Our lives and identities have moved online – and it’s driving us insane

‘You hardly notice how, over time, the world outside has shrunk, until soon there is no outside world.’ Photograph: Anna Barclay/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreen‘You hardly notice how, over time, the world outside has shrunk, until soon there is no outside world.’ Photograph: Anna Barclay/Getty ImagesOur lives and identities have moved online – and it’s driving us insaneBrigid DelaneyPeople have become servants to social media. The ultimate flex is to walk back to real life

Think of your online life as a garden. At first it’s just a few seeds here or there – a Facebook profile where you created entire albums from a night at the pub, or maybe a Tumblr or a Myspace page listing your favourite bands. It is fun – something just for you and your friends to enjoy.

Then the garden grows. You get an Instagram account and document moments from each day on Stories, use LinkedIn for networking and sharing career triumphs, and check your X/Twitter hyper-vigilantly in case you wrote something that just got you cancelled.

Your online garden grows more sprawling and complex; now it’s no longer just a fun project for yourself on weekends and weeknights. As it grows, you start to view it through the eyes of others.

How will this garden be seen? Will people like it? What can I plant in this garden that will make more people like it?

A few more years pass. And now, instead of working on the garden here and there, you’re in there all the time. You have discovered if your garden is really enticing, you can make money off it. You want – then need – big numbers coming in there. You look at other people’s gardens all the time and you get jealous. They have better gardens.

Read moreWhen you’re not in your garden, you’re still somehow tending to it – looking at the number of people coming in, and comparing them with what it used to be, and being worried that maybe you didn’t plant the right things. But people will tell you if you’re doing it wrong. They’ll spray paint all over the garden walls how much your garden sucks, how you’re a loser, how ugly it all is.

And with all this activity going on you hardly notice how, over time, the world outside your garden has shrunk, until soon there is no outside world. The garden is your home now.

When this current moment ends and a more enlightened time kicks in, descendants looking back will see that millions (or is it billions?) of us have spent the last 10 years or more migrating our lives and identities, and our political, communal and social selves, to a digital realm that has sent many of us insane.

The (digital) signal that we are living a better life has been imbued with more energy and importance than living a better life itself.

Those descendants will see what we can’t really see now – a massive serf culture has emerged, where people have become servants to these gardens.

They’ll see how truly unfree so many of us are – allowing the rich, real, tactile world to recede, while the digital gardens have sprawled to take up all our time and energy (the average user spends about 2 hours and 39 minutes a day on social media.)

And it will become apparent that the real elite won’t be the people with the most popular digital gardens. They’ll be the people who never had gardens. Or people who had small private gardens, where they only let a few friends in.

Brand strategists and trend forecasters are saying that, in 2026, the true measure of status is privacy and a low or no digital footprint.

This is a different way of living off-grid.

You experience a rich and interesting life in the real world and don’t feel the need to post about it.

Your sense of self worth is not linked to how many people see that you’ve been somewhere, hung out with someone or worn something.

Your income, status and financial security is not dependent on your social media account.

Your attention span has not been corrupted or shortened by chronic social media consumption and AI use – and this gives you almost superhuman powers such as the ability to read long, difficult novels, think critically, and retain information in your head.

Your emotional stability is not dependent on how your content is performing.

You have not internalised the digital panopticon where everything you do is with an eye to how it is perceived.

You have a healthy social life in the real world, meaning you have less time or inclination to post.

Brand strategist Eugene Healey in his Substack wrote a recent series on “post-luxury status symbols” and said “the greatest privilege is to be chronically offline” and “in this culture of overexposure – it’s only natural that it becomes desirable to opt out”.

The ultimate flex is not needing social media, walking away from your digital garden and back into your real life.