I’m packing my bags. I’m moving offline. I really mean it this time. After writing this essay on a cloud-connected word processor, you’ll never see me surfing these waves again. You can find me in class, on my purple bicycle, or trying and failing to break my new Mexican hot chocolate habit at the town’s favorite and most overrated-but-still-good coffee shop.
Let me tell you what happened, why I’ve decided to shake this addiction.
First, I freaked out about being on a particular social media site too much, read a post on said site about eating chips when you should eat real food, and got the craving, so I put on my headphones and went down to the kitchen, at almost two in the morning. My fingers still smell like tomato chips, which I had instead of the masala ones because the new masala recipe sucks. I can smell it all the way from up here; my fingers are a whole torso away, tapping away by my crossed legs.
Then, I tapped into a slow-productivity vlogger I hadn’t watched in a long time. The video I chose was titled “how to reset for 2024,” and only a couple of minutes in I grew frustrated to not be given actionable steps, to just be hearing a monologue about the last twelve months of this person’s life, which I haven’t been keeping up with and so was not actually that interested. I later realized that the second half of the title read “reflections & lessons I learned this year,” and in that moment, pacing in the kitchen, the only lit room in the house at this witching hour, I let myself relax into this person’s bitter and sweet reminiscences. Yes, like her, I really could be optimistic about being different in the new year, being better. Yes, watching videos online — or listening to them while staring out the window to the backyard — really could change my life for the better. Yes, I really could change. It felt meditative. Pacing, snacking, listening. Her words felt meditative. She’s talking about mindfulness.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. She’s gone into an ad read about a mindfulness app. It was so smooth. I would call it suave if that word didn’t remind me of another stupid brand. She’s clearly written her own copy. She’s talking about her personal experience with the app. I think I believe that she’s actually used it. I fast forward through the rest of the ad, feeling icky inside, used. I am the product, right?
I rush upstairs and start typing while the video is still going, already thinking about how good this will read in my campus alt-weekly news magazine. I am the product, right? As the video ends, she says she’s on vacation with her partner and “his cofounder’s family.” I don’t know what his company does, but all I can think is oh my god, another one.
I recently watched a video on the dangerous practices and recklessness of freight train companies, and the top comment read “I love how the vast majority of problems highlighted by this show are a direct result of nothing but corporate greed.” My friend who interviewed with one of these freight companies for a job responds, “All the freight railroads are big companies that do big company things.” It’s not an excuse, I think. He just knows how things are.
Another personality says that the corporation gatekeeping diagnostic tests is not the enemy–the enemy is the disease. It’s great rhetoric, the kind of speech that gets you speaking time at international governing bodies. But I’m just so tired of being nice. The orange and mango juice at the airport costs sixteen dollars.
On a video call earlier tonight, an emoji appeared as I was speaking to my lover, and now certain gestures will trigger certain emojis on that platform, and now I am being scanned all the time, as my lover said, or at least now, I am aware of it. I need to leave the app that made me have that craving for chips, but all of poetry happens there, and the cutting edge of gender and sexuality theory is there, or maybe it’s in my mirror, maybe the cutting edge is in the glass of my mirror.
How my heart is beating so fast, because I got distracted and read something very very sad. How I’ve gone through this essay to scrub it of brand names, to make it feel like I could be you, or you could be me. How my mother cried after visiting her parents who live so far away, but still she came back here, where I’ve been pampered and educated beyond her wildest dreams. I am the product, right?
So, yeah. I’m gone. Send me a letter on snail mail. Well, I guess I’ll still be on email. I’ll probably stay on the poetry app too, where I might happen to peek at hot takes and anxious news. And people have to know to read this somehow…

Art by Alexander Picoult