MY FYP UNDERSTANDS ME AND OTHER PEOPLE DON’T

Guest writer Costanza Polastri offers a humorous and insightful commentary on the pernicious powers of the algorithm and how we can free ourselves from it in order to better engage in the communities

“Oh and here we have another neurodivergent hot girl with people pleasing issues and a septum ring!” is what a gorgeously androgynous person is yelling at me as soon as I open the Tiktok app “how’s the autism diagnosis going?”. I immediately burst out laughing and send it to my best friend with the caption “wow tiktok really said FOR YOU page today huh” and scroll onto the next bite sized piece of content. 

This kind of joke is not uncommon in my corner of the internet: the Tiktok algorithm is so frighteningly good at recommending stuff that it has become a meme. It’s both weird and wonderful that creators can setup a joke, and trust that a piece of software written on the other side of the globe will bring it to the perfect audience, literally delivering the punchline for them. Tiktok is not the only platform that seems to read our minds: we’ve all seen by now an Instagram ad for a product that we’ve only thought about, Amazon recommendations get more specific by the hour even without an Alexa listening to our every word, a good 80% of the kinks that my dates want to try are given to them by PornHub and my friends have all stopped recommending songs to me at some point during the second lockdown, maybe because they know, on some level, that they could never do a better job than Spotify’s curation. And without even realizing it, I became a part of this trend too: when I send the occasional meme, it rarely gets more than a heart emoji reaction, which is the digital equivalent of a light nose exhale, and I find myself doing it less and less.

This is bittersweet: the more I enjoy my very own custom made reality, the more I feel myself losing touch of what will make my friends laugh. I’m competing with the best robots in the world not just for their attention, but for their taste too. Our media diet has become so hyper-specific to us that we are relatively used to the experience of not having to say a word, maybe even not being aware ourselves of what we want, and still getting an extremely personalized reading of our needs (at least, the most superficial ones). The robots know how to comfort us, entertain us, delight us and infuriate us better than any human friend ever could, and all this, crucially, without us having to say a word to them.

Photo by Lukas Rychvalsky on Unsplash

Attunement is a fancy psychology word that denotes, basically, the skill of knowing how to care for each other. I am attuned to you if I can, to a degree, anticipate and satisfy your needs, and vice-versa you are attuned to me if you can know what I want and need, and act accordingly. I am very fond of this word because I think it captures the essence of what it means to build a relationship -be it platonic, sexual, parental or romantic- with someone else: getting closer to someone means, to me, learning how to care for them and teaching them how to care for me. Attunement is made of small details that, hopefully, build up to something bigger. It’s a slow process that only time can build, full of bumps and awkward questions, but also great joy and lots of laughter. The whole package that comes with raw emotional nakedness, scary and wonderful. I want to learn people’s favourite foods and cook it for them, again and again until they love it, I want to know what my date likes in the bedroom and then do it to her, again and again until she loves it: being compatible is a good start, but the only thing that will get us to true mutual understanding is trial and error, a whole lot of awkward conversations and the never-ending willingness to forgive each other’s mistakes. In one word: vulnerability. Again and again until we love it.

At the cost of sounding dramatic, I find this whole deal frightening. Beautiful of course, but frightening: the idea of having to trust someone else with my needs is stomach churning, the second most terrifying thing I could imagine after, of course, the idea that others might not care about my needs enough to learn them and act on them. I am a soft being in need of care, letting others become attuned to me is hard for my soul. I suspect this has something to do with childhood, something something your caregiver not understanding when they have to feed you or whatever. When I text this thought to my friend, he responds with “so basically becoming friends is just taking care of each other’s mommy issues”, to which I simply reply with a picture of Sigmund Freud with an anime-style blushing effect, a picture that I use as a reaction (I wish I was kidding) at least once a week. Clearly my fear is highly unfounded: some people in the world are very interested in learning when my soul needs shitposting and have no problem taking it upon themselves to feed me the goods.

