public performance of solitude

[tozka]

Research suggests that all this homebody chatter is not just for show: Young people really are more prone to staying in these days. One 2018 paper, published in the journal Joule, found that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 spend a whopping 70% more time at home than the general US population. In another 2018 survey, conducted by the marketing research firm Mintel, 28% of millennials between 24 and 31 said that they preferred to drink at home because going out was too much effort, compared to just 15% of baby boomers who agreed with that statement.

But it’s also true that all those Etsy t-shirts and introvert comics are part of a somewhat paradoxical phenomenon: The internet has given rise to a collective, public performance of solitude.

From Why millennials never want to leave their apartment anymore by Sarah Todd for Quartzy.

Comments

[suncani]

Interesting article. I agree with some of it, I don't necessarily think it's just a millennial thing (and please can the millennial tag just die a quiet death already) and I think it would probably still be a thing although perhaps quite not as much without the internet.

[rosefox]

The obvious thing that's missing from the gendered element is that going out can be uncomfortable and dangerous for women. It's not just opting in to face masks, it's opting out of being hit on or roofied. I'm really astonished that wasn't mentioned at all.

I feel like the thing that's missing from the depiction of the public-facing component is something like introvert pride. It's not just performance; it's finding solidarity and community as a minority, and reassuring other people that they get to do the thing you're doing. This idea that anything on Instagram must be desperate and fake is really missing the point of how people use social media to build community.

When I was first online in the early 1990s, there was a persistent cultural narrative that you could not trust anyone you met online and you had to meet people in person to really know them. That's been thoroughly disproven. Digital socializing is now a perfectly acceptable alternative to face-to-face socializing, just like e-books are now a perfectly acceptable alternative to print books and HBO (which I was recently reminded stands for Home Box Office, though no one remembers that now because you no longer have to say "Look, we're just like watching movies but at home" to justify your existence as a producer of visual media) is a perfectly acceptable alternative to going to the movies. Of course clubs and pubs have lost market share to Discord and Twitter. That's... that's what happens when digital alternatives show up. People have more choices than they used to. Sometimes they make use of those choices. Insert shruggie here.