#1 ·
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much our sense of reality is being hijacked by the constant, low-level hum of digital friction. It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish between what is actually happening in the world and what the internet *wants* us to believe is happening.
We’ve entered this era where if something is happening in physical space—whether it’s a festival, a sporting event, or just a gathering of people—the "narrative" is often decided before the first person even arrives. You scroll through your feed, and you see these intense, highly polished, often incredibly cynical takes on what a specific event is "really" about. People are arguing over perceived slights, debating the "relevance" of a crowd, or nitpicking the optics of a moment. By the time you actually show up to experience the thing yourself, you’ve already been pre-conditioned to look for the flaws. You’ve been trained to be a critic rather than a participant.
I felt this so strongly last weekend. I went to a local community gathering—nothing big, just a neighborhood festival—and I spent the first twenty minutes looking at my phone, reading a thread of people complaining about how "dying" or "out of touch" local events like this are. I was literally sitting there, surrounded by music, laughter, and people actually enjoying themselves, while my thumb was busy scrolling through a digital autopsy of why the event was a failure. It’s a weird kind of psychological sabotage. We are losing the ability to just *be* in a moment because we are too busy preparing our arguments for the inevitable online backlash.
There is this growing divide between the "online sentiment" and the "on-the-ground energy." I’ve noticed that whenever a group of people manages to create something genuinely joyful, or whenever a community shows up in force to support something, there is almost always a counter-wave of digital cynicism designed to dampen that light. It feels like a deliberate attempt to strip the soul out of human connection. If we can convince people that the joy isn't "real" or that the turnout isn't "meaningful," then we win the argument, right?
I think we need to lean harder into what I call "analog presence." There’s a specific kind of magic that happens when people stop performing for a camera or an audience and just lean into the collective experience. There’s a visceral, electric feeling when a crowd is actually happy—not "Instagram happy" where everyone is posing for a shot, but genuinely, unselfconsciously happy. That energy is impossible to replicate in a comment section, and it's something the internet is increasingly bad at recognizing.
I'm starting to wonder if the most radical thing we can do in this hyper-connected, hyper-critical age is to simply refuse to engage with the negativity. To go to the thing, see the thing, and let the joy be its own justification. If the "experts" on Twitter say a movement is failing or a crowd is small, but you are standing in the middle of a sea of people feeling a massive surge of communal spirit, who is actually right? The person with the most followers, or the person with the most skin in the game?
I’m curious to hear from you guys. Have you ever gone somewhere expecting to feel the "vibe" that everyone was complaining about online, only to find that the reality was the complete opposite? How do you protect your own sense of joy from being poisoned by the digital discourse?
We’ve entered this era where if something is happening in physical space—whether it’s a festival, a sporting event, or just a gathering of people—the "narrative" is often decided before the first person even arrives. You scroll through your feed, and you see these intense, highly polished, often incredibly cynical takes on what a specific event is "really" about. People are arguing over perceived slights, debating the "relevance" of a crowd, or nitpicking the optics of a moment. By the time you actually show up to experience the thing yourself, you’ve already been pre-conditioned to look for the flaws. You’ve been trained to be a critic rather than a participant.
I felt this so strongly last weekend. I went to a local community gathering—nothing big, just a neighborhood festival—and I spent the first twenty minutes looking at my phone, reading a thread of people complaining about how "dying" or "out of touch" local events like this are. I was literally sitting there, surrounded by music, laughter, and people actually enjoying themselves, while my thumb was busy scrolling through a digital autopsy of why the event was a failure. It’s a weird kind of psychological sabotage. We are losing the ability to just *be* in a moment because we are too busy preparing our arguments for the inevitable online backlash.
There is this growing divide between the "online sentiment" and the "on-the-ground energy." I’ve noticed that whenever a group of people manages to create something genuinely joyful, or whenever a community shows up in force to support something, there is almost always a counter-wave of digital cynicism designed to dampen that light. It feels like a deliberate attempt to strip the soul out of human connection. If we can convince people that the joy isn't "real" or that the turnout isn't "meaningful," then we win the argument, right?
I think we need to lean harder into what I call "analog presence." There’s a specific kind of magic that happens when people stop performing for a camera or an audience and just lean into the collective experience. There’s a visceral, electric feeling when a crowd is actually happy—not "Instagram happy" where everyone is posing for a shot, but genuinely, unselfconsciously happy. That energy is impossible to replicate in a comment section, and it's something the internet is increasingly bad at recognizing.
I'm starting to wonder if the most radical thing we can do in this hyper-connected, hyper-critical age is to simply refuse to engage with the negativity. To go to the thing, see the thing, and let the joy be its own justification. If the "experts" on Twitter say a movement is failing or a crowd is small, but you are standing in the middle of a sea of people feeling a massive surge of communal spirit, who is actually right? The person with the most followers, or the person with the most skin in the game?
I’m curious to hear from you guys. Have you ever gone somewhere expecting to feel the "vibe" that everyone was complaining about online, only to find that the reality was the complete opposite? How do you protect your own sense of joy from being poisoned by the digital discourse?