Living in a culture you don't belong to

We are living in a black mirror episode

Today’s essay is not about politics, but it feels wrong to not address the elephant in the room. While half of the country is waiting to wake up from a bad dream, the other half is celebrating. We are as divided as ever. Something many of us prayed would return to the fringe of American society has affirmed its place in mainstream culture — dominant culture even, by the numbers.

In the words of Yvette Nicole Brown: “America is done. But they got their orange king.” As a German-American, I fear for the consequences of this choice, a choice made by millions which I will never understand.

But again, this essay is not about politics, and as such, it’s not about the increasingly delicate and polarizing elements of belonging, such as shared values, morals, and beliefs. Rather, it concerns something more fundamental — our culture’s relationship to reality and ourselves.

While my reflections are usually laced with hope and silver linings, today I am here to practice acceptance of a simple but sad truth: I live in a culture I don’t belong to.

A few weeks ago, I was maneuvering around the beach with my dogs. Here in LA, you’ll inevitably walk past someone with a tripod. The case in point that day was a young woman with wet hair and a see through fishnet top (no bottoms), sensually swirling around in front of the camera. I tell myself that it’s LA (and not the world).

After the sun had set, pastels painted into the cloudless sky, I walked back across the parking lot stretching out in front of the Venice Pier. My gaze captured two guys in an open top Bronco. They were chatting and laughing. How lovely, I thought. Two bros enjoying a little sunset.

As I passed them on my way to the sidewalk, I realized they were not enjoying a sunset, they were pretending to enjoy a sunset. There was a third guy with a camera propped up behind them, previously obstructed from my view. My heart sunk.

Now, we could blame LA. Although I might argue that even if it’s just LA, this is a place that births culture. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please restore my faith. Because here in LA, we are either in front of the screen or in front of the camera.

You’ll go to an upscale restaurant and see kids silently scrolling while munching on $200 wagyu. You’ll go to the gym to always find that one person with their phone propped up in the corner. Here in LA you’ll blink your eyes open during a meditation circle only to find that the guy next to you is (also) not meditating but waving his phone around the room (his followers must know he’s meditating!). Here in LA you’ll never drive past girls dancing on the street thinking cute!, because you already know they are filming a TikTok on a phone glued to the storefront.

Here in LA you will encounter engagement and follower buying schemes so sophisticated and obscure, they’ll give you chills: Influencers who appear to be talking to thousands online, when in reality, there may just be a handful of real people in their audience. An audience that consists of an army of bots which they bought for as cheaply as a few hundred bucks. Bots that are passionately discoursing in the comments with language that sounds strange the same way that ChatGPT sometimes sounds strange. But when you click on their profiles, they look real: you’ll find photos, stories, and followers. They are ‘high-quality bots’.

It’s official, we are living in a black mirror episode.

This would be a good place to out myself as a former TikToker. In some ways, I was one of them. My TikTok experiment began harmlessly — filming educational content on psychedelics in the privacy of my own home. I had every intention to not let it bleed into the rest of my life. I will create but not consume, I vowed.

Of course, the algorithm got the better of me and soon, I was wasting hours. When the algorithm began favoring more diverse footage (not just people talking into the camera, because now we need to change the frame every 1-3 seconds, otherwise our popcorn brains tune out), I felt compelled to begin documenting more.

This, as you may expect, cost me presence in the moments I attempted to document, but perhaps even more worrisome, it made me wonder throughout the day: Is this worth documenting? How about this? Or this? So even when I wasn’t documenting, my mind was still contemplating to document, and thus, not present.

Naturally, my TikTok career came to an end when I could no longer ignore what it robbed me of. Every time I return, usually prompted by boredom or loneliness, I’m starkly reminded why I want to stay away.

I’ve struggled with belonging all my life. The way that someone struggles to belong who has never known belonging. There is a film between me and the world, and while it sometimes thins, it never fades.

I’m often most aware of it when socializing. The problem is not being alone either, I cherish solitude. The perhaps most appropriate term for my experience is alienation — estrangement from society at large. I’ve always felt this, and so I recognize that my lack of belonging is not to blame on culture alone.

Psychedelic encounters at the fringe of the human experience and the quitting or limiting much of what connects my generation — social media, drinking, and going out — hasn’t helped, either.

During one of said psychedelic journeys, I witnessed myself as a child curled up in fetal position, absorbed in her alienation. Tribesmen from the plant’s indigenous tradition were running around me in circles, hundreds of them, signaling energetically that I do belong. I belong to this earth the way the trees and birds and mountains and rivers belong. I belong to this earth the way all humans belong to it.

Plants gifted me a sense of unity with this planet, at last. But humans — humans are oddly the one thing emerging from nature that I can feel most estranged from.

Feeling like an alien on this earth is a sensation I share with many — some of whom proclaim on social media that they are “star seeds”, hailing from as far as pleiades, a star cluster 444 light years away from earth (angel numbers! of course).

This may read as a counter culture manifesto, but don’t be fooled. Some of the subculture I feel the furthest removed from — perhaps even further than from mainstream influencer culture — are the new age spiritual communities.

The ‘woke’ who have denied themselves of all responsibility of what’s wrong with the world, escaped the matrix, and created a sweet bubble of spiritual bypassing and bliss. They went on a journey, which quite honestly probably included psychedelics, but never fully came back. They speak a different language and are so untethered that a grounded discourse on the complexities (and mundanities) of life is impossible.

Where are those who ponder the nature of reality and aspire to be a functioning human in capitalist society? Who below the age of 40 can spend several hours without pulling out their phones? Is anyone still appreciating the moment for its fleeting nature and capturing it with the heart, not with the camera?

If you know where they are, or if you are one of them, please say hi. Because no matter where I look, I’m disappointed. Maybe it’s LA, I tell myself. But then again, if it’s LA, it may very well foreshadow the world.

Polarity is at an all time high — we are either esoteric or scientific, religious or secular, online and cultured or offline and counter-cultured, conservative or liberal, empowered to speak freely or cancelled for doing so. When have we lost nuance?

Because who looks closely within finds that we contain all of it, all the traits in our collective, we each contain the beauty and the beast. By repressing what we deem shameful or unsafe, we have birthed a culture rooted in separation and disassociation. A culture carried on the shoulders of our ego’s drive to overcompensate.

In the process, I fear, we have extinguished true belonging. Belonging that stems from recognizing our shared wholeness, the denial that any of us are special, and the recognition that the only thing we’ll ever see when ‘othering’ and judging is a reflection of our own shadow.

And so I must ask myself, what is the source of the distance between me and those glued to the phone, the followers, the star seed fables, or America’s orange king? Which parts within am I rejecting, what needs am I denying myself? Distraction, validation, individuation, selfishness?

Or am I missing the nuance, clinging to the dualities of the concepts I seek to embody, denying myself the reality that it’s not me, it’s not LA, it’s the world?

This morning, I went on another beach walk. Silver mist was draping over the ocean, blending beach and water into an enchanting air of mysticism you normally only find in the Pacific Northwest. There are less influencers in the wild — just dogs running free, and owners chasing after them. Everybody loves the summers here in Southern California, but I may just belong to the fall.

I too have known loneliness. 
I too have known what it is to feel
    misunderstood, 
    rejected, and suddenly
not at all beautiful. 
Oh, mother earth, 
    your comfort is great, your arms never withold. 
It has saved my life to know this. 
Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning. 
Oh, motions of tenderness!

- Mary Oliver

Photo by Steven van Elk