Real Life
Not long ago I came across an Instagram profile in which someone wrote that they were interested in real life.
I liked the phrase immediately. Perhaps because I flatter myself that I am interested in real life too. But the expression stayed with me, because once we speak of real life, we quietly admit the existence of another kind.
Unreal life, presumably.
And it occurred to me that we now spend a rather large part of our lives there.
Instagram itself would seem a reasonable place to begin. People photograph their food, their holidays, their children, their faces; they choose one image out of twenty, improve it, crop it, remove whatever does not belong in the story, and then wait to see what other people make of this small exhibition.
It is tempting to say that this has little to do with life.
Yet there sits a real person with a real telephone, spending twenty real minutes, perhaps forty, perhaps two hours, from a life that will not be extended by the amount spent on Instagram.
So already the distinction becomes inconvenient.
Take a child who wakes up, turns on a computer and plays for twelve or fourteen hours before going to bed again. My instinct is the conventional one. I want to say: Go outside. Meet someone. Do something. Live.
Those fourteen hours will not be returned to him on the grounds that they were spent in a virtual world. He was pleased, angry, frightened, bored, triumphant. He made decisions. He may have spoken to friends. He may remember one of those evenings twenty years later.
The game was virtual.
The hours were not.
Perhaps, then, the useful distinction is not between real life and unreal life but between life at first hand and life at second hand.
Though this distinction soon gives me trouble as well.
If I spend four hours reading a novel, am I living at second hand? Certainly I am moving through a world invented by another person. Yet a novel can alter me more deeply than four hours beside a lake. And I can sit beside a beautiful lake while thinking obsessively about why someone has not replied to my last message.
The scenery, it seems, proves very little.
Television appears easier. I sit on the sofa and watch somebody else climb a mountain. I do not travel through Patagonia; I watch somebody travel through Patagonia. I do not have an interesting conversation; I watch two people having one.
Surely this is second-hand life.
And yet those two hours are still mine.
Perhaps the documentary teaches me something. Perhaps I later travel to Patagonia because of it. Perhaps a film changes some small conviction that I carry for the next twenty years.
So the unreal life has an irritating habit of entering the real one.
And the real one is not always particularly real either.
Fourteen hours of gaming, for example, may not be unfortunate because nothing happened during them. Plenty may have happened. The difficulty may be that the number of things that could have happened became rather small.
Outside, the world interferes.
It rains when I had expected sun. A train leaves just as I reach the platform. Somebody begins a conversation I did not want. I get lost. I become bored. My legs hurt. Another person misunderstands me. I say something foolish. The evening takes a turn nobody had planned.
Reality has bad manners.
It does not always cooperate.
A constructed digital world may contain difficulty, surprise and even chaos, but somebody has arranged the field. The dragon is there because someone decided a dragon should be there. The reward appears because someone programmed it. Even the surprise was, in some sense, prepared in advance.
Perhaps this is part of what I mean when I say “real life.”
The world resists me.
Unfortunately, this does not settle the matter either.
Kant would have spoiled the whole distinction in a few pages.
We do not encounter the world as it is in itself. What reaches us has already passed through perception, through the structures of thought, through whatever peculiar machinery turns light, sound and pressure into the confident experience that a tree is standing outside the window.
I do not possess reality raw.
I possess an experience of it.
The tree may be perfectly real. But my access to it is already mediated.
From here one could easily become lazy and say that everything is therefore equally real. The forest, Instagram, dreams, computer games, television — merely different arrangements of experience.
I cannot quite believe that.
All experience may be mediated, but not all mediation is equal.
When I walk through a forest, something outside me keeps correcting me.
The ground is slippery whether I approve of this or not. The hill is steeper than I expected. The path turns left despite my conviction that it ought to turn right. A mosquito does not care in the slightest about my interpretation of events.
There is resistance.
Between the world and me stands my perception.
On Instagram, the queue has become longer.
There is first the world. Then another person perceives some fragment of it. Then that person chooses what to photograph. Then one image is selected from many. It may be edited. It is placed in a certain context. A platform decides whether to show it to me. Then I perceive this carefully filtered fragment and form an impression of my own.
So
world → perception → me
becomes something more like
world → someone else’s perception → selection → presentation → algorithm → my perception → me.
None of this makes the image unreal.
But it does place it at some distance.
Perhaps that distance is what we vaguely mean when we complain about second-hand life.
It may also explain why I feel uneasy seeing a child spend all day gaming, or why I feel faintly ridiculous after discovering that I have spent an hour scrolling through short videos I can barely remember.
Not because no life occurred.
Because life did occur.
That is precisely the problem.
Every hour there is paid for with the same thing as every hour anywhere else.
Time.
And once I think of it this way, quantity begins to interest me more than authenticity.
An hour in a game may be excellent. A film may be more important to me than a walk. A conversation with somebody thousands of kilometres away may be better than the conversation available to me across the garden fence.
I do not want to create some absurd moral ranking in which forests are noble, books are acceptable and screens are sinful.
But if second-hand life slowly occupies nearly all the available space, something is lost.
Not truth, necessarily.
Possibility.
The accidental encounter. The physical obstacle. The dull afternoon. The misunderstanding. The awkward silence. The unexpected invitation. The event nobody designed for me.
I am hardly innocent in any of this.
While thinking about the virtues of real life, I spend a remarkable amount of time online. I read things, watch things, search for things, write things, and have long conversations with an artificial intelligence about what real life actually consists of.
I could, of course, be sitting in a café talking to somebody.
Though that would not automatically make the conversation better.
And this artificial conversation might produce an idea which becomes an essay, which somebody else later reads on a screen while avoiding whatever is taking place outside.
At that point the categories begin to collapse again.
Perhaps “Is this real life?” was always the wrong question.
Of course it is life.
The less comfortable question is:
How much of my limited life do I want to spend here, and what is happening elsewhere while I do?
Perhaps that was what the person on Instagram meant when they wrote that they were interested in real life.
I cannot ask them.
I only saw their Instagram profile.