How to be online during Omicron
Admitting defeat after a year of Covid-induced chaos.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩
If you’re reading this, you should probably log off. —Kate
When the pandemic first hit, and we were sequestered to our shoebox apartments or eerily empty houses, social media was the only thing that kept me feeling like not all had been lost. I could talk to my friends through video chat and relate to strangers on TikTok about just how bizarre a turn our lives had taken.
Unfortunately, that early reliance on neverending Twitter scrolls and frequently-refreshed headlines established those things as surefire triggers to send me, emotionally, right back to March 2020. So when the recent surge in Covid cases in NYC prompted the familiar online nihilism, I had to run for the hills.
Or rather, my boyfriend had to watch me delete Instagram and Twitter from my phone after day three of letting a flippant tweet or dramatic Instagram upend the very fragile homeostasis I had constructed for myself in order to get up, get dressed, and feed myself every day. One comment about it being 2020 all over again—despite the myriad reasons that’s not the case—would send me straight into bed, where I’d Google “I am sad” and be served only Reddit threads, listicles, and this, because SEO has ruined everything.
I’ve also Googled “will this ever end,” “how do pandemics end,” and “a normal explanation of what’s happening with Covid right now.” I’ve muted every word related to Covid that I can think of, but still someone’s screenshot of rising Covid cases with the caption “seems bad!” makes it through. I allow myself to read a thread from a doctor urging people not to panic, and can’t help but glimpse the replies, which are filled with people who are not doctors telling the doctor they’re wrong. I comfort myself with ways this will be okay (I’m triple vaxxed, my family is triple vaxxed, my friends are triple vaxxed) but am confronted with how that’s not the case for everyone in the world, and I don’t know how to fix it, and until I do it’s selfish of me to be soothed by my vaccination status.
I have been chewed up and spit out by the online environment of the past year, and am now a shivering little chihuahua. The fear-mongering fueled by hopes of virality, carefully constructed headlines to get me to panic-click, the impulse to shame and blame to prove you’re The Best Pandemic Boy/Girl—I admit defeat. I am exhausted and beaten down. And so, I imagine, is everyone else.
So how do we use the internet right now, when any way we choose to behave is likely setting off a person whose way of coping with Covid differs from ours? I can’t offer much prescriptive advice, other than to stay away from spaces people are using to work through their trauma out loud. Pick one article about what’s happening and read it, but not over and over, and not as a springboard to spend the next hour reading the same coverage from various angles across different websites. Remember that a joke, or experience, or opinion doesn’t change the basic facts you know. And repeat these steps back to me in a few hours when I ultimately need to hear them again.