Anonymity - Who Are We When No One Is Watching?

If a tree falls in the woods......

You are somehow less of a person when you are alone, and I don’t mean this in any negative way. There are just less ways to be a person when there is no potential for interaction, so a lot of tendrils of your personality will coil back inward and sink beneath the inky surface and you remain a simpler being.

Maybe you’re the sort who smiles brightly at the cashier while you’re buying your morning bread, but you won’t be randomly grinning to yourself while you’re brewing your tea alone in your kitchen. Maybe you string series of colorful expletives when some jerk casually cuts in front of you on the highway in wild traffic but you won’t be doing that while buttering your toast and waiting for the eggs to finish boiling. Maybe you love making sarcastic jokes while chatting to your friends over pizza and cheap wine, maybe you roll your eyes when your mom tells you to take a warmer jacket, even though you’re 36 and well able to get dressed all by yourself, but you probably aren’t thinking in quips or eyerolls while you read in your favorite corner, or you putter quietly around your home. 

We are, essentially, a series of relationships.

Detached from relationships, a different operating system takes over. I don’t think it was programmed by the same guys. Essentially, you turn into a sort of free floating camera, taking things in, recording without reaction.

Some people are scared of operating in this other, more basic mode, and they take great care to never be left alone. My childhood best friend was like this. When we reached our teens and her parents became comfortable leaving her alone for a few days while they went to set up an exhibition of her dad’s intaglios, she would immediately call me to come down to her place and stay for the duration. By the time I arrived, there would be at least three other people there. She would make sure a cloud of interactions existed around her at every moment.

Me, I couldn’t understand this. The idea that everyone from my place could go away for days and leave me all alone seemed a dream, I would have reveled in the solitude if it had ever happened. 

It seldom did.

Tell me if this makes sense to you, but I feel people carry around them a cloud of atmosphere. There’s a whole vibe around every single person, and when you share the same space with someone, your vibes intermingle. You can feel them even from the next room, even with the door closed. You know that feeling when you step in through the front door, and as you’re putting down your keys you immediately know if someone’s home or not? Vibes. 

(I’ve actually read something recently about our hearts generating an electromagnetic field that reaches several feet outside our body. It definitely goes along with my vibes theory.)

The vibes don’t travel via digital connection, which is why hanging out over Zoom doesn’t quite feel the same as sitting in the same room. And why online conversations are always vaguely awkward, with weird stops and starts. You can’t get a read on other people’s vibes. 

It is my belief that the vibes retract when the person is asleep. That’s why I always loved drawing at night. Everyone falls asleep, their vibe clouds shrivel inwards and settle down around them, and there’s suddenly so much space for your own thoughts to unfurl. The airwaves aren’t crowded anymore. Working at night is my favorite thing ever, it brought me great sadness to let it go. There’s an unparalleled freedom of thought that comes over you at night. Day rules suddenly don’t apply.

This guy likes every Substack post he opens, because he knows how much it means to the writers.

Scrolling social media is a little like being less than a whole person too. You see all these things shared by all these people, but you’re by yourself, safe on the other side of the little portal. Your proper behavior patterns for engaging with other humans fail to ignite, you maintain the basic operating system you usually use when you’re alone, except there you are, interacting. It’s a weird in-between-space. This is, I think, why people act online the way they would act when nobody is watching them. Many an online comment should really have remained an inside thought. 

Oscar Wilde was on to something when he said “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

The mask can, apparently, be almost anything - a phone screen, a car windshield, whatever gives you a feeling of being protected from direct observation - and suddenly the truth comes out, all the prejudices, all the bitterness. The temper. Dylan Moran has a great bit about how different it is trying to get around someone on the sidewalk versus on the road. Two pedestrians getting in each other’s way will smile, shake their heads self-deprecatingly, ‘oh, ever so sorry, oh dear, oh do excuse me’. The same person sitting behind the steering wheel would be shouting every curse word under the sun. 

‘Bloody moron, who gave YOU a license?!? Where the FUCK are you GOING???’

We don’t fully appreciate how much of a leash and muzzle our ingrained social customs really are. As long as there is direct contact, a sharing of space - a whole different system applies. 

Then behind closed doors you shed it like snakeskin. 

After my third year of university, I got a scholarship to spend a year in Japan. I had been learning Japanese since high school, and I chose it as my university major. It was the most impractical yet absolutely wonderful choice, a sign of privilege, or airheadedness, or both - studying something with minimum chance of practical career application. I knew from the beginning that in the third year we would all take a test given by the Japanese Ministry of Education, and whoever scored highest would spend a year in Japan, studying at the university of their choice. I was gunning for that scholarship from the first day. 

It was a crazy, disorienting experience. I was 21, I had never traveled anywhere by myself. I hadn’t even left the country that many times. I started out excited, that excitement turned to dread as my journey progressed. I had a long layover in Frankfurt, they put me in the airport Sheraton for the night. That evening I disintegrated along all my seams - teary-eyed and panicking, I wrote letters to my then-boyfriend (now upgraded to husband), to my parents, full of worries over how it will all go, was it all a terrible mistake, how will I manage it. A year in Tokyo, all by myself.

