Opinion | There Is No More IRL Now

And on Instagram last week, sexy selfies gradually gave way to comfort dogs, visual depictions of self-care, increasingly messy apartments producing increasingly intricate meals, and hashtag-laced captions urging caution. Occasionally a photo would pop up of a group of people defiantly calling themselves undefeated, as though the coronavirus was a terrorist and that if we just stand close enough together it will not win.

Most sites I follow gradually shifted their content into a chorus of coronavirus and self-isolation. Some brands have seized the opportunity to pivot their products to some kind of “work from home leisure.” Others have defiantly stayed on message: I recently saw a post offering to show me the best destinations in Europe for March; the wedding sites I follow, too, have insisted that nothing is wrong. (Maybe if we pretend this isn’t happening, it will be so — and what better forum for self-delusion than Instagram?)

Every once in a while someone’s random remark from somewhere far away reminds me of how life goes on — and also how out of sync we can be, no matter all the options for connectivity.

On Saturday night I was invited to a party; it eventually got moved to the videoconferencing platform Zoom. People bought beer and wine and drank it wherever they’d decided to sit out the pandemic, dialed into their laptops and chatted.

When it was over I opened up Instagram. Someone I knew in high school was at a wedding in Florida; someone I did a relay race with once was wishing her 3-year-old a happy birthday. The child smiled out at me from her tricycle and it felt off-message, and ominous. My brother’s friend “went live” about his crazy night out, and I weighed the efficacy of DMing him to stop being so selfish and go home immediately.

Last weekend a black screen came up and the scroll stopped. “You’re all caught up,” it read.

OK.

I called to my partner — that’s easy since our apartment has no door — and asked what he was doing. We decided to go for a walk. We didn’t touch anything, and we kept our distance from everyone else, although we waved hello to a bunch of perfect strangers. It was so nice outside. We didn’t bring our phones.

Lindsay Crouse (@lindsaycrouse) is a senior staff editor in the Opinion section.

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