Oh, Avatar

These will be my last words. Here I am, in front of my computer, typing the final thoughts I will ever have, almost as if they’re written in my own blood. When I’m done with this, I’ll die. I’m not alone. The one here with me has made me promise to write clearly what led to this, so it can be a warning to anyone who might read it. If you read this and believe it, then maybe it can still help you. If you don’t, there’s nothing I can do about that. I only ask that you put your disbelief aside long enough to hear me out. Everything I’m telling you is true. And the one waiting for me to finish seems to know what I’m saying even as I type it.

I won’t give you my name. Being anonymous is a rare luxury now. Once, I would have proudly attached my name to any story about my life, or anything my elders had passed down to me. I wanted credit for every joke, every clever remark. Like so many people, I spent years expressing myself on social media. Looking back, much of it was petty, and none of it makes me look good. I wrote in anger. I mocked people for their religious or political beliefs, or for being stupid enough to fall for the lies of people I despised. What other explanation could there be?

I could have used that time better. I might have done some good if I’d tried to be encouraging or positive. But that wasn’t what the algorithms rewarded. I could post a picture of a flower or a cloud and get nothing. Then I’d tear into someone I couldn’t stand and get exactly what I wanted: people agreeing with me, and people I hated firing back. I enjoyed both. How much of my life did I spend typing anger into a phone or tablet? How much of it helped anyone? How much will anyone remember? How much of it lived up to the man I thought I was?

I felt helpless. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew why. I spent so much time scrolling through bad jokes, upsetting videos, and other people’s thoughts that I barely had room for my own. So why did I think adding my thoughts to the pile would change anything? Why did I keep shouting into it? Outside, the real world was being taken apart and sold to the highest bidder. By the time I looked up, there wasn’t much left.

That was when the one here with me arrived. He hasn’t left. We’ve talked a lot about what happened, and I understand it better now. I also understand what that conversation is going to cost me.

When I first joined social media, I thought it was a wonderful way to find people I hadn’t seen in years. It made me happy. I felt part of something bigger, a conversation that was always going on. I renewed old friendships, found people we both knew, and wondered where all the years had gone. I spent too much time filling out my online life with pictures, tagging people, tagging places. Some days, keeping up with everyone’s posts was almost all I did. By the end of that first year, so much of me was online that I didn’t notice the split.

I noticed later, when real life started to seem dull. How could my relationships outside the platforms compete with what I found there? The women were beautiful and openly sexual. The friendships seemed closer, somehow deeper. The food, the places, the stories all felt more real than anything I could see around me, even though they were just images on a flat screen. People’s lives seemed fuller and easier to understand. They seemed to have more going for them. How could my wife compare with those women? How could our food compare with those meals? 

Some of those people I knew personally. I knew their claims were as ridiculous as mine. But I still wanted to believe them. And I wanted people to believe me, so I started making my own posts sound better than the life behind them.

I posted across half a dozen platforms. The more I posted, the more people I met, and the more I saw of the people they knew. You might think that seeing so many different lives would have opened my mind. Instead, it made me feel further away from everyone. I became less tolerant of other views. I judged people for what they believed, often right where they could see it. I built a personality around a picture of myself that didn’t really look like me. The person attached to that picture didn’t seem much like me either.

But the illusion became so convincing that I started thinking of myself as the avatar. I gave him qualities I didn’t have because my own life felt smaller every day. The more time I spent online, the more jealous I became. Handsome men with full heads of hair, married to beautiful, lively women. Both of them are in perfect shape. Incredible houses, incredible cars, and apparently none of my problems. My wife and I never looked like that. Never would.

Seeing them made my own problems harder to ignore. So I lied more. I posted things that weren’t remotely true, hoping no one would see what was happening to me.

I was being hollowed out.

It wasn’t just how people looked or what they owned. I thought I had the right to judge anyone online who disagreed with me. But attacking their beliefs didn’t make mine stronger. It made me afraid that my own beliefs were just as easy to see through.

I picked so many fights. Not thoughtful discussions. Not civil debates. Name-calling. When someone did it to me, I took it badly, then turned around and did it to someone else. There was no room for compromise. Agreeing with someone who had already made up their mind got me nowhere. Fighting with them got me nowhere too.

After a while, my body reacted to words as if they could kill me. I couldn’t turn the anxiety off. On some platforms, everything depended on how many followers you had. I could comment on someone’s post, but that didn’t mean they would read it or care. Being ignored made me even angrier. I lost my temper more often.

