Digital usage that stems not from a desire for attention but from metaphysical hunger.

 I never had a persona on social media; that is to say, I was never actively present on the internet. I only interacted and observed—nothing more—because I never had the desire to be involved in it, nor did I feel any need to. This continued until the end of my adolescence, and I never felt its absence. Eventually, however, I began comparing the scarcity and sameness of people in the physical world with the abundance and diversity of people—or at least the possibility of meeting someone even on the other side of the world—in the virtual one. And thus, out of weariness with those around me, I too was drawn into social media. I created accounts. I shared pictures. I posted quotes. I wrote texts, and so on. Yet there was one thing that set me apart from those who used these platforms as they were meant to be used: I did all this so that they would remain frozen in time, as “capsules of the past.” Perhaps, I thought, someone who understands me might see them even decades later and think, “So there was someone like me who saw all these things I saw in existence.” Those who turn to the virtual world as their only alternative because they cannot find satisfaction in the physical one are usually conformists, for they are addicted to their screens precisely because they do not wish to be alone with their pain. Naturally, they are ready to do whatever is expected of them there—disregarding their own identities for the sake of belonging, even when it harms them. This is the reaction of a typical adolescent whose mind has already been assimilated into societal values. But I entered the virtual world not as an escape, but as a search—and that is where I differ from them. My personality was formed in solitude, and therefore my values belonged entirely to me. That is why I neither fell into their corrupted path nor found resonance in any virtual space where even discontented people gather to form “alliances.” There was no one who truly spoke to me, nor was capable of doing so, for I was not living in an age of contemplation but in an era of consumption. And it is precisely for this reason that, while my peers were able to flee from themselves, I could not find anything that could affirm me. Still, I kept sharing—not because I expected something to happen, but simply because maybe something might. It wasn’t hope that drove me; it was the impulse, the urge to encounter that person who exists nowhere. Now, I express my inner world so that it may somehow reach those rare, marginal souls outside society. I externalize many of the things that pass through me—not to be liked, but to be found. Yet a feeling within me insists that I still belong to that untouched, pure self I had before late adolescence.