What Is Being an Individual When We Don’t Exist Individually?

One of the questions the 21st century has to answer is what happens when we tear down every communication barrier surrounding the most social species that ever walked the Earth.

Before the internet, the only way to talk to someone remotely and in real time was the telephone. The interaction was self-contained. Beginning, middle and end, usually within a few minutes and with a clear purpose. There was even an etiquette about when it was appropriate to call someone and when it wasn’t; a phone call carried a whole protocol our parents taught us from an early age. I clearly remember my mother saying “don’t call him now, it’s far too late.” There were limits. Media consumption wasn’t much different. The newspaper had its hour to be read. So did the film we rented at the video store or waited to catch on TV. Everything inside its own little box, a world where more or less everything kept office hours.

Ever since the web showed up, it’s as if we’ve been knocking down all of those limits. Now we are permanently connected to everything: friends, girlfriend, work, the news, everything everywhere all at once. The process started slowly, with dial-up, just a few minutes a day and a few hours on the weekend. When broadband arrived, the limit became access to the computer. The internet lived at home — more precisely, in the bedroom, for millennials like me. With the smartphone and 5G, the moment we’re living in now, it’s practically impossible to imagine a day without a WhatsApp message. When did that happen? When did we normalize this uninterrupted access to our very selves?

I used to come home from school and spend the time until the next day alone (and happy) with my books, my films and my video games. Now I feel that something is wrong when I pick up my phone after a couple of hours and see that nobody has talked to me.

With technologies like Neuralink, which promises to keep us connected all the time through a chip, the trend is that the very idea of individuality will have to be redefined. What is being an individual when we don’t exist individually? When we no longer know how to sit with ourselves, with our own ideas, our own thoughts? Not even Plato’s Republic proposed tyranny on this scale. When I think about these things, I feel a stronger urge toward isolation, toward compartmentalizing my online interactions, toward rebelling against this invasion of private space.

I want to restore the limits that were taken away.

Bring back phone etiquette, so that nobody talks to me after 8pm on a weekday because it would be rude. So that news is something you consume for a few minutes a day, and that’s it. So that “watching something” doesn’t include photos and few-second videos of people I barely know or who have no artistic talent whatsoever. I want to trade this endless low-quality connection for occasional dialogue that actually has value.

I know it sounds Luddite, but we need to restore the limits of individuality and get back to a happiness that exists beyond someone else’s gaze. Of all the consequences of the advance of communication, this gradual loss of our capacity to exist individually is likely to be a great source of suffering for the generations to come.

This piece was originally published in Portuguese on my newsletter Em Busca de Clareza.