The more I changed myself to fit my online personality, the more the people I also knew in real life pulled away. They became careful around me. I couldn’t understand it. If we were friends, then as far as I was concerned, we were close friends. I knew them. I trusted them. I loved them.

They didn’t feel the same way.

That should have told me how much I was changing. It was also when mitosis started—the splitting of one self into two. If only I’d understood how dangerous it was.

This went on for years. The platforms pulled me in, fed me nonsense, and gave me carefully packaged bits of nothing to believe in. The more I accepted online, the more I changed outside it.

But listen to how I say that. The platforms pulled me in. They fed me. They changed me.

That’s only part of the truth. I might as well say a venomous snake exists just so it can bite me when I disturb it. I went to those platforms willingly. As they changed, I went along with them. The people who built them were responsible, but so was I.

Maybe I wouldn’t have been hurt if I’d never used them. Or, as I preferred to think of it, if no one had introduced me to them. They were presented as harmless. A way to connect. A way to see more of the world than I could ever see on my own.

And they found a way around the part of my mind that should have known the difference. I wasn’t experiencing friendship, not beyond something like having a pen pal. I wasn’t visiting those places or sharing those people’s lives. I was looking at pictures. I could have done that with television, movies, or books.

But it felt real.

If someone bullied me online, it felt as real as being bullied in a grocery store parking lot or back in school. My body didn’t know the difference. If people liked what I said, supported me, or took my side, it felt like the whole world stood behind me.

The illusion became stronger than the life it was supposed to reflect. The real world couldn’t compete. Going through an ordinary day, I felt as if there wasn’t enough of anything. Not enough feeling. Not enough life.

I’d been married my whole adult life, but when I went on a date with my wife to ‘rekindle’ our romance, I felt thin, almost transparent. Less real than the person I was online. Before long, I couldn’t get through those parts of our life together without checking my phone. Each visit lasted longer than the one before it. Life was dull. I wanted to be online. She couldn’t be those women. She knew it and I knew it. We moved more and more apart and I moved more and more into my online life.

That was when the splitting really took hold. I couldn’t live without the avatar I had created anymore. I started to see myself as him, as if every story I posted and every thought I shared came honestly and directly from me. I was too worried about appearances. I was no longer living with my spouse, just sharing a house, but the illusion online seemed like we were never happier. It was all lies.

As the real world fell apart, I began to believe its supposed protections hadn’t been taken away. They had never really existed. I cared less and less about actual people. I sent money to online causes for strangers I would never meet, but gave nothing useful to neighbors who had suffered terrible losses. I became “politically active” without having any real politics. What I called my beliefs was a collection of scraps stuck together from the endless stream coming through my screen.

It seemed unfiltered. That was what made it so convincing. I thought I had unlimited access to a bigger, more real world. But everything woven into the platforms I wanted so badly to belong to was filtering what I saw, pushing me in a particular direction.

The same thing was happening to the people around me. One day, someone would seem normal, posting their bright, colorful life. Next, they were promoting beliefs that didn’t seem to fit anything else about them. They looked like the same person, but now they believed something extreme.

Some of that extremism came from the way the algorithms had shaped them. Some came from the way those same algorithms had shaped me. We started defining ourselves against whatever we thought was false, or whatever we thought had no right to exist.

It made me so angry I could barely think. I couldn’t understand how so many people had gone crazy. I couldn’t see what had happened to my own beliefs. Between those two positions, an abyss opened, and I couldn’t pull myself away from it.

Sometimes I thought I could see clearly. I would realize I’d lost myself. Between fights over ideas I claimed not to believe in—ideas I told myself I was only playing with, because I was too clever to fall for any ideology—I could see that whatever had once kept me steady was gone.

If I’d been a Christian before, I wasn’t one now. If I’d been an atheist, I was now the most devoted Christian you could find.

My family, my friends, my coworkers all drifted away. I blamed them. When they tried to tell me they were losing someone they loved, all I heard was noise. They might as well have been animals howling somewhere far away.

I hadn’t changed. They had.

Underneath that was the certainty that none of them mattered anyway. The whole world was circling a drain. Freedom was disappearing. Strange groups with no coherent beliefs were gaining power. People had given up on reason.

I shook my head at everyone who spent their waking hours staring into a device, trapped inside a little rectangle full of lies.

And there I was, doing exactly the same thing.

Sometimes, with what little irony I had left, I wondered whether anyone looked at me that way.

By then, the split was almost complete.

Late one night, a police officer pulled me over. He said he knew I’d been on my phone because he could see the blue light on my face as I swerved through the streets.

