The online life that steals your soul

Freya India’s debut book, GirlsⓇ, is a terribly sad read. It is also likely to be rather eye-opening to anyone older than the “Gen Z” cohort (born 1997–2012) who is its focus, and to which group India herself belongs. She describes a cold world of almost total alienation from every value we would associate with a flourishing life — among which love, duty, real-life community, family, meaning, self-knowledge and faith. While India acknowledges that growing up, particularly adolescence, is never easy, she makes the case that, for younger women today, their lives have become “agonisingly different”. “What girls and young women are going through today,” she writes, “is something new. We see this most clearly in the complete collapse of their mental health.” 

So what is happening to young women today? India, who strikes a good balance between personal reflection and broader analysis, describes a world completely dominated by technology, social anxiety, medicalisation, alienation and, above all, commodification. This is not exactly the Marxist account of commodity fetishism — the transformation of a social relation between people that takes on the form of a relation between things — although it is not entirely incompatible with such an account either. India’s approach is less that of a political theorist and more that of a rigorous journalist who is able to mine her own experiences without laying on the emotion — though, as I said, it is nevertheless an account that inevitably invokes pathos. 

India begins — where else — with the phone. She describes a world that older people might struggle to recognise, in which applications with names like “Facetune” encourage users to upload selfies so as to “fix” various parts of their anatomy in order to appear more attractive. Attractive to who or what becomes an interesting question: it’s not at all obvious that this kind of anxious self-absorption is really about a desire to be attractive to men; it’s curious that men don’t even really get mentioned until a discussion of dating apps much later on, and neither does the patriarchy as the explanatory cause, as we might find in more stridently feminist work.

There’s no attempt to tie looking better online to worldly attractiveness, nor does India suggest that it was men or “male sexual expectations” that shaped her and her friends’ desire to have the most perfect self-images. India describes an entirely hermetic world, in which the camera appears to have taken the place of the outside: there is certainly what we might call “intra-sexual rivalry” — girls competing with each other — but from a place, not of bravado, but of total, punishing lack. 

As with many of the online tools, platforms and programmes India discusses (and there are a lot of them), these are downloaded in their millions, relentlessly promoted by celebrities, and targeted precisely to the kinds of insecurities young women tend to have about their appearance. Apps that smooth skin, tighten waists, shrink noses (and so on) create a fantasy world in which the perfect “you” emerges, even if only in an image (or, more recently, doctored videos). These kinds of tools do not exactly build acceptance, character or a cheerful spirit. As India puts it: “Forget the painful process of accepting yourself, or of coming to terms with your flaws or even learning to love them; none of that was necessary any more.” 

In sections which read like Dante’s descent into hell, “Filtered” is followed by “Diagnosed”, “Documented”, “Disconnected”, “Detached”, and finally, “Empowered,” (the quotation marks being ironic in this last instance). We follow our girl Virgil (Virgirl?) through the dark gullies of augmented-reality filters, TikTok contouring programmes, “Golden Ratio” grids and Inversion programmes, so that you can see yourself how others see you (and be horrified, presumably). “We were attracted to algorithms, ready to transport us to dark and extreme places,” India writes. 

It only gets worse, with India’s descent mapping on to the time period from the mid-2010s to today (with a large starring role for the lockdowns), as technology became more and more granular and advertising more and more insidious. While image-changing programmes were just the beginning, social media algorithms became more and more attuned to exactly how rotten girls were feeling: “Some feel as though TikTok is reading their mind, or knows them better than they know themselves.” 

Then come the beauty influencers, with discount codes for products: “We trust them because they pretend to be our friends,” she observes mordantly. This is a recurring pattern: technology promises something: a better face, attention, friendship, and gives you a fake version of it, while selling you some tat at the same time. After a metric ton of Kardashian references, we move on to body dysmorphia, obviously encouraged by the hall-of-mirrors apps, and from the relatively mild skincare products to injections, fillers and full-on surgery. 

As someone who grew up taking her beauty advice from hedges, I felt despair in the face of India’s no-doubt accurate depiction of the hellish, ouroboric world of infinite self-improvement: this extends, inevitably, from the physical to the mental, and the horror only increases: “We are the most medicalised generation of girls and young women in history” yet “we only seem to feel worse”. The immoral and unregulated trade in diagnosis and prescription worsened during lockdown (often with ensuing lawsuits). India mentions the mimetic tendency for girls to practise “self-diagnosis”, sometimes in bizarre ways: in 2020 there was an apparent mass outbreak of tourettes, with girls thumping their chest and shouting “beans” in a bid to emulate one TikTok influencer. 

After a while reading GirlsⓇ, I had the strong urge to ask “where on earth are the adults here?!” Why was no one saying “you seem rather unhappy, darling, shall we delete these silly things off your phone?”, or saying things like “you’re beautiful as you are” or “there are much more important things in the world than photofilters, or knowing where your friends are at all time, or taking pictures of everything rather than just enjoying the moment!” As India concludes, “[We] never knew life without documenting and marketing and obsessively analysing it as we went.” These archivists of the self appear to be cast adrift in a world without order, without hierarchy or guidance. 

India neutrally reports that, while her parents broke up when she was three, among her peers “family breakdown was so common it never felt worth mentioning”. Divorce, she writes, “became a way for parents to find their true selves,” just as their daughters were struggling to work out who they might be at all. While not at all as angry as it could be, GirlsⓇ is a searing indictment of a culture that has become so decadent, so disconnected and detached that young people, desperate for love and recognition, as is only natural, are turning to increasingly dark and dangerous substitutes for real affection. We might think an AI therapist is (relatively) harmless, but OnlyFans and a world in which violent sexual behaviour is copied from pornography, watched at ever younger ages, is certainly not (“Many of us watched violent porn before we even had a first kiss”).

India’s account makes clear that all the proposed “cures” for whatever anxieties and pathologies — real, imagined or, more likely, encouraged — were worse than useless where they weren’t actively destructive or dangerous. Her overriding argument — that girls turned from being sold commodities to becoming commodities themselves — is convincing, though could go deeper: would she defend a ban on phones for children, or would she rather parents take more control? She suggests that girls younger than her can notice when they treat themselves “like a product”, for example, but it is not clear how they might avoid the same traps that ensnared India and her peers, particularly as technology is only going to get better – or worse.

India is right that normal, historical insecurities have been exploded beyond all reason

GirlsⓇ might be relentlessly depressing, but it succeeds in describing many of the false ways in which real human needs, and particularly those of people struggling to find their place in the world, are being “met” by the false promises of the internet. It seems simply bizarre that humanity has constructed an entire simulation of all the things we can get simply by existing in the world as it is already given to us. We were not designed to be compared to every other living being with an internet connection: no one could survive that. India is right that normal, historical insecurities have been exploded beyond all reason.

While India did not at any point stamp on her phone, as I wished she had, GirlsⓇ is a serious warning to young and old alike: don’t let this stuff steal your soul. There is a whole world out there that cares not one jot how well a machine can scrub you up.