We’re Only as Important as the Relational Model Allows Us to Be

Six degrees of separation took on a whole new meaning

In a world of blurring lines, there’s nothing hazier than the one between real life and the online world.

I’ve got 1028 friends on Facebook, 531 followers on my personal instagram page, 209 on my writing-based instagram page, 407 followers on Medium and 68 followers on Twitter. I’m also a part of at least two dozen Whatsapp groups, a bunch of Slack groups, LinkedIn and Telegram.

If we follow each other on any of these platforms, we may show up in our feeds. I say may, because there are a lot of other factors that this depends on — our topics of interest, the number of people we follow, how active we are etc.

The more we engage with each other’s contents, the more likely we are to bump in to each other more often.

And the vicious cycle continues with each follower and followee, building a complicated web of social bubbles in the nebulous digital space.

Whenever some one responds, comments, reacts to our posts, we are elated. We feel important, our fragile egos inflated ever-so-slightly with each puff of attention. I belong! My words matter! I’ve finally arrived!

But when we log off and turn around, we’re all alone in our little rooms with our little keyboards and mice, half-drunk cup of coffee (or tea, or water) on the side, sound of random music playing, the last conversation our fingers had playing through our mind.

All alone in the real world. Just us, and the real, touchable humans (and pets) we surround ourselves with.

Out of my phone and IRL

I went to a park once and spotted someone I thought I knew. I couldn’t put a name to the face or remember how I knew her, but a visual of her dancing kept running through my head.

Our dogs seemed to get along pretty well, so she came up to me smiling, and we exchanged a few “Omg your dog is so cute, how old is she/he/they? Sorry my dog is an idiot! Oops, did our leashes tangle?” type statements, that are really just gap filler conversations while the dogs do crazy shit like sniffing butts and running around in circles biting each others’ legs.

The whole while she was still dancing in my head.

As we said our good-byes, I realized I had seen her on Instagram. She was a dancer (explains that) and a friend of an acquaintance of a friend of mine, who had been to her dance program once. They had tagged each other in videos they posted of the dance — which I saw — and ever since she always showed up in my recommendations.

I knew she was married, had recently celebrated her anniversary and loved wearing sarees. I knew which state she lived in, where she went on vacation last month and even how much she misses her parents. But I didn’t know her — only what she chose to share.

Would she have been happy or creeped out to know she was minutely famous?

Honey, did you know the world shrunk?

Back when the concept of six degrees of separation was first being talked about, the world wasn’t small, the society was. Society represented everything within range of one’s own sight, and touch. Within the country, within the state, within the city, within the town, within the village, within the street, within the neighborhood around us.

Today it literally references the whole world.

It’s liberating yet scary to be a creator today, because the potential of an audience is some permutation and combination of 7.9 Billion people and their choices.

Let that sink in.

I’m not ambitious, but I do have hopes and dreams of getting ahead with my writing, so I can’t ignore the sheer opportunity that statistic offers. But when I struggle to balance this with preserving my mental health, I choose, and sometimes I’m forced, to don an attitude of “in the grand scheme of things, does it matter?”

More often than not, the answer is no, it doesn’t.

I remind myself that all the content I see is the result of choice and arbitrary algorithms (I went this far without mentioning it, so pardon me), both of which change constantly.

One day we’re a part of a clique, the next we’re not. Not by any fault of ours, but simply because our lives run at different speeds and take different trajectories each day. One small click, one change in setting and we find ourselves in a different bubble; new people, new content, new relationships.

What’s significant today — including me — may not be tomorrow.

There’s something humbling about that. And it gets me every single time.

Sure honey, but the world was always small to start with

I will leave you with a small practice I swear by when I’m overwhelmed. A little holiday gift if you will.

Take a piece of paper and write down the names of the people (and pets) you love. Close the paper, and your eyes.

Breathe, let go and remember: Nothing else matters.

Nothing.

I want to thank Smillew Rahcuef for the inspiration to be relational, as he shares in his inspiring piece:

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