MAKE IT MAKE SENSE: Staying sane in the matrix
being obsessed with being online and then trying to make real life work, too
Hello crushes!
She’s back from London with a slight British accent (kidding, can you imagine), she’s a worn out woman who just finished recording the audiobook (in a baton relay style, across timezone approach with Luce) and she’s bloody happy to be back writing to you from her desk in Lisbon! She will now stop writing in third person.
Secondly - thank you to everyone who RSVPd to our upcoming event with Bookety Book Books in September!!! Honestly, as someone who’s not getting married any time soon, it feels like a… wedding? It was a true joy to wake up on this side of the world and see it was all booked out. Just simply j’adore you all!
Our weird online lives, the ways we’re trying to claw them back in real life
When Luce and I were planning out the book - which took hours of us sitting down either mainlining caffeine accidentally next to NZ celebrities or our favourite red wine in Lisbon we affectionately called ‘Whining Woman,’ we got to this point where we were spending so much time together, both online (commenting and tagging in Google Docs), and in real life we were like I don’t know where you end and I begin.
Sometimes it even happens when we read aloud parts of the book.
Lol, sounds like a romcom, but I mean it in a way that’s very symptomatic of the way we live our lives now. I know more of us are online than others, more of the niche internet wormholes resonate with some but not all, and that we all have those cool friends who take ages to text back and aren’t on social media.
Basically - we’re all on our own internet connection spectrum, but the way this evolved so rapidly without anyone being able to properly regulate or take stock of has created this kind of hyperventilative state of trying to keep up, stay relevant, maintain visibility, keep connected or even keep our jobs (insert AI doomer deluge of information here).
We want data on everything. When our car is coming. When our next period will be, and how that is on average with everyone else’s. How busy the train carriage is and which one we should take. How likely we are to get a seat at the bar at which time. What Blake Lively said in an interview years ago, where the dress she was wearing from, who wore it first, and better, and how much it cost.
So much knowing has also made us so afraid of unknowing. Which, in most cases, is really just living. Not only do we have access to all this information (wow, hot take, I know, but stay with me), but we have it on everyone else, too. Where they went on holiday, what they wore, who they were with, what happiness looks like to them, how they discovered retinol for their skintype and how you too can put an outfit together like them. It’s a watching game and it’s making us crazy with this feeling like everyone knows who they are and what they want except for us.
Being so psycho obsessed with the internet has unlocked so many cute things for me - crushes, here (hello), work, knowledge, friends, travel, places, people - all those gorgeous Air BnB stretch quote art canvases. In a way, it’s how I understand the world. It’s also what fucks me up at times when I have bouts of bad mental health, how I know I’m trying to know too much and not living enough in real life, in the now.
There are more concrete ways we’ve suggested to combat these crazy feelings in the book, but for the meantime, setting rules around my internet use seems to be the hottest tip and only way. DND, Sleep mode, Quiet Time, turning 5G off and just using my phone to take photos when I’m out - all these listicle hacks tend to be the things that make the difference between me being a crazed, always online working woman to one with heels on the ground in the real world? A life’s work.
Sometimes explanatory words can only capture a feeling so well and for the others, you can resort to an unhinged, list poem of sorts to tell you what we really mean:
Love you! Can’t wait to see you soon.
Xox
