To thine own self be true — especially in our fake digital world

Every once in a while you hear about these people who build up totally fake identities on the internet.

They devote hundreds of hours to crafting a persona and a story that are completely fabricated. They claim they have eight kids. They claim they have a ton of money. They claim they are something they are absolutely not.

We shouldn’t seek out approval pretending to be someone else. We shouldn’t drift off into the digital abyss, play-acting like little children.

What is that? What can we learn from it? What does it mean for us?

A new kind of delusion

It’s a very modern phenomenon, that’s for sure. It didn’t exist 50 years ago. It couldn’t have existed 50 years ago. There was just no way to do it. There was no internet. No possibility of retreating into the safety of a false digital reality.

And that’s what it is at bottom: a retreat into a more alluring world. A world where you don’t have to ever do anything or be anything. You can just say you are anything, and that’s enough.

It’s a kind of fantasy escapism. Yes, of course, we have had fantasy and escapism for a long time. Books can be just that. But this is very different from books. It’s more interactive, more immersive, more alluring.

We live in an era of parallel worlds. There is the digital world and the actual world. It’s no stretch to suggest that retreating into a false digital identity, living in a false digital world, is a retreat from life itself.

How do you end up claiming that you have 11 kids when you have none? How do you end up claiming you are some wealthy mogul when you are living with your parents? How do you end up claiming you are 27 when you are 49?

The same old escapism

I imagine it happens slowly. It starts with a desire to escape. To leave life behind. To become someone else, someone you see as greater, without doing any of the work to get there.

You don’t leave your life if you are happy. You don’t leave reality if you are fulfilled. Think about drug addicts who zone out every day. Do they do it because they are fulfilled in their lives? No, they want to zone out as far as they possibly can without going over the edge into death.

A similar thing is going on with retreating into the digital. “Life is miserable, but the digital world can be whatever I want.” That’s the logic.

That’s how it all starts. Then it accelerates. The “likes” start coming in. The followers start increasing. Fabricators see what works, and soon enough they are throwing red meat to their mob. The people eat it up.

They see that everyone loves who they are. Well, not who they actually are, but who they pretend to be. “I’m not enough, but my pretend self is.” That must be painful, but it can be overcome for the sake of likes and follows.

Bridging the gap

The examples above are extreme. Most people, thankfully, don’t concoct false parallel lives for internet dopamine hits. But the question of how we bridge the gap between the digital and the actual in a healthy way is a question we all must wrestle with. How do we remain ourselves in the digital world?

Honesty. That’s how we remain ourselves. We just have to be honest, or at least not dishonest. We don’t have to tell the whole world everything about who we are. Strangers don’t have a right to anything that’s ours. We don’t owe anyone any details about how we live our lives.

But we shouldn’t lie to ourselves or others. We shouldn’t seek out approval by pretending to be someone else. We shouldn’t drift off into the digital abyss, play-acting like little children.

Living a parallel life isn’t natural. We haven’t evolved with the internet. We are new to it. Throughout human civilization, we have only lived IRL. Now, we live IRL and online. The dissonance of managing two conflicting identities at the same time is not something we were ever made to do.

Bad for the soul

It’s not good for the soul, either. There has to be some kind of corrosion that happens when you live a parallel life in the digital world. Some kind of deeper self-hatred burns there. The self-deception must eat away at you.

The most fundamental problem of losing oneself in the digital world is the fact that we will never escape the actual one, no matter how hard we try. We can’t upload our brains to the cloud. We can’t get away from the fact that we are stuck here on earth. We can’t escape our bodies, the rooms where we sleep, or the fingers with which we type. The actual world will always remain, as long as we do.

Offloading one’s energy and emotions to a parallel identity in the digital world only prevents us from bettering our actual lives in the actual world. It doesn’t matter how many likes you get or how many followers you have if you hate yourself. It doesn’t matter how exciting your digital life looks if your actual life is miserable.

The internet has given us incredible opportunities, but it also presents us with incredible dangers. We must never lose our way in a false digital world. We must always remain ourselves, both online and offline. This might be one of the great challenges of our time.