T w e n t y S i d e d
Logan is depressed, just like a lot of the rest of the world he’s living in right now. For the first time in his life, he’s turning to fully online friend groups and Discord servers. David is out of his life, and he can’t make friends in public right now, so it’s the best he can do to socialize. Logan has always been a social butterfly and a leader, but in online spaces he feels strangely out of his depth.
Small online communities are largely based on seniority and who’s been around the longest. This is true of a lot of in-person communities too, but it’s a bit less intense. A total stranger can walk into a (small) organized event like a potluck or a book club, and help hang streamers or grab napkins real quick if they’re so inclined. In an online community of the same breed, every stranger must prove themselves before being allowed anywhere near the metaphorical streamers.
It makes sense. Your in-person book club isn’t likely right next to every street in the world, including federal prisons and somehow the gates of hell; your online Discord server dedicated to snails eating strawberries is. No matter what you do, or how you set up moderation, the unwashed masses will come. You let a total stranger hang up metaphorical streamers? Bang! Those are Nazi streamers now! You let them bring food to your theoretical potluck? Yeah good luck clicking that link, it sends you straight to virus city, population; you, an idiot for clicking a random link sent by a total stranger.
Logan isn’t a total noob when it comes to being online, of course he’s not; he can’t be. He went to a normal school, and has relatively average parents. He fell somewhere in the huge space between iPad kids and ‘Christian Moms Against Computers’ kids. He’s at neither extreme, just somewhere in the median. He got his own laptop sometime in his early teens, but he never really used it to communicate with strangers. He’s got a Facebook, a Twitter and an Instagram, and he’s friends with people he actively knows on all three. He logged onto Omegle once on a dare in high school and never really tried again. That place was weird and gross. He had a Neopets account, but that wasn’t really engaging for him. He plays video games, but only on his PlayStation, offline.
Now, he’s forced to get online to get his socialization fix.
He tries some different Discord servers. In the first one, he offers immediately to try and program a bot the mods are having issues with. Logan doesn’t know anything about programming, or Discord bots, he just likes to be helpful. He’s sure he could manage with the help of Google. Offering doesn’t get him the reaction he expects, though. The vibe gets somehow awkward, and Logan is left feeling sure he made some sort of mistake. When people begin ignoring his attempts to connect all together, he leaves. As he server jumps, each time he is less and less sure he knows what he’s doing. Usually, offering to be helpful makes him friends and makes him seem friendly and personable. Online, not so much.
Finally, he does figure out that what he needs is slowly-built trust over time. This makes sense, but is frustrating given his current situation. He sticks around for awhile in a few, and sees how newbies are mostly showing off things they’ve done. Code they’ve written, art they’ve made, games they’ve beaten, things they’ve baked. Whatever makes sense for the group he’s found himself in, people show off, and as they do, become part of the community.
Now Logan has a new problem. He doesn’t have any special skills.
Some people show off their pets, which he can take part in, but if he’s honest with himself, that won’t last long. Noodle is twenty, and most pictures he snags of her are sleeping in her favorite spot, experiencing a pampered end-of-life phase.
Logan’s parents watch in bafflement as he orders from their family Amazon account. Sketchbooks, pencils, a beginner crochet kit, a friendship bracelet kit for children, yarn. From the bookshop he carts up how-to books for everything under the sun, and some cookbooks to go through while he’s at it.
Kelly and Michael decide not to step in, but to watch in confusion as Logan seems to be self-soothing some major cabin fever. Logan, however, has decided to use this time to speed-run…having hobbies?
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Ah, the hobby speedrun…I remember this part of 2020 like it was yesterday. Got into 3d printing, eventually made a cute planter, decided “man, I should look into bonsai, it’d be cool to couple the two hobbies”, and within weeks was digging up Red Maple seedlings and shoving them in cheap planters from Lowes.
Kelly and Micheal should count themselves lucky; arts & crafts are a lot less stressful and messy than diving headlong into keeping plants, let alone trees that were perfectly content to be left well enough alone until some nerd with Pothos repotting tools dug them outta the river rock. There’s *still* potting soil in the corners of my windowsill even after having washed and vaccuumed it like ten times now.
