I saw a meme on facebook or twitter, I can’t find it now. It said something like:
“In the 90s, a visit to the shop for ice-cream would be considered a good day out”
This gave me a mini hit of nostalgia. I remembered being 9 years old and hanging around my Nana Maughan’s house with Amy. The thrill of walking to the shop at 2 in the afternoon, getting some sweets and coming home was top tier fun. Day complete. And I imagine that’s how stoked dogs feel when they get to go for a walk.
Life at 33 doesn’t have the same salience – that’s expected when you grow up – but I’m sure there’s something else going on and it’s to do with expectations for how we spend our time.
It’s a cliche that social media is driving a comparison culture. The image of a 17 year old girl crying at her reflection in the bathroom after swiping for 2 hours on Instagram is not unfamiliar to the modern person.
And, just like the power of marketing or advertising I tend to assume this is something other people suffer with, more susceptible people. I deny its impact on me.
These days a Sunday can feel wasted, even if we cooked a great meal and watched a fun movie, did laundry and wondered around Albert Heijn – it feels that a sin against life has been committed because the weekend is done and we did ‘nothing’ with it.
But where does this gap between expectations and reality coming from? It has to come from somewhere. The image of the ideal Sunday paddleboarding on the lake as the sun-rises, running a half-marathon in the afternoon then having the neighbours around for a barbecue in the evening must have been informed by all the things we’ve absorbed. I think this is precisely where and how social media’s bullshit wears us down.
The internet’s effect on our day-to-day expectations on life is much more wide ranging than body image. The internet tells us in its subtle and constant way, what our day should look like. What we should consume, how our evenings should be spent.
We used to get this from TV – I remember reading something about “Friends”, explaining that its popularity isn’t in its comedy, but that its aspirational. Six hot single friends living their 20s in the centre of the greatest city on Earth during an economic boom. We watched to build a template of how to be.
The recent surge of phrases like bed-rotting and being a ‘Rat Person’ (translated from Chinese) makes sense given the context above. In a world where the gap between our lives and our expectations has been stretched by social media. One way to feel comfortable with the gap is to declare ourselves opt-outs, and labelling our despicable behaviour with a level of judgement that gets us over any grey area where others might get the impression we thought it was okay to have what used to be called a ‘lie-in on the weekend’.
And for me, this is crystal clear when thinking back to covid. During covid the felt expectations on how I spent my time was liberating. Going for a walk and baking a cake became worthy ways to live my life. There was no sense that my 3 closest friends might be spending the weekend getting drunk in Singapore without me, that everyone else was having fun except me.
During covid – going to the shop for ice cream, was a good day out.
Leave a Reply