Still, I find myself frustrated with having to explain the details of how to care for me to other people, and while this is not caused by the technology of our time, the Tiktok algorithm definitely doesn’t make things better or easier. Inside my pocket there is, at all times, a little magical black box that delivers the most accurate prediction of my wants and tastes and needs directly to my prefrontal cortex, at the pressing of a button. My phone knows things about me that my own mother doesn’t know, that I don’t even know, and all I have to do to articulate these things is to turn it on: the more I reflexively do it, the less I build the skill of actually putting my needs into words for others to understand. And I’m a bloody writer, my literal job and passion is to put my feelings into words, so I can only imagine how others are doing: the memes about showing your therapist a Tiktok instead of actually explaining your feelings have made it all the way to Instagram, so I can’t be the only one who feels this way. I’m getting more and more intolerant of having to wait for others to get attuned to me, I find myself wantint to train them like an algorithm, I become impatient and emotionally fidgety when I get to know new people, I expect from them a level of care that is objectively impossible for someone who just met me. I want them to read my mind like mommy Amazon does, literally thinking to myself (in my worst moments) that I’ve given them plenty of hints -I usually haven’t- and feeling frustrated at how slow they are at picking them up. And when they can’t magically read my mind, I take my needs back to the robots, checking my phone every 30 seconds to ease social anxiety at houseparties, most of the times without even realizing I took out the little black box in the first place. Does anyone else get a tiny bit of heart racing when someone suggests we all put away our phones for the dinner?

On the other side, the more time I spend scrolling, the more I’m losing my ability to get and interpret feedback from other people, to ask difficult or intimate questions, to apologize for getting it wrong, to read body language, to make meaningful eye contact, to catch hints, to memorize informations about their taste, to remember details about their past life. To become attuned to them. The pandemic didn’t make this any easier, of course: losing such a vital and big chunk of our formative years has compromised my generation’s ability to have real, in-person relationships, and while this is not our fault, I don’t think anyone is coming to rescue us and teach us the tools to build those skills back up again, so we have to figure out ourselves how to dig each other out of this ditch, and the least we can do is be compassionate. I have a suspicion that the folks who got it worse than me, who lost even younger years to Covid-19, feel this problem 10 times worse.

Photo by Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash

There is a terrifying “trust the process” element to making friends, that I think a lot of us are losing the ability to tolerate. A big chunk of this is from circumstances outside of our control -atomization of society, lack of walkable neighbourhoods, having to work all the goddamn time just to afford food and rent, dating apps becoming the norm, loss of third places, a literal fucking pandemic, etc etc- but I also think that part of this has to do with our own expectations: we’re so used to having our (low level) emotional needs met by the algorithms, that we never build the skills to communicate them, and therefore are at a complete loss in even understanding what it is that we want. And obviously, if we can’t even understand and communicate what kind of memes make us laugh and what music we enjoy, how are we ever expected to figure out what it means for us to feel loved or what we want from our lives. There’s a part of me that wants to only be surrounded by people who completely get me, who I feel 100% comfortable around, who almost feel like they can read my mind. This is unrealistic, and I think it’s important -at least for me- to internalize that very little people will feel like they can read my mind, and while that brings a bit of grief, it also brings freedom and acceptance. I’m not suggesting that marginalized folks simply put up with micro-aggressions from others, frankly the idea that “love is a lot of work!” has been used to justify in my past relationships a lot of misogyny, a lot of entitlement towards my body and frankly sometimes abusive stuff. So no, my boundaries being flexible doesn’t mean that anything goes. But I do need to remind myself that my tolerance for social awkwardness and anxiety is a lot higher than I think, and most crucially, flexible and capable of increasing. And not everyone is going to be a lifelong friend, and that’s ok too.

When the internet is not giving us solutions to this loneliness problem that border on psychopathy, the advice we hear is that loneliness is the one thing we can’t cure for ourselves, so the only choice we have is to cure it for someone else and hope that others will cure it for us. By definition, being with other people is the one thing that we can’t do alone, no matter how much we try, so it makes sense to focus our efforts on other people and pray for the favour to be returned. This advice is so correct it makes me want to scream: it’s very true, but helping others requires the very same energy that loneliness consumes, and in my darkest moments I feel like I have nothing left to give. I am afraid I smell of desperation, and it becomes yet another excuse to isolate myself and be comforted by the robots. But then I eat something, take a shower, dust myself off, and remember that every single time in my life in which my brain was trying to convince me that I am hopeless and beyond salvation, I proved it wrong. So, in the spirit of fighting doom (and, oh would you look at that, trying to cure loneliness for others) here is all of what worked for me.