The constant discussions about having to find things to do and taking up a lot of hobbies to cover it was one of the most annoying aspects of that time for me, because for me it was “I WISH I had to find things to do” as I was actually a LOT busier than I was before then. I was home so I made more of a mess at home and noticed it more, and so had to do more cleaning. While I had always cooked a bit not being able to necessarily pick up something if I was busy meant that I spent more time cooking ahead for the week on a regular basis. So pretty much my entire Sunday was gone whereas before I had some time to do some stuff there. And none of my actual hobbies were impacted by the lockdowns — I had just started doing bowling once or twice a month that obviously didn’t work — so I still had them to do. So people complaining that they had nothing to do just kinda grated against me feeling that I was just incredibly busy during that time.
Yes I think similarly for me I wasn’t left at loose end at all, my work all went to being remote, I was stressed with being in the house all the time not because I couldn’t go and do things outside but because it became a place to need to tidy all the time and there was no outdoor routine giving me daily sunlight and exercise, so while I gained commute time I then had to schedule in exercise and walk time into the day, which made it more stressful as it was more self-managed, plus a switch to online supermarket shopping. And my hobbies of video games and even going to the cinema weren’t affected – just the ability see my family or happily travel on public transport. So there was zero ‘being at loose end’ at all. More that it was the same amount of stuff now in a smaller space, with less restauranting and in-store shopping. I guess playing the Dark Souls trilogy was a Covid-time event for me.
I was lucky to be one of those “I’ve been preparing for this all my life!” introverts who had no problem not leaving the house, as whenever I was on vacation I didn’t leave it that much anyway. I DID have to increase my exercise due to not moving around as much, but I started going for a walk in the morning which worked really well (and I’ve kept up). But things were more complicated for me since I didn’t have the ability to just go anywhere anytime, so my Sundays ended up being: go for groceries (with a list so I didn’t forget anything, which was new for me), cook for the week, do dishes, do laundry, and then the day was done.
The big thing that I remember during that time was finally playing and finishing Saint’s Row the Third and Saint’s Row IV. Working from home I set up in the bedroom that I had set up for playing PC games, but in the evening when I was done I kinda wanted to get out of that room, which meant playing console games, and those two worked really well at being interesting enough to keep me going but flexible enough that if I didn’t have time I could play for an hour or two and pick things up the next day.
Same about the “trained for it my whole life”. When they first announced we were going into lockdown (or as close to one as we got) I initially panicked because I imagined it would be pretty much impossible for me to function. Well, turns out I could still go to work (I work emergency services so it’s not like they were going to shut us down) and we were allowed to “go shop for essentials” so my “once a week on my way home” shopping was not disturbed. The one thing I could not do was go to the local geek hangout but I do that only once about every four weeks when the date coincides with my schedule so it’s not like I felt cut off from a major avenue of social contact…
Honestly when I finally did get covid, which was just before they deemed us “essential” and put us on the list for early vaccination, the isolation felt very similar to the way I spend my time off (except I had to ask friends to bring me groceries to last), admittedly I was bloody lucky and got off with minimal symptoms that only lasted a couple of first days.
See I too thought that staying indoors and not having to leave was my natural way. And it was great until about 2 weeks in I stopped being able to sleep properly. That was when the daily walks and so on had to be brought in. Extra difficult in the winter when there is no sunlight before or after working hours and barely any during the day in this grey grey country…
Agreed about that settee-gaming. I wanted to be more than a foot or two from the screen I suspect.
Just needs to play Dark Souls 2, enjoy it, and get onto r/DS2 to talk about it. Such and appreciative sub. As is r/MirrorsEdge. For casual conversation anyway :D making actual friends on the other hand…
I had thought that his surprise at the views of David had come partly as a result of living in a bit of an online bubble? But it sounds more like he wasn’t that much of an online person? Typical middle of the range millennial-age person in that regard by the sounds of it. But then I’d have thought at school the typical catchall insult would be homophobic – but then again 95% of the people using the insults weren’t genuinely prejudiced or wouldn’t grow up to be.
He was in an online bubble, when online, but ‘scrolling twitter’ and ‘forming meaningful relationships’ are very different activities. I still haven’t learned the latter.
It has allowed me to form a relationship with the device on which I scroll, but it’s not a healthy one!
Logan is Gen Z, not a millennial – he was born in 2000 (source: a few articles back). Millennials were born roughly 1981 – 1996. (Any younger and someone almost certainly won’t have been old enough to actually remember the turn of the millennium.)
–An actual Millennial
Here I was sure they were called Millenials because they were born in the new millenium.