I woke up early the next morning and chucked both letters into the bin. 

I came down for breakfast, heaping my plate with smoked salmon, and strawberries, and Nutella. A waiter offered me a selection of English-language newspapers on those weird long wooden sticks they use in hotels to keep broadsheets neat. Life was suddenly a completely new kind of good.

Landing in Tokyo felt like coming to a home you left as a very small child, before you formed any memories - strange but somehow still familiar in vibes only. The sky was a completely unreal shade of blue. I sat on the first seat behind the driver in the airport shuttle bus and stared at the ribbons of interweaving highways we were passing. 

That entire year was me floating around like the eye of the camera. Yeah I socialized, I made lots of friends, all that. But the alone parts were somehow the best. Because they were a whole new way of being. I had had friends before, but I had never been alone before. It was like a warm blanket. The freedom to just look at things, think about things, to wander. 

Tokyo is extremely laid-back in the sense that you can go wherever you want looking however you want and largely people have no reaction to you at all. I felt like I could take a stroll around Ikebukuro with a raw chicken on my head instead of a hat and no one would so much as blink. 

Besides walking around alone, soon I had to get used to eating alone. This was a tricky one because back home we just didn’t do that. I wasn’t the type to eat in restaurants anyway, and if I would go I would certainly not be going alone. But once it clicked it became my favorite thing in the world to do. Go eat alone, go see a movie alone. There was a power to it. I phoned home only once during that entire year, on my mom’s birthday. I was well and truly in a different world.

I got to do a few more trips overseas by myself, and every time I would marvel at what an odd experience it was, being complete master of your itinerary. Walking down the street and not having to decide until you reached the very corner whether you wanted to turn right or left. Not having to negotiate meal options. I realized you literally see more. It isn’t even strange in retrospect, when your attention isn’t shared with another person of course you will be noticing more, looking in different places. 

You are not just a string of relationships with other people - you are also a string of relationships with places. Having lived that year alone in Tokyo is as much a part of how I turned out as is having lived through the Balkan wars in the ‘90s, or having spent all my childhood summers in a small village by the Adriatic sea in Croatia, or having immigrated to Canada. We build ourselves in layers, like elaborate cakes.

This guy smiles at everyone at work all day, and then spends his evenings typing mean comments under people’s workout progress posts.

Recently I read a compelling text by Linda Caroll of Hello, Writer! entitled ‘The Problem With Both Medium And Substack Isn’t The Platform’. In it (and I warmly encourage you to give it a look) she compares Substack writing to baking a plate of fresh cookies and giving them out to strangers for free. Her point was that we take free things for granted, which is why such a very small percentage of readers bothers to leave even a like - that smallest sliver of effort you can give back to someone if you got anything out of reading their work.

Her cookie metaphor is particularly good, because it illustrates what I’m talking about here as well. Imagine a person standing in the town square with a platter of fresh cookies, inviting people to take one if they please. Can you imagine yourself being in that situation, face to face with someone giving you something, and not saying anything at all? Just taking a cookie and leaving in silence? Some people would, for various reasons, but most of us would, I’m pretty sure, mumble out an awkward ‘thank you’ at least.

Linda’s takeaway was that we don’t appreciate free things, and if you suddenly slapped a price tag on those cookies, say ‘two for a dollar’, suddenly people would not only be thanking you profusely, they would also happily be giving you money and possibly even feeling better about the cookies themselves. And I am sure that aspect of it does come into play. Someone else had also pointed out that a part of your readers read from their inboxes and not from the app, so they don’t even have the option of clicking the little ‘heart’ button. But I also have a different theory.

I think that when we’re reading Substack - well, you get it. We’re a bit less of a person. We are shrouded in that veil of anonymity that the internet gives us. We are, effectively, alone. If you sat next to someone listening to them tell you a story, or a bit of news, or anything, you would naturally provide some sort of reaction, because our conditioning demands it. Have you ever listened to someone talking without saying absolutely anything? I don’t think I have. That’s just not how interpersonal communication works. 

But when you are behind the screen, you tendrils are withdrawn, your vibe cloud is contracted, just like when it’s just you there, alone with your anonymity. Walking down the street observing strangers. In that scenario, you are much less likely to interact. Some people will stop for a second to say something to a total stranger - how nice their jacket is, or whatever - but most people won’t. I’ve only done it a few times in my life. So when you are in that anonymous mode, leaving a like suddenly carries far less weight, because it isn’t linkable to you directly. There will be some likes there, nobody will know whether you specifically did or didn’t leave one. Hence most people don’t.

So that’s an interesting thing for us to consider as we interact on here - do we want to engage with Substack with our social tendrils dormant, or awake. I know what we all prefer as writers. The question is how much we can commit to as readers.

On the other hand, writing is great way of being alone. Of course ultimately you’re always talking to someone, but that someone is somewhere else, not yet within earshot of your thoughts. Polishing a sentence is a great way to spend time with yourself. To exist in that lower setting, where you’re for a moment not a long, intricate string of relationships, you’re a simpler thing.

Drawing is an even better way because there are no words, even. 

Just you.