The year is 2063 and you were never interesting.

You’re never going to be someone’s eccentric grandmother because you spent your best years consuming the lives of strangers.

Growing up, you were gifted. Your parents would talk about your potential, the things you’d do. You had hobbies, interests. You collected Pokémon cards and adored animals; your singular life goal was to convince your parents to dig a backyard pool so you could put a dolphin in it. You were obsessed with miniature things and death, you concocted elaborate backstories for why your Barbie’s were missing heads after your brother’s tore them off. Albeit poorly, you played sports: cross country in the summer, volleyball in the fall. The internet was a narrow window into a narrower corner, it lived on desktop in a dedicated place: The Computer Room.

As a tween, your days were ritualized. Summer meant the bike ride past your rowing coach’s house, idly circling unattainable items in the J. Crew catalogue on the floor of your best friend’s house. You’d Limewire Dave Matthew’s songs and eat raw cookie dough - you didn’t know calories existed then (or salmonella). You’d come home to check your away messages on AOL, checking to see if your crush wrote you (he didn’t). You would duck out of your middle school class to feed the Tamagotchi in your locker.

In your teens, that window became a door. Facebook. You begged your brother for his university email so you could sign up - back then, it was reserved for actual college students. Every weekend, you’d upload albums: 50+ photos, religiously tagging everyone that appeared. Your evenings get narrower. On Mondays, you pore over the photos. It’s a glimpse into a life adjacent to yours, but entirely separate.

You are 14 & cripplingly insecure; certain you’re ugly, unfixable, perpetually missing out. You find Tumblr and your weekends vanish, too - you’re Alice in Wonderland, you’re a pioneer, tumbling into a dark new world, one without parental restrictions, community guidelines, any semblance of guardrails.

But you write, a lot. Love letters to your boyfriend, 8 page essays when the teacher asked for one. You’re in DECA and synchronized swimming. Your relationship with the internet, while tenuous, is fragmented. It still lives in a room of its own, your parents can lock you out. To distract yourself in class, you resort to doodling: centaurs plucking their hearts out with pitchforks, glistening fish caught in elaborate nets. Facebook introduces “honesty box” and you receive your first hate comment: “annoying little bitch.” You stare at it, blinking, and delete the widget from your profile. You’re certain it’s true, but before, people would at least tell you it to your face.

In college, for the most part, you are too busy living to concern yourself with the online world. You scale back your online production - you’re no longer posting weekly dispatches of your life on Facebook, chronicling your breakups with relationship and status updates. Your first love cheated on you during spring break in the Dominican Republic and now he’s at a darty in Indiana with the girl but no one will ever even know - it’s embarrassing now to switch your relationship status to “it’s complicated,” after all. “Cringe” has not entered the cultural lexicon yet, you are free from it.

Besides, you’re a curator now, thanks to Instagram. You and your friends happily abuse the Valencia filter, your feed is group photos and sunsets. After a 2 week trip to Europe only one photo makes it to your page, it gets 6 likes. Photos are square - dumps won’t exist for another decade. You’re not quite sure what you do with your free time besides drinking and occasionally starving yourself - you’re never hungover, so you spend every waking minute either partying or half listening to lectures.

Barstool Smokeshows and TFM are launched - you’re inundated with gorgeous girls at state schools in the south, parties and sororities that are far cooler than the ones you seem to be getting invited to. You feel as though you’re on the fringe of your own life, engulfed by the sprawling campus. You no longer doodle in class. To distract yourself, you open Facebook on your laptop.

You have a smartphone now. The ‘others’ aren’t just university students in the south, now - they’re celebrities, bloggers, trust fund babies in Manhattan. You are blown away by the banality of your own life. It’s official, now: your hobbies are the gym, partying, and this. The word “influencer” exists, to you, for the first time ever. They are curators. You delete all your old photos, erasing evidence of your entire adolescence in a fit of insecurity. These women hike mountains in the pre-dawn darkness to capture sunrise in evening gowns without crowds. They lay on the ground, smiling, their long shining hair coiled in ringlets around them, coquettishly posing with a camera.