Photo by ray sangga kusuma on Unsplash

Firstly, I was seeing a lot of rejection where there actually was just a lack of time: adjusting my expectations was a crucial step, because building closeness takes a lot more time than I’d like. Where before I used to feel rejected if someone wasn’t immediately vibing with me the first time we met, nowadays I try to commit at least for 1 or 2 months of trying a new activity out, before I decide that the people there are not my tribe. I pick one of my hobbies or interests and look for an activity related to it, literally googling the name of the activity, the name of the city where I live and words like “group” or “meetup”. From volunteering groups to language learning evenings, from book clubs to BDSM events, anything goes as long as they’re meeting regularly. It’s not particularly glamorous, but we have to start somewhere. I try to prioritize groups in my same age range, that meet at least once a week, close to where I live and that are cheap, although I have yet to find one that fits all of those criteria. I take a deep breathe before I walk into the event, sometimes two, sometimes ten, and it’s cringe and awkward but it also eases my anxiety in a way that numbing it away with my phone never could. I try to listen more than I talk, and to never consider myself above anyone. On a side note, I know very well that churches are often filled with the worst and most bigoted members of our communities, but if you find one that is not terrible I can’t recommend them enough: there is almost certainly one around you, they offer countless opportunities for volunteering and family friendly activities, they require zero money to participate, their main activities are on days when you usually don’t have to work, they often have different groups for different ages and I can guarantee you that the old lady who sat next to you at church makes the absolute best lasagna you’ve ever tasted and she is eager to give you the recipe. As a society, we’re absolutely sleeping on intergenerational communities.

I try to make it a point to speak to the people who look friendly at my local bar or café, if I’m lucky enough to have one in my neighbourhood. I find that openly saying that I am new to town and looking for friends works wonders to ease the initial tension of meeting new folks: I’m often worried that when I talk to strangers my friendliness might come across as suspicious, worried that others might think that I want something from them or that I’m hitting on them… but I noticed that saying “by the way I just moved here, where do people go to meet others?” after a compliment, it is almost always met with kindness. If you’ve lived in the same place your whole life, I think you could get away with telling a little lie and say you’re new to this area of town, don’t worry I won’t tell.

I know, realistically speaking, that all of this will not make me come across as cool, and I need to be ok with it because I’m a lonely young woman who works too much and makes too little, and trying to act mysterious won’t change that. Some people -maybe even the very people that I would desperately want to be liked by- will inevitably meet my earnestness with cringe and distance, but there is really nothing shameful in being a bit lonely, and I like to think there are folks out there who will be compassionate towards my struggles. Social anxiety is a bitch, and I really am familiar with how much it can hijack our brains. Right after the last lockdown I really had to re-teach myself how to socialize, and for a while I was full on agoraphobic: I had to give myself little challenges, like “I’m gonna tell the cashier I really like her nail polish today” to get used to talking to other people again after living for months in complete isolation, and even those kind of tiny interactions would make my heart race a bit. You probably gathered from the tone of this essay that it was really tough, but I am really so glad I pushed through my social anxiety, and I like to think the cashier appreciated it too. Eventually, I worked up the confidence to go to an event with many other people and stay for 10 minutes, then 20, then the whole evening, then the whole evening again, and it genuinely felt so good when I started feeling like “a regular” at some places.

Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash

In the same way that decorating a house slowly turns it into a home, and your shoulders relax just a tad bit more when you enter that space, the same can happen with other people’s souls, with events and bars and places, and it’s wonderful. It’s easy, when you’ve been lonely for a while, to convince yourself that everyone else has a group of attractive and socially well adjusted friends, and you are uniquely awkward and socially deficient in your struggles. But we all know that’s bullshit: when you put yourself out there, even if you don’t end up making deep connections or finding your people right away, you are subtly telling other people that it is ok to openly look for friends, and maybe even to be a bit lonely. And don’t we all need that kind of messaging? Don’t we all wanna be reminded that other folks are looking for connections too, and maybe some of those folks will be compatible souls? The world in which we live puts a million and a half obstacles in the way of forming new friendships, from soulless jobs to phone addiction to a literal fucking pandemic. So maybe, let’s not make our own minds into yet another obstacle: there’s countless people out there that are just as eager to make friends as you are! Put your phone down and go find them!