Remember when you didn't watch a video about every neat thing that ever happened and it was much better that way?

Reject the smartphone gaze!

“Viral TikTok shows group of strangers taking a 12-hour road trip together after Frontier canceled their flight” is a headline that to me perfectly encapsulates the societal moment in which we find ourselves: People publishing highly curated and expertly staged media on the Internet, after which major news networks pick it up as if it’s something organic and meaningful rather than something edited and packaged. The headline tells it all: A “group of strangers” took a “12-hour road trip together” after their flight was cancelled. Instant virality, instant news cycle. It all feels so lame and depressing. Doesn’t anyone else feel that way?

I’m not suggesting that the flight in question wasn’t cancelled; nor am I suggesting that these people didn’t actually rent a gigantic van and drive up I-75 together. All of that actually appears to have happened. What also happened is that a nominally interesting, exciting, unique and one-of-a-kind incident has once again been crammed into the social media maw, processed, reconstituted, and disgorged into yet another “viral TikTok.” In effect a once-in-a-lifetime event has become indistinguishable from 15 other things that have already been posted to social media this month alone. This doesn’t really feel all that special; it feels, in fact, pretty boring, and rote, and redundant.

Up until very recently it wasn’t this way. You probably never would have heard of this incident; if you did, it might have merely been in a funny filler squib in a Knoxville newspaper, or maybe on a local news report that eventually made its way onto the Internet. Perhaps you might have run into someone years later who took part in this trip, and you’d hear about it, and it would sound quasi-mythical, almost barely believable, like the description of a supernova in some ancient astronomer’s text—there and gone again, incredible in its ambiguity and uncertainty. Yet now it’s just…on TikTok. And I’m sorry, that’s lame. TikTok is really, really lame.

More broadly the issue is with the smartphone, and what we might call “the smartphone gaze,” or the act of viewing everything in your life through the context of a smartphone screen. I knew a guy once who liked to say: "Something always happens.” To which we might add today: “…and if it does it ends up on a smartphone.” That’s essentially what’s happened to our culture and our way of life: If something happens, it is recorded on a phone; increasingly it is likely it will end up on social media. And that has changed things greatly.

Obviously people are afraid of ending up on a social media feed as a target of cancel culture backlash; people will do just about anything to avoid that. But even where there’s no risk of being cancelled people still change their behavior. The people taking part in this “impromptu road trip” are plainly aware that they are essentially characters in a social media series, and they don’t shy away from acting like it. (“They told me we was stopping at the licka sto,” one passenger complains with an exaggerated smirk; another declares, “I just like snacks!”) The smartphone gaze transforms everyone into a player on the stage, and the contrived sentimentality of it is just hard to swallow.

I mean just imagine the sinking feeling of it all: You discover a bunch of people are renting a car and driving to the exact destination you’re going to, and you say, “Oh wow, great, I may actually get home on time and I’ll even have a great story to tell about it!” And then you realize: “…oh, man, but I have to be a character in a TikTok post to do it.” Sounds like instant death to me. I might actually elect to hitchhike and take the risk of getting offed by a serial killer near Waycross.

As with any “viral moment,” this one brought with it a sort of saccharine hyperbole meant to justify its own existence. One participant in the ride said the whole thing seemed to “restore [peoples’] faith in humanity,” while another said that the passengers “came together because we all needed each other.” This is all of course very silly—these people all pooled their money and rented a van, it was nice, it was fine, it wasn’t a huge deal or some sort of paradigm shift or something—but social media demands this sort of thing and these people know it.

My advice is the same as ever: Get rid of your smartphone and get off social media. If you’re unwilling to do those things, at least consider this: The next time something interesting happens, don’t reach for your smartphone. Don’t record it. Don’t put people on the spot and turn the whole thing into a monetized performance. Just enjoy whatever is happening. If you’re experiencing something fun, experience it, then tell people about it later. It will be more real, less stressful and more rewarding than packaging up yet another fun occurrence for yet another turn on your feed. Life is better when you’re not looking at it through a smartphone; it was like that once and it can easily be that way again, if you try for it.