How I Became Everyone I Know
When I arrived in Berlin—almost seven years ago now—I moved through half a dozen different social worlds within a few months. There were people studying packaging design, people serving in the military, people working the floor at electronics superstores, people attending a Catholic girls’ school, people killing time in internet cafés, people cutting hair, people doing vocational training. All of them, somehow, mine to some degree.
Those circles were loud with disagreement. People brought different experiences, different politics, different certainties, and they weren’t shy about them. I actually see it differently
was a phrase that got used constantly—in arguments that ended in laughter, in debates that didn’t end at all, in conversations that left you slightly unsettled and better for it. I didn’t always enjoy the friction, but looking back, it was doing something. Forming something.
Still, deep bonds were hard to maintain across all of it. There was never enough time, never enough attention to go around. Work friends, vocational school friends, my girlfriend’s friends, the people from StudiVZ—Germany’s short-lived answer to Facebook—people I’d somehow acquired and couldn’t quite explain. Everyone brought new people. So many people.
Then, gradually, I started trimming. I’d always preferred a smaller number of close relationships over a sprawling roster of acquaintances. So they fell away, one by one. The packaging designers, the soldiers, the students, the electronics store guys, the school kids, the hairdressers. It was a slow process, half-conscious at best. But at some point they were simply gone. I stopped running into them on the U-Bahn. Facebook quietly filtered them out. Their numbers left my phone. Their faces blurred.
What replaced them was a Berlin I discovered through writing online—a world of MacBooks and iPhones and afternoon café meetings that never end. Now I’m surrounded entirely by creative people: PR consultants, social media managers, coders, bloggers. The conversations are about startups and operating systems and Steve Jobs and advertorials and samples and follower counts and WiFi and press trips and brand partnerships and programming languages and WordPress and the NSA. It’s interesting. It’s also, when I catch it at the right angle, completely airless.
I meet these bubble friends at promo parties thrown by clothing labels or tech companies or breweries. Everything is free. You only get in if you’re on the list. At some point I started mentally sorting people by whether they’d be on a list like that. I don’t think I noticed when I started doing it.
Now there is no one in my immediate world who doesn’t also exist in this digital dreamscape—this compact universe of media and reach and relevance. When I’ve slept with someone in the last few years, it’s been agency girls, bloggers, women for whom Twitter carried more existential weight than most actual problems in the world. Orgasm fine and good, but first let me check Instagram.
On quiet afternoons I sit with the question of whether this is actually good for me—for my worldview, for my maturity, for whatever it is that makes a person complete. When you only hear opinions you already hold, only see the conflicts that already concern you, only visit the places you’d visit anyway—what exactly is forming? What’s being refused entry?
I love my friends. And my enemies. And everyone who occupies the murky middle ground between the two. Genuinely. But the longer I stay inside this particular bubble, this comfortable networked life, the louder something in me calls for other voices. Positions so far outside my own existence that they’d almost split me open—but that would also, I suspect, do more for me than the consensus ever could.
Complaining doesn’t make much sense, though. Life is good. We’re all fine here in the peaceful bubble, even when EdgeRank dips and the WiFi misbehaves and the torrent stalls at 98%. Other people have actual problems, and I’m sitting here protesting a reality I constructed myself. One that’s better than plenty of alternatives, by any measure. But sometimes I miss it—that time. When I first got here.