The parasocial friends you'll never meet

This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it's worth re... See more

The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with. This precision was hard for me, partly because my sense for how communication is supposed to work is shaped by reading mass media. Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t ... See more

but whether parasocial content is desirable or not, it points to a growing crisis on the internet: So much of what we encounter online just doesn’t matter , and even worse, offers no mechanism for us to start caring about it. The average human living today sees more things they don’t care about in one week than a medieval peasant did in their entir... See more

The problem is, we no longer live solely among those we know well. We're now forced to refine our personalities by the countless eyes of strangers. And this has begun to affect the process by which we develop our identities.