Nah, we’re old news at this point – anyone born this millennium is Gen Z or Gen Alpha.
There was a lad at work who proclaimed proudly and gratefully that he had just missed out on being a (much-maligned) Millennial, thinking it meant whiny teenager, because he was just old enough. As one myself, and older than him, I was puzzled and looked it up, and had to let him know he had indeed missed out on being one, but because he was too young!
Edit: ahh he must have been a 1999 person, who was thinking the same thing as Syal said above. He was ~20 when Covid hit.
Ah 2000, yeah I wasn’t sure when he was born so didn’t mean his age per se, rather his internet habits. I’d thought as much (re: his age) but as a middle-of-the-era middle-of-the-range millennial myself I don’t know what the typical internet/social media experience of Gen Z is, other than assuming there is too much Snapchat and TikTok, taking the place of too much Facebook. I.e. general social media usage but not chronically online Reddit/Discord/4Chan/whatever internet denizen. Actually I’m not sure what the average early-30s person does on the internet these days, Instagram and Twitter mainly I guess? Or maybe there isn’t an average internet usage any more, too diverse. I got shot of Facebook after university, once Whatsapp took hold and I stopped needing it for image sharing and talking to friends easily.
This part of 2020 ended with me joining a game of Scum and Villainy that helped me meet a (then future, now ex) girlfriend, one of my closest friends, and my future maid of honor. And that’s not even getting into the friends I made out of the D&D or S7S games I ruined.
Logan reminds me so much of a friend of mine. Like your description, my friend defined himself by his connections to OTHERS. He was a member of our high school soccer team, part of the computer club (where I met him), and I believe he also tried out for music and drama as well. Unlike someone like me (who pretty much defined my identity as a nerd, geek and gamer early in my teens because of my enduring love for science, pop-culture and gaming, and I knew this would be the core of my personality for the rest of my days), he never really learned to be happy with just himself. He always needed to be around friends or other people, or he’d get restless and maybe even a bit agitated. In our penultimate year at high school, our grade all went on a camping trip where one of the activities was that we each had to go out to an isolated spot, pitch our tent, and then spend the rest of the day and night alone. For me, that evening was one of the most peaceful I’d ever known. It was just me, the outback, and the broad, endless tapestry of the night sky above. I did get a bit bored now and again (I entertained myself by mentally replaying entire favourite movies from my childhood in my head, or planning out that weekend’s D&D session with my friends), but on the whole I weathered the night very well.
When we all reconvened the next morning, I was quite surprised to hear most of my grade (my friend included) all say it was one of the most harrowing things they had ever gone through. Being out there, alone with only their thoughts for company, was almost akin to torture for them. Apparently the camp coordinator had been expecting this, because he reassured them that their reactions were quite normal. The entire exercise, he explained, was supposed to give people an opportunity to reflect on themselves, their place in nature and the universe, when stripped of things like peer pressure and societal expectations and the personas we put up in front of others. So he was quite surprised when he got to me and I said I found the night very peaceful, almost soothing. He replied that I must be “someone very at peace with who and what I am.” XD
I have a half-baked theory that maybe this is related to middle school/HS being hard on a lot of introverts (I hated it. For no amount of money would I go back), but for a lot of extroverts that amount of constant socialization was the best time of their lives (or at least, that’s what they tell me).
Heh. As a Discord mod for a semi-public server, I face the same problems as Logan, but from the other side of the fence. The server is geared toward nerds in the county in which I live, which has a population exceeding one million. A flood of new members probably means someone has posted an invite link to reddit.
The periodic floods of newbies leave me trying to square two apparently contrary things. On one hand, I owe most of my social life in the county to a rando Discord invite posted to reddit, and want to pay the favor forward. (And I’m not the only member to feel that way.) But on the other hand, I periodically feel like my back yard is invaded by a gaggle of bored strangers who treat it like Hotel California and never leave.
One mechanism we use to establish seniority is a role indicating that someone has showed up to an event IRL, so theoretically, part of the solution is to periodically organize public events, like board game nights at a bar, or bicycle rides. However, my experience has been that at only ~1 in 20 newbies actually show up. That kind of engagement problem is especially frustrating because organizing events is _work_. The old-timers who are most able to authoritatively make something happen are enmeshed in the group and socially tapped out, and the newbies lack the confidence or social standing to make something happen.