The year is 2063 and you were never interesting.

@lizleatrice

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The year is 2063 and you were never interesting.<br>You’re never going to be someone’s eccentric grandmother because you spent your best years consuming the lives of strangers.

@lizleatrice<br>Jun 01, 2026

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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.<br>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.<br>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.

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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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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,...