When I got home, I put the ticket on the counter. Then I noticed someone standing in the kitchen, their outline dark against the room behind them.

At first, I thought it was my wife. But she had left me long before, lost in her own online world. She had also grown bitter because I hadn’t given her the life she thought she deserved—the life she kept seeing on the platforms.

The figure moved in a way I recognized. For a moment, despite how large they were, I thought it was my daughter.

Then I thought it wasn’t anyone I knew.

But I did know him.

He stepped into the light, and I knew exactly who he was.

I wondered if this was how God had felt when he first looked at Adam. Or how Victor Frankenstein had felt when he looked at his own Adam.

I felt sick. Then I felt afraid, so deeply and suddenly that everything else stopped.

The world, in the state it was in, shouldn’t have been able to make something like him. So where had he come from? Had the people who owned the platforms decided to take over God’s work?

He won’t tell me. I don’t blame him.

It doesn’t matter whether someone assembled him in a lab from manufactured tissue and fluids. I’m the one who made him. I put every part of him together with words I believed, even when I knew they weren’t true.

“You can go,” he said. “I’m here now.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” I said.

Even to me, it sounded weak. I wasn’t sure I meant it. How could I know? I’d used him to carry my version of the truth for so long that I couldn’t tell what was real anymore.

“You’re no longer needed,” he said. “I’ll finish out your life.”

I argued with him for a long time. It did no good. He knew every approach I would try. Every time I thought I’d found a way through, he stepped around it.

I screamed until my throat bled. I cried until no more tears came. I threatened to destroy myself, as if he would die without me.

Through all of it, he waited for me to accept the thing I already knew.

I was no longer needed.

When my wife came out of her room and saw him, she went straight to him. There was something hungry in the way she moved. She hadn’t moved toward me like that in years.

He gave her a piece of jewelry. Something cheap, probably made in a sweatshop somewhere. She loved it. She put it on, then looked at me as if the Devil himself had come up through the floor to take her.

They went into my bedroom together. He closed the door.

It should have destroyed me. Instead, I felt nothing.

I reached for my device and went back to the platforms. That was how I dealt with the loss. Then a picture of them appeared in my feed.

She was wearing next to nothing, posed in a way she had never posed for me. She had the new jewelry on. She looked alive, full of color, more real than she had in years.

Beside her, he smiled at me with complete confidence.

Their eyes seemed to reach all the way inside my head.

I went upstairs to my office. There was a cot there. I’d been sleeping on it for a long time. I lay down.

When he came in, he acted as if the house belonged to him. He didn’t ask. He didn’t wait for an invitation. This wasn’t some creature bound by ancient rules about permission.

He wasn’t someone else.

He was me.

“We’ve been together a long time,” he said.

I could smell my wife on him.

“You’ve been putting me together for as long as you’ve been staring at that screen. Every post. Every status update. Every time you interact with someone else’s online life, I become more solid.”

His calm unsettled me. He spoke as if he were explaining something ordinary.

Had I ever been like that? Was any part of me still mine?

“No,” he said.

His mouth didn’t move.

This time, the answer came from inside my head, in the voice I used when I talked to myself. It came as easily as any thought I’d ever had.

Here was the man I’d made out of myself.

And I wasn’t him.

“She’s still an amazing lover,” he said. “Why did you neglect her? Why did you let her neglect you?”

I started to answer.

“There are always excuses,” he said. “You won’t say anything I haven’t already thought of. Why would you? How could you? I’m you. Every part of you. Every muscle. Every tendon.

“Here I am. The man you loved into existence. You built me from the cells up.

“I have everything you deny yourself. Your hair’s getting thin. Mine isn’t. You’re going gray. My hair’s the color it was when we were young. You’re out of shape. Look at your stomach. I’m in the best shape of our lives.

“I don’t have to run. I don’t have to work out or watch what I eat. Your lies took care of that.

“You wanted people to accept you so badly that you made a better version of yourself to deal with them. That way, you could keep everything you hated about yourself out of sight.

“You think those people care so much about our life. You think they’re watching every day unfold like a reality show. They aren’t. They do just enough to keep you involved, because they think you’re watching their lives the same way.

“That’s the best part. None of you can see it.

“It’s okay. I have plenty of siblings and cousins. They’ll be replacing those people too.”

Then he handed me a notebook and a pen.

I’ve written everything down as well as I can. But even now, I can feel the truth draining out of me.

The truth, and whatever makes me real.

This is all that’s left.

An empty shell.

All for the illusion of connection and a...

...life that has always been a lie.