. We must exist within these spaces and then put them away… to live, to continue. But are we moving slowly enough to pause and realise how lucky we truly are? Or are we rushing towards a standard that doesn't exist?

I personally am not pausing. I panic if I move slowly, but I will try. Because I believe we must. To look life in the face, to know it, to love it and then put it away… hopefully not to doomscroll.