Dual Lives

It gets quite maddening to live dual lives; one inside our small screens and one outside of it. Even while we try to replicate the outside world in the world within the small screens, it is not quite the same. In the world within the small screens, there is hardly any sign of real emotions or vulnerability, barring the personal messages. The world of the small screens invites us to "explore" a world full of happiness, adventure, poems and love. It's all either travel bugs happily showing us greener pastures, literally, or the aesthetic curators showing their perfectly decked homes and kitchens despite a seemingly thriving career. Everyone is happy, lucky or in love. 

Does the instagram chef have a magical kitchen where the cooking leaves no grease marks? Or does he have a magic spell to make the stains vanish? Why do I see no dishes half filled with water left in the sink from the last meal? 

Why does the poet on the internet who sits by the verandah of her ancestral house and watches the rain feel no guilt that her indulgence is eating into her time for taking care of all the innumerable things yet to be ticked off on her to-do list? 

How does the woman with reels of her lounging in her enviable bohemian home decor find time to reply to those inane emails from work? 

Is life so blemish free for all those creators as they make us believe? I know we are to not think about the creases and crevices that have been carefully removed for our gaze, validation or envy. It is a world that perhaps they themselves do not really live in. It is after all a version of their real worlds meticulously crafted to fit into one of the many molds of lives allowed to flourish in the world of the small screen. It would be wrong to dub it a non-existent world. For it exists in the real world too, though not quite in the way it exists inside the small screens. A life once removed from the real life, perhaps. 

I wonder, do the creators too feel a sense of other-ness about their own lives in their seemingly successful attempts to lead these dual lives? Or does the dissonance too get magically erased as those filters get added to their small screen lives? 

On the other hand, it is possible that they feel the burden of people's validation heavier than us, the ones who do not brandish our lives on the small screens. The prey becomes the hunter in a strange fashion. It is an effortless and scary transformation; the consumers, who are made to feel envy and self-pity looking at the rose tinted, blemish and crevice free lives of the small screen, become ruthless monsters casting their watchful eyes at the creators. Some even become diabolical, by casting public judgment instead, without a second thought. Anonymity becomes a weapon when consumers join hands in the comment sections. 'Big Brother' is watching you and but the brothers (meant to be gender neutral) nevertheless desire for lives as perfect as the curated lives playing in 30 second loops on their screens. 

Time to turn off the mobile data, I suppose. Enough internet for the day.