in life there is rain

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how in the early 2000s internet, people just posted what they wanted. They were cringe, stupid, unserious, they overshared, they just let their head-cannons loose. These days the percentage of people on SNS that lurk has skyrocketed (partly why I’m making sehyo.com but I digress). As social media has become commodified as a nearly free advertising space for companies and their armies of ugc creators and influencers-for-hire, people have been trained into watchers™, made to expect polish and sensationalism only corporations or jobless people have the time to craft. We used to be able to just upload text, photos, and videos of ourselves doing whatever however because everyone else was sharing and it was all entertaining. Now that everyone has become part of the peanut gallery if you do that you’re labeled 和室界隈, aka simple room group like as if if you don’t have a ring light, dslr, lavalier mic, and pretty face your opinion online does not matter.

But what is even more concerning to me is less about the online world but how the shifts online have happened in the real world as well.

Like have you ever watched those videos of NYC or Tokyo in the 80s or 90s or even 2000s. The way people in the pre-smartphone era were so present with each other in space and time even in the public domain. I’m not saying I want all of the behaviors of those generations, but it’s hard to go outside in Manhattan and see everyone with their airpods in looking down at their phones scurrying around and think that’s how human society was meant to function, especially considering I’m often similarly airpoded, similarly looking at my phone multitasking (often on Slack, God bless my coworkers messaging me at any time of day), similarly looking for connection or community but simultaneously looking as unapproachable as possible.

I feel like the rise of third spaces are much needed but also kind of hilarious in a sad way, that in order to restore ourselves to the communities we had pre-internet, we have to create spaces that we have to use the internet to advertise. I acknowledge that I have been coding from a young age, but I feel like the extent to which we have let the internet rob us (or maybe we’re doing it to ourselves) of our humanity is sickening. Social anxiety and fear has never been higher not just in major cities but globally. People would rather do heinous things to themselves than be labeled, judged, or canceled.

This is not just about socializing. The percentage of lurkers™ being high means that whenever you try anything different from the status quo, everyone is watching. They’ll have nice things to say to you individually but behind your back (or worse, online™) they will be labeling you, categorizing you, critiquing you, their words like scissors cutting to pieces the already misrepresented caricature of your persona. People are cruel and they will reject you like a company with an entry level role rejecting someone with 3 years of experience. You’ll never know it though because the job of a lurker is to be silent, so you will be left wondering “what is everyone thinking of me?”.

The current year is 2026 and you have no optionality here in terms of time. You cannot go back to the yesteryear where you can be cringe but free. You must exist in this late-stage capitalist nightmare where even saying hi to someone is hard because everyone hates you why would you do that are you crazy. You can’t create anything because the lurkers will converge on you with critiques: "it’s meh”, “i wouldn’t have done it that way”, “ok i guess”. People will descend on you and backseat-game your life as if they have the courage to put themselves out there and create in public, do in public, speak in public. Nobody wants to do shit anymore; people would rather connect with ai, a literal set of weights and biases in a tensor, than connect with you. Why are you talking to me? Go away.

Everyone’s lonely but it’s because we’re just mean to each other so we complain to ai not even human therapists. People don’t want to be authentic anymore because it’s the prisoner’s dilemma of lurking: when everyone is lurking who wants to be the first one to stand out and do something and have all that crushing attention on them.

It’s stupid, you don’t have much time left on this Earth, I don’t have much time either, and neither do all of the lurkers around us. We are all destined to die on some day at some age. So if you want to actually do something with your life meaningful enough to demand attention you need to be able to weather it. There is no question that there are way more things to fear for the average person than even a decade ago. Everyone wants to be a good person™, who does good things™, just like all of the influencers with their carefully curated successful seeming lifestyles.

The issue is that underneath all that veneer we’re all human and we’re going to do things that others will perceive as mistakes, especially if we aren’t naturally talented at whatever it is. The labels, the icks, the criticisms, if you are trying to live your life authentically these things will all come at you some day whether you like it or not. It will suck and you will feel emotional pain, definitely more than is justified, but you have to treat it like rain. The weather changes every day (especially here in nyc), some days bring rain. If you’re caught in the rain, you get soaked, the water falls from the sky and saturates your pores, your clothes. You become cold, you shiver. But even when it’s raining the water is mostly hitting you, beading up, and then falling off. And eventually it stops raining and the water evaporates off of you and you become dry again. That’s kind of what embarrassment, shame, even guilt is like at the end of the day, provided the transgression isn’t huge or in this case that it’s just directed at you for being you and doing what you love. The lurkers are like clouds hovering in the sky, and yeah it’s true that 2026 is rather cloudy, but that’s just life.

in life there is rain.

Originally published on Substack. View the source version ↗