A tale of connections

Remember when times were, in fact, harder?

December 19, 2022

As the internet asks: “Is the bird app dying? Where do we go now?” let us remember what life was like before our time and attention were permanently and chronically online. Before social media engulfed our lives, back when going online was a purposeful journey to specific ends.

I do not intend to write a lengthy essay on the perks of being offline, because I’m not. Week after week, my phone’s usage report haunts me. The chunk of time funneled to that tiny screen seems to only grown, shrinking on instances when much of my time was in fact absorbed by other screens of different sizes. Online is not a choice; it’s a routine checkpoint, a permanent state, a condition of modern existence.

But before there was online, forging connections worked in wild different ways. And in a not at all unexpected post-pandemic wave, people are craving the wild.

The type of connections we create while being online don’t just feel different from connecting IRL, they inherently are. The parasocial relationships we forge not only with people we don’t know in person, but with people we do, allow us to inhabit this weird space between intimacy (reading someone’s inner thoughts, witnessing their world through their lenses) and complete distance (realizing the version of ourselves we expose online is curated, sometimes artificial, a persona - not a person). A space where everyone is relatable and at the same time so siloed. That’s not to say that real-life interactions will always be more genuine or sincere. But if there is something we learned with forced, collective isolation is that not many things beat up meeting people. Being around people, talking to people; bonding with people.

Every year, at some point, I like to torture my soul and rewatch Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. I say torture as the biggest compliment, as these are some of my favorite movies ever, because they leave this aftertaste of bittersweetness - for not being either Jesse or Celine, for not having found such a deep connection over one night in Vienna that would span through decades, for not having written such an unreal and yet grounded story. Before Sunrise, the first movie of the trilogy, was based on an actual encounter that Linklater had with a woman named Amy. They had this deep, instant type of connection, talked through an entire night, and then never saw each other again. Many years later, when the third movie was on its way, he discovered Amy actually passed away a few months before the first movie was even shot. You can cry now, it’s sad.

Back to the movies themselves; the three Before movies - Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight - are structured in a similar fashion. They are all conversation-based, always Celine and Jesse talking about varied topics, almost in the same order, but in essence they elaborate this connection they have with each other. You see how their relationship shifts with the gaps of time between the movies (9 years each) and how it doesn’t. Their connection is still there, still very strong and magnetic even if they both are fundamentally different people. And that for me is the real catch of their chemistry; they see the world in wild different ways (see what I did there?) yet they are capable of finding these feelings for each other that don’t die down, only reshape. Linklater brought this from a real-life experience where he met this wonderful person for a night and everything else after that was speculation. He tried to capture a rare feeling and stretch it through decades, trying to figure out how these people would relate to each other over time. But the whole point of it is still the connection itself.

It sounds a bore to say we need go out, touch grass, see some people. But goddammit, sometimes we really do. Some of the connections we make online, like being able to throw your comments about anything out in the air for whoever wants to read them, are hard to reproduce in real life. And that’s alright; realizing these are different channels that serve different communication purposes, for me, is key to learn how to have a healthier relationship not with other people but with the internet itself. It’s what you do with it that defines how much you need it.

Or something like that.

-Maíra

This week’s recommendation: