Day 632: When my mother-in-law screamed my daughter’s name three times, I ran from a Zoom meeting in the dining room and quickly realized that my 12-month-old might be dying. Her breath was faint, her body was limp, and her eyes were rolled into the back of her head. “Call 911!” It was the loudest I’d yelled in the six months since we’d been living at my in-laws’ house. Holding her by the armpits, my mind detonated in a dozen directions: Keep her alive. Also, Does she have Covid? Also, an image from season six of The Sopranos, one of the 4 billion shows we’d binged since March 2020: Does she look like Christopher Moltisanti did after his Escalade rolled down the hill? And then, Shit, am I still in a meeting? Are my camera and microphone still on?
When my daughter most needed me to be her father, I was everywhere and nowhere, everyone and no one.
Two years into this pandemic, we are in the throes of what my scrambled brain can only think to call The Great Smushing. This non-peer-reviewed term refers to the crashing and flattening of our personalities, responsibilities, and selves, driven by frictionless Everything Devices and greatly accelerated by Covid. Our identities and roles as parents, children, friends, colleagues, lovers, caretakers, and on and on have been collapsed into a single addled being. Many of us have remained hunched and fidgeting in the same room, Slacking, Zooming, emailing, betting, dating, trolling, therapizing, grieving, giggling, sobbing, shrieking at strangers, and identifying with an immovable 200,000-ton container ship, all on the same small screens day in and day out, with fewer places in the outside world open for us to safely stretch, find, challenge, or lose ourselves, or to be any one self at one time. In my experience, the symptoms of this smushing include discombobulation, disorganization, despair, and inertia. All work and all play on the screen all day makes Jack a dull boy.
Blessedly, the 911 operator seemed not to be experiencing any of these side effects, and acted with authority. She suggested I turn my baby upside down. As soon as I did, her eyes returned to meet my horrified gaze, and she started to cry. A minute later, my wife and I were off in an ambulance to find out what just happened, and if it could happen again. As my dazed child lay strapped to the stretcher, my mind kept cycling through the same scattered, shameful, smushed thoughts: Will she be OK? How did I fail her so completely? Is there Wi-Fi in the ER?
"You have one identity," a 25-year-old Mark Zuckerberg famously told journalist David Kirkpatrick in 2009. "The days of you having a different image for your work friends or coworkers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” And then his moralizing kicker: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity." Strap on your Oculus blinders and ignore the fact that there may have been times that Facebook (now Meta) has displayed multiple identities or a lack of integrity. Zuckerberg’s prophecy has been thoroughly fulfilled.
Smushing started long before 2009—it probably began with the advent of personal computing and being able to open multiple windows at the same time—but throughout the 2010s, our lives got mega-crunched. The share of Americans who owned a smartphone rose from some 35 percent to 85 percent over the decade. The proportion of our lives that we compressed into our smartphones jumped at about the same rate. The average American adult now spends more than nine hours a day planted in front of a screen, more than half of our waking lives smushed into an Apple, Google, or Microsoft device.
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
The cost of this convenience is a pocket-sized self.
These shifts have collectively eroded the physical and mental boundaries within which we play with and construct different aspects of our identities. As our social media connections broadened from close friends to second cousins, preschool classmates, and Taye Diggs, the pressure to generalize how we presented ourselves grew. When we’re talking to everyone, as Joshua Meyrowitz writes in No Sense of Place, “We would have trouble projecting a very different definition of ourselves to different people when so much other information about us was available to each of our audiences.” As Jenny Odell adds in How to Do Nothing, this generalizing also creates an “inability to publicly change our minds, i.e., to express different selves over time.”
Meanwhile, the air between our generalized, non-fungible social media selves and any of our other selves continues to shrink. It might seem like pure efficiency to eschew the trip to the bank, store, or even a Dave & Buster’s and instead move your fingers a few millimeters from Instagram to open up Capitol One, Instacart, or Wordle. But as Cal Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of A World Without Email, explains, because everything can be opened and done on the same device or browser, without serious discipline, we try to do and be everything all the time. “Your mind is going to go, ‘Why not now? Why not now? Why not now?’ You can only win that argument so many times,” he says. Losing that argument doesn’t just torpedo our focus—what's known as "attention residue"—it’s also a catastrophe to the self. “The human brain cannot just quickly jump back and forth between different contexts,” says Newport. Constantly switching from one forum to another—a dating app to a Zoom meeting, say—means that how we present ourselves in one is bound to bleed into the other, what might be called identity residue.
If all of our individual selves were colliding and coagulating before Covid, the pandemic put them into a particle accelerator. Covid-era smushing incidents, in which people brought the wrong version of themselves to the wrong place at the wrong time, include Jeffrey Toobin’s Zoom Dick moment, Marjorie Taylor Greene bringing memes to the floor of Congress, and the lawyer who pleaded “I’m not a cat” in a civil forfeiture hearing.
