The Chaos of Existing in Multiple Places at Once
By: Kiddest Sinke
Tags: Personal Essay, Covid 19, Social Media, Self, Mental Health

At Yale, I developed a slight obsession with psychology studies. Over my four years on campus, I made over $5,000 as a certified lab rat. I participated in anything that would pay me over $25 an hour: getting MRI scans while I watched Moana, munching on bagels in front of a webcam. I even gambled against a gang of robots on a simulated deserted island.

The least regrettable experience was a two-month “wellness” study taught by what my grandparents would call a trust fund hippie — a wanderlust white woman who had ditched her upper-middle class New York lifestyle for a more “bohemian” one as a spiritual guru for Ivy League students.

While there were many problems with this class, the most prominent being the unapologetic appropriation and Westernization of Hindu yoga practices, I came away with a valuable lesson: the importance of staying present.

For two hours, twice a week, we would turn off our phone and practice breathing exercises, just existing in that moment.

At the time, I was a junior struggling with anxiety, not just about school, but a slew of family and financial issues. There was something incredibly freeing about letting go of my stressors, even if it was only for a couple hours a week, in the illusionary environment of a psychology study.

For a while, this wellness workshop worked — until COVID-19 happened.

In quarantine, it’s been terribly difficult to stay present. Even as I’m writing, my mind wanders. I’ll check my phone periodically, for no particular reason other than to refresh my Instagram feed or watch someone’s Snapchat story. I’ll open and reopen iMessage. I’ll read then re-read a news article. It’s like I’m existing in a million places at once. It’s driving me crazy.

A lot of people feel this way right now. Without their usual, more tangible support systems — their jobs, their homes, their campuses, their friends and family — they reach for a different support system, an intangible one: the internet.

Since quarantine began, everyone’s screen time has skyrocketed. For me, it has at least doubled. Much of this time spent online has been constructive. I’ve spent more time writing articles, making art, building my social media audience, and of course, keeping up with my loved ones. Throughout this all, I’ve become a lot more comfortable sharing aspects of myself online, something my friends have attested to feeling as well. We’ve discovered that with all this free time, with all this space, there is freedom in digital expression. There is freedom in uploading more and more information about ourselves onto the web, until we feel digitally “full.” But is this fullness an illusion?

In a way, we’re all more connected than before. We feel more in touch, not just with each other but with ourselves. But we also feel more fragmented. We feel more split, not just between the physical and the digital, but also between every app, website, device, you name it.

Last night, in another one of my 2 AM COVID-inspired existential crises, I rewatched one of my favorite spoken word poems, “Touchscreen” by Marshall Davis Jones.

In one of Jones’ stanzas, he says, “You would think these headphone jacks inject in the flesh / the way we connect to disconnect / power on / but we are powerless.”

As someone who’s music-obsessed, I know this feeling too well. When I plug in my earbuds, the real world fades away. I’m immersed in a new world, a much more interesting one, where I’m the angsty teen protagonist of a music video or the lead of a Broadway musical (one that strategically requires no musical abilities, of course). This embarrassment keeps going until my sister, or roommate, or some stranger in the grocery store, screams my name, and I’m forced to yank the headphones out, my fantasy fading away.

By connecting to technology, we fool ourselves into thinking we’ve disconnected from our physical worlds. But in reality, we’re still there, just divided between multiple places.

There’s something empowering about this multiplicity — about escaping from the present every once in a while — especially when it gives you the ability to express yourself in ways you can’t in real life. But at the same time, there’s something dangerous. I worry about the disconnect that technology creates. I worry that by enabling ourselves through digital spaces, we may be dis-enabling ourselves in real life.

A lot of times, especially during quarantine, when we rely upon the internet to feel seen, digital expression becomes entwined with a fear of oblivion — a fear that if we don’t upload ourselves online, we will no longer exist.

It’s this rat race to exist in multiple places at once that makes us feel both full and empty at the same time. Because to exist online, you have to, at least a little, agree to not exist offline, and vice versa. You have to remove yourself from the present moment and upload your consciousness to the non-present, into the infinite space of the internet.

This isn’t a new concept. Even before quarantine, we have been chipping away at ourselves, spreading ourselves across multiple spaces. Quarantine has just expedited the process.

Though I wonder if once quarantine ends, we’ll revert back to our “normal” tendencies. I wonder if our screen time will decrease, if split identities will merge back together, if we’ll become more present. I wonder if we’ll take a moment to turn off our devices and just breathe. I wonder if it will be too late. If we will have become so comfortable with being fragmented that even if we could go back, we wouldn’t want to. Or we wouldn’t know how.