I wrote this article in October 2023, on a week in which we saw terrorist attacks, state-sponsored violence, devastating earthquakes, and climate emergencies.
A year and a half later, I’m coming back to it and deciding that I want to add it to the conversation. In the past 1.5 years, a lot has happened. As I’m writing this re-intro, we’re in the second Trump administration. TikTok has been banned and un-banned. The United States is steadily slipping into fascism. Both its domestic and foreign policy reflect this: Thousands of aid workers have lost their jobs. Billionaire losers with bad bone structures are running amok. The Palestinian people have suffered through something that many people are still refusing to name as a genocide or as ethnic cleansing, heavily supported by the United States.
Underpinning all of this is the age old sentiment that hurt people hurt people, and we’re eroding our structures for collective healing.
There’s not really a “point” this article. It was an expression of my deep frustration at how parasocial relationships are menacing us—menacing me—and I wish we could have a collective reprioritization.
People are hurting. And they don’t really know where to put their grief.
So, as always, the conversation is brought to social media, which is not a convening of solutions.
I’ve said this time and again: Community is political. This article isn’t about “politics” in our conventional sense—it’s not about Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan, or any specific country, ethnic group, religion, or region. It’s about the very structure of our society.
In times of global upheaval, we turn to:
- Our friends and family and our actual communities that know us deeply as human beings
- Social media to see what our “friends” are posting
- Celebrities to get “their take” on complex issues
- Random TikTok creators and people on the internet that we feel connected to
- “The news”, which now includes newsletters and conversational podcasts with writers and hosts we feel like we’re friends with
And guess what?
Four out of five categories on that (non-comprehensive) list represent parasocial relationships. It’s what you call the imaginary psychological relationship that fans think they have with celebrities… and now podcasters, internet creators, independent journalists, and more.
I made a highly unscientific pie chart on what I think healthy relationships should be.
My “should” pie chart is something like: 80% real community, 20% everything else.
It seems like we have it the other way around.
Here are some facts I learned from Kat Vellos’s book We Should Get Together:
- One in five Americans report that they rarely or never feel close to people
- One in four Americans feel like there’s no one they can talk to, or like there’s no one who understands them
- The average American hasn’t made one new friend in the last five years
Instead of finding and forming healthy communities, we are finding and forming unhealthy attachments to people on the internet who quite frankly could not give a rat’s ass about us!
We’re in a real loneliness and isolation epidemic.
And we’re looking in the wrong places for solutions.
The consequences of this are disastrous. We don’t have safe spaces we are creating with others in our lives to process heavy, life-threatening information. As climate change worsens and social injustices exacerbate, the flow of information is only going to increase in toxicity.
We cannot afford to respond to this with more toxicity.
We cannot afford to wait for a celebrity to put out a statement about the next horrific global event, and then lash out at them. Or share posts to our social feeds that only push away our real friends, because we’re busy sharing stuff on Instagram instead of checking in on them.
We only have 24 hours a day, whether we like it or not. Each minute we spend on the illusion of closeness is a minute squandered.
When something bad happens in my city, country, community, or the world at large, I used to be the first to post something on social media and share my opinion.
This is not a bad thing, necessarily… but I started noticing that I wasn’t actually checking in 1x1 with people impacted.
I, like probably most of us chronically online people today, was living almost entirely in the realm of parasocial relationships, and it has had real-world impacts on my ACTUAL friendships and family ties.
I’m not saying that we have to stop sharing our opinions in public spaces. I’m just saying we need to recognize that this is what they are—public spaces—and not gatherings of people that truly care about one another.
Because our time and energy are limited, parasocial relationships are menacing our real ones.
I probably spent 2 hours on social media posting / reading / getting angry in the past few days. This is progress from the person I used to be, but it’s still 2 hours I could have used reaching out to my real friends. To cook them a meal. To walk over and give them a hug. To scream together.
Grief deserves to be witnessed by those we care about. We must use our time and energy to strengthen our relationships with the people who are actually in our lives. We are all we have. We cannot get through this world unharmed. And when you are harmed, when you are grieving, ask yourself—who will come over at a moment’s notice to help me get through this?
It’s not a Kardashian, that’s for sure.