‘You hardly notice how, over time, the world outside has shrunk, until soon there is no outside world.’ Photograph: Anna Barclay/Getty Images View image in fullscreen ‘You hardly notice how, over time, the world outside has shrunk, until soon there is no outside world.’ Photograph: Anna Barclay/Getty Images Opinion Social media Our lives and identities have moved online – and it’s driving us insane Brigid Delaney People have become servants to social media. The ultimate flex is to walk back to real life
T hink of your online life as a garden. At first it’s just a few seeds here or there – a Facebook profile where you created entire albums from a night at the pub, or maybe a Tumblr or a Myspace page listing your favourite bands. It is fun – something just for you and your friends to enjoy.
Then the garden grows. You get an Instagram account and document moments from each day on Stories, use LinkedIn for networking and sharing career triumphs, and check your X/Twitter hyper-vigilantly in case you wrote something that just got you cancelled.
Your online garden grows more sprawling and complex; now it’s no longer just a fun project for yourself on weekends and weeknights. As it grows, you start to view it through the eyes of others.
How will this garden be seen? Will people like it? What can I plant in this garden that will make more people like it?
A few more years pass. And now, instead of working on the garden here and there, you’re in there all the time. You have discovered if your garden is really enticing, you can make money off it. You want – then need – big numbers coming in there. You look at other people’s gardens all the time and you get jealous. They have better gardens.
Read more When you’re not in your garden, you’re still somehow tending to it – looking at the number of people coming in, and comparing them with what it used to be, and being worried that maybe you didn’t plant the right things. But people will tell you if you’re doing it wrong. They’ll spray paint all over the garden walls how much your garden sucks, how you’re a loser, how ugly it all is.
And with all this activity going on you hardly notice how, over time, the world outside your garden has shrunk, until soon there is no outside world. The garden is your home now.
W hen this current moment ends and a more enlightened time kicks in, descendants looking back will see that millions (or is it billions?) of us have spent the last 10 years or more migrating our lives and identities, and our political, communal and social selves, to a digital realm that has sent many of us insane.
The (digital) signal that we are living a better life has been imbued with more energy and importance than living a better life itself.
Those descendants will see what we can’t really see now – a massive serf culture has emerged, where people have become servants to these gardens.
They’ll see how truly unfree so many of us are – allowing the rich, real, tactile world to recede, while the digital gardens have sprawled to take up all our time and energy (the average user spends about 2 hours and 39 minutes a day on social media.)
And it will become apparent that the real elite won’t be the people with the most popular digital gardens. They’ll be the people who never had gardens. Or people who had small private gardens, where they only let a few friends in.
Brand strategists and trend forecasters are saying that, in 2026, the true measure of status is privacy and a low or no digi…