Belonging in the playground
“Hey, hey — what are you guys laughing about?”
I breathlessly blurt out the words, winded from running straight across the playground to get to them before “the funny” had stopped.
“Haha, just something they said! You wouldn’t get it.”
As children, when we start our search for belonging, we are often caught between trying to listen to someone intently, and trying to listen to everyone attentively. Energy at the max; attention-span basically at zero. We don’t yet know who we are, or what kind of friends we want to make, so we try to take it all in at once. After about a decade (maybe a decade-and-a-half) of social media, the collective human population living in that bubble is showing the same Freudian tell-tale signs.
Thanks to the internet, we can be connected to everyone, all the time. Information is overflowing everywhere, much like when we are exposed to other children for the first time. Only, in this digital playground, there are billions of them. On the internet, we are acutely aware of everything that was, is, and isn’t — and what could be. Trying to figure out where to go, or what to do, is nigh impossible; like being within earshot of a million different funny conversations, and trying to decide which one to run to, in the hopes of being included — of feeling included. The result is hurting us more than we realize.
The human experience has always been defined by relationships. Nowadays, that small, tight-knit tribe that used to live together has been blown up to extreme proportions; the human condition ad absurdum. How can any one person possibly feel like they are keeping up with the tribe, when that tribe has grown from perhaps 7 people, to over 7 billion people?
Change has not happened overnight but, connecting the dots, one can see the inevitability of where we ended up: with an overload of connections, nursing relationship deficits. The fault is our own. We don’t make time for growing real relationships anymore, always rushing from one connection to the next — and no amount of match-making right-swipes, Facebook groups, or co-created TikToks can replace that. As we continue our lifelong search for belonging, that trek becomes a real slog as we get lost in the digital thicket.
In the digital playground, it is hard to feel adequate; to be enough. And that feeling of not being enough is exacerbated by the system; fueled by it. We are all just running from one place to the next, never settling.
Back in the real playground, it is clear I was never going to be included in whatever they were talking and laughing about.
“You had to be there!”, the group announces to me, effectively ending our interaction.
Yeah, I guess you’re right. You were right back then, in that cruel way children can be, and it certainly applies to right now. I have to be there more. But not for every connection and conversation — just for the ones I care about.
