Don't forget about the Following tab

When one door closes, the internet builds a window.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Embedded will be taking off next week for the holiday. We’ll return starting with a Sunday Scroll on the 31st! —Kate

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There’s a version of me who returned to the UK for good after the years I spent there in childhood and adolescence. There’s a version of me who went on to become a nanny in Amsterdam (something that, in the lead-up to college graduation, when the idea of ever finding a job in writing seemed impossible, I kept threatening to do). And then there are the versions of me who, every time I come back from a vacation somewhere new, actually followed through on the “What would it be like to live here?” question. 

Somewhere, on some hypothetical astral plan, I’m everywhere all over the world. But as I get older, the doors to these potential fantasy lives, once fueled by the vague promise of “maybe one day,” are closing. This isn’t as sad as it sounds. It’s just that, as I enter my thirties, I am more firmly rooted to a single place. My friends, family, partner, and job are all established and arranged in such a way that to change a single one of them would result in a significant upheaval—not to mention the fact that I don’t want to change any of it! 

On Thursday, I was invited to present at the final 2023 Meme In The Moment Festival, hosted by Digital Void. I made a presentation inspired by this post, but my favorite part of the night was getting to chat backstage with the internet culture writer and experts I had been reading all year (can you believe it took until December in the year of our lord 2023 for

Ryan Broderick

and I to actually have an IRL conversation). One of the things that came up in a chat with fellow presenter Jenny Chang was the difference between our Following and For You feeds on TikTok. It got me thinking that, while there’s rightly a lot of focus on the things your algorithm says about you, we shouldn’t overlook the significance of the content you choose for yourself. 

While my For You page is a mix of animal videos and lifestyle vlogs and aspirational craft content, my Following feed (when you remove the people I keep tabs on for Embedded) is almost exclusively a reflection of those fantasy lives I mention above. It can’t be a coincidence that I followed not one, not two, but three different creators living in remote cabins in the Scottish Highlands in the past year, a place I just happened to visit in the spring. Or this creator who lives in Norway, where I jumped into a fjord in 2019 after a big professional upset and thought “what if I just never came back?” There are the London girlies, the south of France girlies, the girlies who abandoned life in the city to live upstate. If I open my Following feed, I can digitally live all the lives I’ve come to accept I'll likely never experience IRL. 

Maybe it has been easier for me to accept that I will likely never have those lives because, in some small way, TikTok allows for a kind of compromise. There are, of course, times when scrolling my fantasies as other people’s realities makes my heart ache to the point that I have to do some journaling to calm down. But rather than wonder “what if?” I can, in a general way, get the answers. I can see all the best parts—the countryside scenery or European wine bars or simply a home that has stairs—without experiencing the hard parts, like the loneliness of being away from the people I care about and the less-than-idyllic realities I deep down know would come from, say, living in a lighthouse in Canada. 

I know my life can still change in a thousand of unexpected ways, and future me will roll my eyes at the thought of my thirties being the end of anything—the same way I now roll my eyes at my 25-year-old self publicly lamenting I was too old to find love. But when one door closes, it’s nice to know the internet can build a window.