You Dropped Your Halo

 Yesterday while binge watching episodes of a true crime YouTuber I follow, I was served an ad for Amazon Halo, their version of a fitness tracker. It tracks the usual stuff -- activity and sleep. But this particular ad was hyping a specific special feature: The Halo will track your tone of voice to help you optimize your relationships. I looked up the specs and the company specifically describes the feature as using "machine learning to analyze energy and positivity in a customer's voice so they can better understand how they may sound to others, helping improve their communication and relationships."

Because nothing says relating like using a machine to check that you're constantly being the most palatable version of yourself for everyone around you. 

For about the last 3 weeks I've been spending very little time on Instagram, the only social network I still use. I mean, I look at TikTok, but I view that as TV for people with extremely short attention spans. Over the last two years I've started to realize all of the ways that social media is damaging. At the end of the day, it is only branding, both advertising products and users. Yes, we are telegraphing parts of ourselves to an audience that consists in part of people who really know us, at least casually. But even if you're letting all your mess hang out, it's still a curated existence, mostly with people who you will forget completely if you delete the app for a period of time. And at first all of this seemed fine. For several years I knew what the platforms were and I still participated because I also felt like I got something there. As long as I knw what they were, they couldn't hurt me. But like the analogy of the lobsters in pot of cool water, chilling as the heat slowly rises until they're suddenly boiling, over time I developed a distorted view of reality. 

One of the problems that I've noticed is that the tone of social media is often a din of people transmitting their anger over interpersonal disruptions into the universe while declaring a righteousness that I would assume one would only claim if one thought one was some kind of perfect friend, lover, or family member. I'm not talking here about political anger. I'm talking here of posts about "recognizing the harm we do to each other," which often sound more like a call for the reader to fess up than for the author to do some personal assessment. I'm talking about vaguebooks, subtweets, and whatever the Insta equivalent is about how to apologize correctly that feel a little too pointed, less a PSA and more a "you know who you are" callout to someone who fucked up (whether they know it or not). I'm talking about posts that reveal our general tendency to assume that when someone has hurt us, they have done it on purpose, know they did it, are withholding remedy willfully, and simply are refusing to police themselves hard enough. I often have to wonder, though, how sincere these calls for apology are when there are an equal number of internet aphorisms about how basically no one deserves forgiveness except possibly the person posting the aphorism. 

But it's pointless to desire an apology if you are planning on refusing forgiveness. 

Now, I get that many of the people posting these things possibly have much more complicated views of relationships. I can't help but wonder, though, what this kind of rhetoric is doing to the way we relate to each other. Much like the idea of a fitness tracker that can optimize your relationships by letting you know when you just haven't been high energy enough for people to like you, these posts signal that everyone seems to think that if we just take the right actions we will experience no strife in our relationships. I find this prospect scary, not comforting. As a person who is very aware of both my flaws and what happens to me when I try to be hypervigilant about policing them, all I see in that direction is heartbreak. 

We don't have to love everyone. And we don't have to forgive everyone or everything. But the only sustainable way to love is learning to love in spite of. I cannot imagine a scenario in which a relationship won't involve at least some level of pain. Those moments when you realize that you're out of sync with the person sitting in front of you as you try to navigate a life together. The moments when you take something tiny and precious that means so much to you to them and they don't notice it. Those moments when they die. Those moments when someone comes home and they're tired from one too many difficult interactions that day and they just don't have the energy for your difficult interaction. 

It's very possible that some people scroll through these posts mostly unaffected (which, then, begs the question about the point of these posts if not to simply act as more noise). I am well aware that my brain is like a funhouse steel trap -- information gets in there, gets seen through a mirror that changes its size and shape, and can't get out. Maybe that's everyone's mind, just different mirrors. Certainly perception is reality, and everyone's perception is different. And of course I can practice compassion for all the ways that our flaws show up on social media as demands for the world to read our minds and give us the things we're missing while expecting nothing from us. 

Social media is weird simulacrum of a relationship. Lonely? You can jump on there and see people you kind of have a relationship with. You can get some attention. You can post a story and see people seeing it. It's almost like you were together. Angry? You can passive-aggressively let that person know while refusing to directly address anything, and when they don't pick up on the fact that they owe you an apology, you can hold it against them. 

And what does this have to do with the Halo? Isn't the Halo the opposite of all of this behavior, calling us to police ourselves in our relationships with the goal of ensuring that no one has to passive-aggressively post on Instagram about "someone's" fake-ass apology mere moments after we sent that apology email? 

I'd argue they're two sides of the same problem. I don't even know what an optimized relationship would look like. Even the most intimate relationship I have leaves me feeling lonely sometimes. Misunderstood. Unappreciated. Irritated. In struggle. Somewhere on that edge of the knife where I'm balancing needing something from him and knowing I have to give something as well. Falling off that edge in one direction or the other sometimes. Being resentful. I work on it. It gets better. Or sometimes it doesn't. But I cannot imagine that using a positive tone of voice all of the time would fill in all the cracks that just naturally exist when two people try to share a space together. And I cannot imagine how we build, maintain, and heal relationships when we're crying for help into the void of the internet.

Just remember: that device you use to look at Instagram isn't just the place where all the apps live. It's not just the place where you mine your Amazon Halo data for personal insights. It's also a phone.