Hi friends! Normally we’d have a chat pack next Friday, but in a week I’ll be somewhere between Des Moines, IA, and Cheyenne, WY. So instead, I’ll be sending out a short series called Notes From the Road through my weeklong trip across the U.S. These posts will only be available to paid subscribers, so if you’ve been thinking about a paid subscription for $5/month, this is a great time to do it.
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Back in March, I was drinking beer with a friend when she got a notification on her phone. “Kathy,” (a college nickname she won’t let go of) “have you heard of BeReal?” I hadn’t. “All the kids are on it these days,” she continued, holding up her phone to snap a photo of us.
The premise of BeReal, a social media app particularly popular among Gen Z, is simple. Every day at an unpredicted time, BeReal sends all the users a notification. I call it, “BeReal O’Clock.” We open our phones in simultaneity and the app takes a front- and back-facing photo which is posted to a timeline visible to only our close friends. BeReal was supposedly designed to get people to stop using filters, to encourage you to “show your friends who you really are, for once.”
In theory, I like the idea. And for the first several months, I liked the app. It reminded me of the now-almost-vintage era of Snapchat which fostered a spontaneity and unselfconsciousness no other social media app even pretends to encourage.
But BeReal was pretending, sending me notifications throughout my last summer in Boston, documenting a moment of every day and sharing those photos with five friends.
Over the summer, that list grew to 37 “friends.” It included people I rarely talked to. An ex. A college acquaintance. I felt indifferent about seeing what they were doing, and worse, as the circle of people seeing my posts grew larger, I felt increasingly self-conscious.
When the app caught me doing something fun, I was invigorated. When the notification came while I was at work, or by myself, or after I’d already gone to bed, I felt heightened social anxiety. Other people were doing cooler things than I was! They were with more friends!
In college, the golden age of Snapchat among my cohort, my best friend nicknamed me the “Queen of FOMO.” He wasn’t wrong to call me out; my Fear Of Missing Out was intense. I was vocal about it, whining not only about missing out on specific events, but missing out on the possibility of fun and special and singular experiences. I was worried that critical bonding would happen in my absence. I was worried that the stories that got told and retold wouldn’t include me.
In the last couple years, I thought I’d overcome my FOMO. But it returned with a vengeance this summer. I suspect I hadn’t outgrown FOMO so much as it had been dormant for the majority of the pandemic, when it wasn’t safe or possible to do much of anything with anyone.
But now, there is so much to do and so much to miss out on. I see it on BeReal; I see it on Instagram; I hear about it in real life. I am stuck in a constant scroll of weekend trips and outdoor beers and endless summer. In fact, I’m doing all these things as well. I don’t feel left out of the summer fun—I’m having the summer fun. But everything feels heightened because it’s my last summer here. My last sticky green east coast summer, at least for a while.
The early days of summer felt ripe with possibility. The weeks ahead felt expansive, unrolling before me, a summer carpet. I always have this idea that the time will expand to accommodate my summer plans. That time will stretch to hold the shape of summer.
That’s never how it is. Summer is never as long and malleable as I imagine. There are schedule constraints. There are a limited number of weekends. And still, I packed an enormous amount into my summer. I scrolled back through months of BeReal images—an archive visible only to me—and saw everything I did: cousin’s wedding in Los Gatos, visit with friends in New York City, camping in Maine, long weekend in Vermont, road race in upstate New York, reunion with college friends in Connecticut.
I was gone for five weekends in a row and I kept packing and unpacking and repacking the same black bag. It was full in the way I want my summer to be. It was social and sunny and exhausting and restorative.
Yet through it all, I was missing out on time in Boston, where there were people I wanted to see before I left for good. And where I was swept up in a summer romance I’d been hoping would ignite for months and now finally was. I didn’t want to be gone, and I did want to be gone. I didn't want to forgo my fun weekends, but I mourned what I couldn’t have when I was out of town.
Last week, I had the perfect summer day in Boston. It was busy and breezy, yet unstructured. I sat on the grass and ate the smoothest strawberry custard. I waited in line forever to get burritos with a friend, but we didn’t mind because we had all the time in the world. Friends invited us to bike out to Crystal Lake, a pond in Newton, Mass, to watch the moonrise; it’s so rare to have a free evening and the ability to say yes to spontaneous plans, but that’s the spirit of an unencumbered summer.
We met up with the group in Coolidge Corner and traveled as a bike parade west out of the city, working our legs and our nonfunctional gears up the inclines, then bombing down the Newton hills, our brakes untouched. We got to a patch of grass at the edge of the water and stripped down as the sun sank, submerging our clammy bodies in the water, still pink with the reflection of dusk and warm from the summer heat.
We floated for an hour, watching a glow in the east that could have been a hint of the moon, or maybe just light pollution from Boston. When our arms wore out and the moon still hadn’t crested above the trees, we walked ashore and dried off. It was almost 10pm then, and BeReal notifications came through on all of our phones. I snapped my camera with the flash on, capturing my drenched, messy hair and a blurry photo of the pond.
As we unlocked our bikes, someone spotted the glowing orb and called us all over. It was bright and low, the color of corn. “Ugh right after we took our BeReals!” I heard someone mutter. And I had the same nervous thought. I was ending my perfect summer day, and suddenly it mattered that other people knew I’d had this experience. It took me out of the yellow light of this celestial body, out of this wash of awe, and thrust my face into the anxious blue glow of my phone.
In pursuit of Being Real, I’d taken myself out of the experience of just being. I’m not the first to critique social media in this way. I’ll delete it for a few weeks, remove it from my home screen, add app limits, but I still find myself back in the scroll and hyper-conscious of how I’m being perceived. With an app like Instagram, I know the whole thing is a sham. Nothing is real on that app. But BeReal claims to be real, so when I see other people’s lives, it heightens the feeling that I’m missing out. What’s harder, but more gratifying, is remembering the value of being exactly where I am, doing what I’m already doing.
I had the momentary urge to chuck my phone into the pond and fully submerge my online presence. Instead, I put it in my pocket and took a breath of the cooling summer air, then biked on home, the moon in the east lighting my ride.
Fortnightly Faves
This interview between Charlie Warzel of the Atlantic newsletter Galaxy Brain and Kate Lindsay who quit all social media except TikTok. Really great explanation of the way social media changes our behavior even when we’re in spaces that are not online. Apropos of the above.
This OpEd in the NYT about the busyness trap we fall for in America, and what it costs us when there is more to life than the propaganda slogan of “hard work.” This essay perfectly captured what I’ve been discussing with a lot of friends lately, but couldn’t put into words nearly as well.
This visceral, affecting poem about a mother’s response to the loss of her child.
This Ezra Klein show interview about why housing is so expensive (in addition to many other discussions about everything that’s wrong with our country’s approach to housing).
This New Yorker deep dive into the uber-rich superyacht culture which I found gross but also addictive?
This Julia Jacklin song that I love very much.
Instagram is perfectly designed to make us all feel like shit. It's a firehose of FOMO, and it really messes with my head.
Your descriptions of summer somehow make me long for it when it’s literally happening lol. So great. Can’t wait for more of this series!