Rivalling with Reflection
📝 Journal 2: On the brink of online presence, virtual life & social media.
Welcome, to my second journal.
Strangely enough, this time I wrote the title above as a verb, a battle still being fought. A double-edged sword.
In this second entry, I’m sharing what troubles me most about the online world — the quiet collapse of human connection as technology accelerates. The dystopias that we once read, watched, or played are no longer distant warnings but reflections in the mirror. The lines between fiction & reality are blurring & that’s… terrifying.
So welcome back to a glimpse inside my brainsomnia which I personally loathe, but some seem to admire :)
These days, it’s common to find ourselves in any of these rising professions:
Laborers of capitalist greed
Consumers of brain-rot entertainment
Slaves to the digital world
Victims of doom-scrolling & mass (mis)information
Captives craving for fame & validation
All of that, just for tiny shots of dopamine.
Sounds familiar? I know many real-humans can relate. Maybe not this terrifying synthetic-humans, who are also…disturbingly real!
This post isn’t meant to begin with a creepy introduction, but more about confronting my own reflections.
Struggles of Presence.
As a hardcore introvert who already finds real-life presence draining, it’s equally exhausting to wrestle with my virtual-life. Most of the time, I live inside my own bubble (& in my head) with a talkative-brain.
“Can I borrow your brain?” — people often joke that with me. Maybe it’s meant as a compliment, but honestly, I sometimes wish I didn’t have to think so much. I’m just one imperfect person trying hard to survive, one day at a time.
In the online world, I mainly use Instagram & Substack for my hobbies. My dragon is the main character (not me) & honestly, that’s not such a bad deal when you think about it. It’s actually pretty cool.
Then came the Metaverse. Something I’ve hated more than my own talkative-brain since day one.
Meta controls 4 major communication platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp & it doesn’t stop there. It also tracks your phone & browser activities even when you’re not actively using their apps, integrates AI into their platforms & mines your data without your consent.
(Let’s not forget: Instagram & WhatsApp were once independent platforms before Meta acquired them).
Even my dragon hates it.
I still remember those early years when I had nearly every communication platform & social media account you could think of, Meta-owned or not. Fragments of my personal identity & traces of my real-life were scattered across the internet beyond my control. What happened back then became my FIRST wake-up call.
That’s when I made the choice to let it all go. Not just deactivated, but completely deleted. Everything. Wiped clean. Public or private. I even shut down all my blogs. No backups, no safety nets.
Yes, I was really that brave.
I had grown to resent all the fame, attention & public recognition that once followed me. Choosing to step back & go low-profile felt like reclaiming a part of myself. The freedom was unlike anything else, perhaps one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
A huge disclaimer here: I’m not saying this to influence your thoughts, nor to scare you, or to suggest you should do anything. That’s not the point of this post. This is me sharing my personal experiences & also a reminder for future-me if I ever revisit this post. I might laugh about it (who knows?), or I might even thank myself later.
Just recently in 2025, I witnessed firsthand how people went crazy when TikTok was down for over 14 hours during its ban in the U.S (I’m not in the U.S & I don’t use TikTok, so this didn’t affect me). Still, the whole incident was enough to become my SECOND wake-up call.
It terrifies me to see how addicted people have become to social media.
Watching some lose their minds, & even a sense of themselves felt deeply.. unsettling. I’m not talking about those who depend on social media for a living, but rather the everyday users. You get the gist.
And that was just one platform going down. Imagine losing the entire internet. It reminded me of Cyberpunk 2077 (great game, by the way), where the whole DataKrash storyline echoes the similarity.
This really makes me stop & think. Deeply.
What Happens Next.
I stayed off my hobby Instagram for over a month to see if I could manage without it & thankfully, I could. It was tough at first, especially after being so active there throughout 2024.
Around that time, I did a Q&A with the online community about ‘Keeping Contacts’. By then, I was already on the brink of leaving for good & wiping everything online, even if it was just my dragon doing the posting.
However, I had also built connections with several welcoming communities around the world, & those interactions made me hesitate.
I was on the fence.
During that period, I built a private online space, something I could make public if I chose to, allowing people to reach me outside of Instagram or this Substack. For now, I prefer to keep it as it is, with only these two platforms remaining active.
I often think about how life was perfectly fine before social media & the culprit smartphone. Those were some of the best years of my life.
Gone are the days of genuine connections & real conversations.
Nowadays, it’s mostly people glued to their phones, ghosting, silently watching without engaging & lurking behind algorithms. Add in the army bots, zero-attention-span humans, toxic grifters & lazy plagiarists. It paints a bleak picture.
In this so-called ‘new intelligent’ digital era, I can’t help but wonder: For every post I’ve crafted, does it even matter anymore? For what, really? Do real humans still care, or the synthetics & fake AIs become easier to please?
Rivaling with reflection.
Life in the virtual space & digital platforms — it’s addictive, yet terrifying.
Recently on Thread, i was pondering upon the algorithm on the posts I see. It shows public posts of those similar interest to us, determining by "likes" we click on posts we see. It's great and easy to find people with similar interest, but it's also limiting exposure to people with similar mindset, values, worldview. It shows us what we want to see. In a way, it drives us to be more polarize, put us into our conform zone, and avoiding us to interact with those who opinionated differently with us (will this avoid people commenting harsh words on each other? I don't know..). Instead of connecting people, people grew apart.
But still, it was algorithm that let me become one of your dragon cave dwellers, I'm grateful for that I suppose?