Of course, it’s an obscene luxury to be able to be smushed—to make an income from your bed or couch and to afford the devices to be smushed into. To be sure, the lockdowns, closures, and social distancing that have exacerbated the smushing have saved lives. And there are countless examples of the internet being a means of unsmushing, allowing anyone isolated, oppressed, or misunderstood to find community and be a version of themselves they can’t be elsewhere. But maintaining this separation of selves feels less and less possible. And any notion that the pandemic’s end will mark the end of smushing is a farce. We will soon undoubtedly be able to conduct even more of our lives on our devices with even less friction. What is the metaverse but the endgame of Zuckerberg’s one identity edict—a desperate (and so far silly) ploy to get us to immerse ourselves in a headset so deeply that we have no identity in reality whatsoever?
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
I’ve felt the smushing acutely since we had our first child in November 2020. For many months as my wife and I both worked without childcare, our one-bedroom apartment was a tornado of blurred identities, burping the baby while a story source’s lawyer grilled me on the phone, while I looked at the Covid case counts on my laptop, while Peloton instructor Cody Rigsby screamed at my wife, “You don’t need permission to shake those tit-eees!” Parenting mode seeped into work mode seeped into marriage mode, and I was failing in all of them. More than anything, our decision to move across the country and live with my in-laws (and receive their free childcare) for half a year was an attempt to unsmush ourselves. Evidently, even that didn’t work.
After a series of tests, the doctor explained that my daughter had a febrile seizure. They’re fairly common in young children, don't affect development, and most often go away without intervention. This news brought on cosmic relief. And then cosmic shame. All those endless seconds I was holding her upright, patting her back, thinking fragmented thoughts, I was doing the wrong thing. And I could've easily known the right thing to do—just lay on her side uninhibited—it's right there in the baby books. There was no avoiding fear and panic in that moment, but I likely would've been far more alert as my Dad Self had I not had all my other hats half on at that moment too.
As the neurologist explained it to us, a sudden spike in a baby’s temperature can “make their immature brains go haywire.” That's the best analogy for smushing I've heard. Too many aspects of ourselves crammed together has sent our brains on the fritz. To avoid febrile seizures, the key is to give my daughter Tylenol at the earliest sign of a fever. But what’s the Tylenol for smushing?
The first treatment is realizing Zuckerberg is wrong: We have gobs of identities. Whether you believe that the self is illusory, as Buddhists do, or that we have several discrete selves that float in and out of controlling how we think and act, as some psychologists do, you know that your boss is not your partner, who’s not your brother, who’s not your child, who’s not your rabbi. Showing up for each person in your life requires showing up in many different ways. Studies from Sarah Gaither, a psychologist at Duke, have found that being reminded of one’s multiple identities (gender, race, social roles, etc.) prompts more creative problem solving. Each of us has 86 billion neurons, and forms some 6,000 thoughts a day. The idea that we must rein all of that into a single identity is fantastical. But the smushing makes that fantasy a suffocating reality.
The solution, of course, is to set boundaries. Easier said than done, especially as the pandemic continues to confine many people to their homes. But it helps to recognize that while technology itself is not the problem—that any one app or tool can help us find a more whole version of any one of ourselves—the smushing of all these tools together smushes us, and that we need to push back on that. If you can afford it, use different devices for personal and work tasks. As Newport preaches, forget a to-do list, get a timeblock planner, where you can only do one type of thinking or task at a time. Poop without your phone. Give yourself permission to be one self at one time when you’re able to.
Most PopularBusinessThe End of Airbnb in New York
Amanda Hoover
BusinessThis Is the True Scale of New York’s Airbnb Apocalypse
Amanda Hoover
CultureStarfield Will Be the Meme Game for Decades to Come
Will Bedingfield
GearThe 15 Best Electric Bikes for Every Kind of Ride
Adrienne So
It’s very difficult to process that the year of the greatest joy in my life, witnessing my infant daughter feast on life, has also been the year my mental health has been its worst. I’ve been extremely online, and felt hemmed in, anxious, frenzied. By trying to be everyone at once, I haven’t been the best version of anyone. But then I realize that one of my daughter’s many identities, though she doesn’t realize it, is a guide. She, like any very young child, shows that the best way to be unsmushed is to be. She has no reservations about being inconsistent, no care about being perceived in any way, throws herself fully into what fascinates, beguiles, or transfixes her in the moment. She babbles with ferocity for 30 minutes, sits in Buddha-like silence for the next 20, and then waddles into the dining room, wide-eyed with glee and pride, outstretching her tiny chubby hand to show me her latest discovery. Here.
More Great WIRED Stories📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!How Bloghouse's neon reign united the internetDoes anyone even want Big Tech's metaverse?Apps and gadgets to help you cope with tinnitusAmerican spy agencies are strugglingThe physics of the N95 face mask👁️ Explore AI like never before with our new database💻 Upgrade your work game with our Gear team’s favorite laptops, keyboards, typing alternatives, and noise-canceling headphones