Aubade #3 – Unfiltered
We have all become architects of our ideal, filtered, perfect versions. Our Instagram profile is our personal, digital mausoleum, where we entomb our best moments, our cleverest thoughts, and our most photogenic smiles. This is our avatar – a superhero who never gets tired, never cries (unless, of course, it’s poetically beautiful), and whose coffee never spills.
But who is the person standing behind this profile? Who is the one scrolling through someone else’s perfect life at 3 AM in the cold light of their phone, fighting their own spiritual loneliness? The one whose real story is far more complex, chaotic, and, let’s admit it, far more brilliant than any beautiful story.
We created an idyll, behind which our true “self” hides. And this constant performance has given birth to new, strange diseases.
- Social anxiety, fed by watching others’ perfect lives.
- FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) – the eternal fear that something better is happening somewhere without you.
- Digital autism, where we prefer sitting silently with a screen over a real, live conversation.
We are no longer real. We are ghosts, sliding through each other’s digital lives, leaving a disembodied trace – a “like,” a comment, an emoji – and then we just disappear. We are digital information.
Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg created not just a “social network,” but humanity’s first, unified nervous system. A tool that could have connected our collective consciousness. But at some point, this global brain decided that “buying” attention and the anxiety caused by watching others’ “perfect lives” was more important than a real connection.
What if this tool had developed differently? What would a social network look like where “trending” wasn’t about primping and self-promotion, but about raising global consciousness? Where the algorithm rewarded you not for “likes,” but for empathy, for sharing a new idea, for helping someone else. Maybe, in such a reality, we would finally understand what is already clear in the big picture: we are not 8 billion competitors. We are one, gigantic organism – humanity. And this network is our common mind. Have you thought about this?
And the solution? Maybe the problem isn’t the technology, or the framework that designers and developers give us, but our relationship with it. Maybe salvation is in balance. It’s hard to perfectly tune the news feed, but it’s easy to get more of the right education so that, against the backdrop of this insane flow of information, we can process it without spraining our brains. This is just a simulation, humanity’s digital monopoly mirrors, which, unfortunately for us, are being given direction, and consequently, we don’t know the real face of our race.
As for our personal expression: maybe it’s time to admit that our avatar is a part of us, but not all of us. It is our created character, our work of art. But art without reality is just meaningless primping. We have to go outside, breathe the air, smile at each other.
By the way, I play this game too. My profile is also a better version of me. But writing these “Aubades” is my attempt to talk to the real “me” behind this mask. This is my search for balance.
So, before I close this post and dive back into the un-primped noise of everyday life, I want to ask one thing of you, and of myself:
The next time you’re scrolling through someone else’s ideal profile, stop for a second. Behind that polished photo, that clever caption, that happy smile, hides a real, living person. With their own cracks, their own fears, their own unwritten stories.
And maybe, the real beauty is right there in those cracks. Maybe it’s time to stop worshiping each other’s ideal avatars and start searching for each other’s real, chaotic, imperfect, but boundlessly interesting souls.
I will try…