We're All Living Slightly Outside Reality

Lately, I've been thinking about how strange it is that we know so much about people we have never met. Not just recognise them, or know their name, but actually feel familiar with them. We know where they go on holiday, what they eat, what their bedrooms look like, who their friends are, what they were doing at the weekend, and sometimes, the smallest details about their lives that we would never know about someone we actually knew in person.

It's a peculiar kind of familiarity, because there is no real relationship behind it. They don't know us, and yet, after watching someone's life unfold through a screen for long enough, it can begin to feel as though we know them.

There is a word for this: parasocial relationships. The concept isn't particularly new. The term was originally used to describe the one-sided relationships audiences developed with media personalities, where a television presenter or celebrity could become a familiar presence in someone's life despite there being no actual relationship between them. What feels different now is the sheer level of access we have. It seems that social media has blurred the line between watching someone, and feeling as though you are actually spending time with them. We don't just see celebrities on a screen for a few minutes anymore; we follow their mornings, their relationships, their careers, and seemingly insignificant moments in between. This creates a sense of familiarity that feels personal despite being entirely one-sided, as explored in The Nature of Celebrity Fascinations.

Perhaps the strangest part is how emotionally invested people have become in the lives they will never be part of. Stan culture has turned celebrities' achievements into collective celebrations, where some can feel genuine excitement over an influencer buying a house or a celebrity getting engaged, whilst overlooking the milestones happening in their own friends' lives. We know the in's and out's of a stranger's relationship but can go weeks without asking someone close to us how they are really doing. The online world offers a version of life that is endlessly entertaining, accessible and easy to feel part of, without requiring us to show up in any meaningful way. And somewhere along the way, we risk becoming more invested in watching other people live than in making our own lives feel worth living. We have never had more access to one another, yet it feels as though we are increasingly attached to people we don't know, while becoming a little more distant from the people we do.

What I've been more interested in is what this constant access might be doing to our sense of normal. When you're exposed to hundreds of lives every day, the scale of human experience starts to change. Someone is getting engaged, someone else is getting a divorce, someone has moved to Dubai, someone else has become a millionaire before thirty, someone is crying in their car, whilst someone else is showing you the most beautiful day of their life. And then, five seconds later, you're watching a woman make an iced latte in her kitchen.

Everything exists beside everything else.

The extraordinary sits next to the mundane so constantly that eventually, neither feels particularly extraordinary.

I think this is where the idea of desensitisation becomes interesting. Not in the dramatic sense of becoming dumb or uncaring (which is probably happening regardless), but in the way that repeated exposure can make almost anything feel familiar. We can watch a stranger's relationship fall apart over a five part series and then scroll straight past a luxury shopping haul. We view a number of life events, and go through all the emotions of others, all before we have even got out of bed and brushed our teeth.

Of course there's an understanding that all these things matter. But perhaps we don't always feel them in proportion to how significant they would feel if they happened within our own lives. Real life is seemingly becoming quieter than it used to be. And this is not to say that real life has become less interesting, instead we've become accustomed to experiencing it at a heightened volume. Our feeds are full of dream homes and cars, expensive dinners, perfect friendships and relationships, career milestones and of people living lives that are constantly moving forwards. Even happiness has become something we can consume in endless quantities.

And with that all being said and scrolled, we return to our regular Tuesday. Commuting to work, doing a food shop, scrolling unread emails, taking out the laundry, using every last energy to prepare dinner. The ordinary week where nothing particularly dramatic happened. And that can feel underwhelming.

I've wondered whether this is the part where it means to live slightly outside reality. Our own lives can feel strangely still when nothing is being presented to us. I feel as though the problem isn't that we are comparing our lives to other people's (that's been happening forever), it's the fact we now have access to an almost endless supply of other people's lives to compare them to. There's always someone 'new' to watch. Another relationship to observe. Another life to imagine. Another version of success to measure ourselves against. The supply never ends. There is never really a moment in which we reach the end of someone's story and completely return to our own.

Because of this, parasocial relationships feel so different now. The people we view online aren't celebrities in the traditional sense, they're people who's lives unfold alongside ours in a closer capacity. This is where the line of desensitisation is brought in. When something is constantly present, it doesn't feel surprising anymore. Major events in one's lives just become another post, or update. Then we close the app and return to a life where enormous moments are actually quite rare.

Real life seems to be rarely visually compelling as the version of it we see online. Most of it is repetitive, ordinary and quiet. There are long stretches where nothing happens at all. You don't always feel beautiful. Your friends aren't always available. Your career doesn't change every six months. You don't go on holiday every few weeks. Your relationship doesn't have a storyline. Sometimes you spend an entire Saturday doing absolutely nothing worth posting. And yet, those are the years of our lives. Maybe we've become so desensitised to the extraordinary that we have forgotten how much there is to notice in the ordinary. The conversation that never becomes a screenshot. The dinner that nobody photographs. The joke that only makes sense to the people who were there. The friend who knows what you're like when you're tired because they've spent enough ordinary afternoons with you to know. The walk home where nothing happened except the fact that you were there.

There is something quite beautiful about experiences that don't need an audience. Maybe we don't need less connection with the world. Maybe we just need a little more connection with the life immediately in front of us. Because perhaps reality isn't disappearing at all. Perhaps we're simply becoming so accustomed to watching everyone else's that we have forgotten how to be impressed by our own.

And maybe that's what it means to live slightly outside reality.