You have only a dim awareness that any of this might not be real. You copy them. They influence you to go to Bali and when you go, you pack a suitcase of outfits: shoes, earrings, everything matching. Before, you’d bring a carry-on; now you have to check a bag. You beg your friend to take photos of you, snapping photo after photo. Your most vivid memory of the 10 days there was posing with an acai bowl in a pineapple printed polyester set - how well the picture turned out, the smoothie lukewarm by the time you finally eat it.

Somewhere around your mid 20s, the memories stop. The window has become the door has become the room has become the entire house has become a window again. You have a portal in your pocket full of apps that are designed within an inch of their lives to take the best of you - your attention, your ability to focus, your time.

Your life is an orchestrated shuffle of technology. Your days are spent at work with the medium screen and you come home to unwind with the big screen; reflexively grabbing for the small screen every 2 to 7 minutes. Your screen time is 4 hours per day, 6 hours on the weekends, 7 if you’re hungover (you often are). It’s the midwest, after all. Fridays are for going out, Sundays are for boozy brunch. And repeat.

The feeds are more curated now, these girls are just like you, but unlike you, they are clean, gorgeous, smiling. They aren’t unattainable like the influencers of the past, gatekeeping all the time, FaceTuned, evening gowns on the mountain top. They are not selfish, these girls: they tell you exactly how they got that way, the ten step skincare routine, the walking pad. They find salvation through consumption: red light therapy, 10k steps, matcha. You dutifully take your marching orders. Tomorrow you will be them. Tomorrow you will do the thing.

You no longer think about hobbies. Your day is full, after all. Your life is a kaleidoscope of activity: fishing trips, police chases, cheating scandals. It’s neat and tidy, really - everything that’s interesting happens to you through the confines of a 4x6 rectangle. You start taking pilates because everyone else does. You hate it, and your abs never appear, and the classes cost $50 dollars a pop, but you can’t really think of what else you would do, so you go.

Growing up, you had very specific dreams: by 50 you would be a bilingual marketing executive CEO entrepreneur, wearing lingerie and weighing your oatmeal (you really, really loved the opening scene of Devil Wears Prada). You’d be settled with your gorgeous, green eyed British husband that you met while living abroad (city undefined - stylistically Paris, but on the water, and everyone’s speaking english? Your imagination has never had much use for a map), and you’d have a home (no, a penthouse apartment! No, wait, a seaside cottage, but in New York City..!) filled to the brim with tasteful knickknacks you’ve picked up during your lifetime of travels.

You can practically see it: your hobbies are varied, deepened by a lifetime of attention, practice. You throw ceramics and vacation in the French countryside; you and your husband are avid cyclers. You are able to refinish a hardwood floor, you garnish your meals (at the dinner parties you host for your gaggle of equally gorgeous and interesting friends) with microgreens from your garden. The lifelong, slow burn preoccupation with weight has faded over the decades, your body has given you two children, you are at peace. You obsess about keeping it strong now, so you can pick up your grandchildren, drag your 50 pound suitcase up the stairs of Sicily (you never did shake that overpacking habit).

But wait. You are 70 years old. You’re sitting in your home. Your grandchildren ask you what your 20s were like, and you honestly can’t tell them. You have no heirlooms; Temu doesn’t last. You never moved to Paris or quit the toxic job or booked the Spanish lesson. You were too nervous to get that tattoo, never went back to school. You were too awkward to go to the nude drawing class, you never did learn how to make dumplings. Your feed was so full of people living lives so full you never stopped to consider yours.

The great love affair of your life is… this. Sitting in the dark, your nose 6 inches from the screen. You have never separated, never taken a break. It started slowly, rockily. But by 25, it had its claws in you. By 30, it fills the dead spaces in your life. And you’ve never relented. It has consumed you wholly and the math has compounded. By this age, at 7 hours a day, 15 years of your life has been a screen.