Being Online Makes You Feel Bad But You're Still Here

On why everything online feels like advice, 'fauxthenticity' and our endless love of other people's horror stories

If you value Peak Notions, consider signing up for a paid subscription. By doing this, you directly fund the creation of my work and gain access to bonus content like audio columns, extra writing, our weekly subscriber chat and the Peak Notions Book Club. Thank you for giving Peak Notions your support, your time and your only set of eyeballs (hopefully) in an infinite online media landscape. The honour of that is not lost on me.

---

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

---

“I always advise people never to give advice.”

-PG Wodehouse

---

There appears to be significant social cachet in giving advice online; appearing to have your life together after a period of chaos and then dangling the carrot of this aspirational togetherness before others. ‘Drink this green juice which perfectly simulates the gorge-rising textural nightmare of biting into a gobbet of insect-infested, wet moss. It will regrow your lost knee cartilage and soften the resentment you harbour toward your deceased father’. Something like that. ‘Here’s my essay on failure as an objectively successful person who has experienced a couple of rough summers and once fell over in front of an aristocrat in Biarritz’. You know the manner of thing I’m getting at. ‘Enjoy my YouTube video confessional about being very conventionally attractive but also feeling bad about this small line on my forehead here - the one that is far smaller and less visible than all your many lines.’

There is an element of what I think of as ‘fauxthenticity’ to this sort of thing. Performative hardship often takes precedence in a world where those who struggle most desperately often aren’t equipped, empowered or at liberty to tell their stories. There is also a wealth of legitimate trauma- and misery-mining online. People crave vulnerability in all sorts of content we consume. There’s evidence of it even here at Peak Notions. The personal essays which share the soiled laundry of my ample and numerous inadequacies are consistently more widely read than the columns on epistemology or women’s unsettling obsession with true crime or our lost sense of collective meaning.