IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives

By Chris Stedman

What Does "IRL (In Real Life)" Really Mean in Today's Digital Age?

It's easy and reflexive to view our online presence as fake, to see the internet as a space we enter when we aren't living our real, offline lives. Yet so much of who we are and what we do now happens online, making it hard to know which parts of our lives are real.

IRL, Chris Stedman's personal and searing exploration of authenticity in the digital age, shines a light on how age-old notions of realness--who we are and where we fit in the world--can be freshly understood in our increasingly online lives. Stedman offers a different way of seeing the supposed split between our online and offline selves: the internet and social media are new tools for understanding and expressing ourselves, and the not-always-graceful ways we use these tools can reveal new insights into far older human behaviors and desires.

IRL invites readers to consider how we use the internet to fulfill the essential human need to feel real--a need many of us once met in institutions, but now seek to do on our own, online--as well as the ways we edit or curate ourselves for digital audiences. The digital search for meaning and belonging presents challenges, Stedman suggests, but also myriad opportunities to become more fully human. In the end, he makes a bold case for embracing realness in all of its uncertainty, online and off, even when it feels risky.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781506463520

Book preview

Introduction to the 2022 Edition: The Year of Living Digitally

On the day the first edition of this book entered the world, a blizzard buried my city.

I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, so most of the time a snowstorm isn’t a notable occasion. But this was in October, and it was not a small amount of snow.

The Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport reported 7.9 inches that day, the second-largest snowfall on record for the month of October. While it didn’t topple the infamous Halloween blizzard of 1991, an event Minnesotans still discuss in the kind of hushed, wondrous tones typically reserved for miracles and horrors, it was still a milestone event—the biggest documented snowfall so early in the season.

Normally an unparalleled blizzard on the day of your book release is very bad news. After all, a local bookstore was hosting a launch event for IRL that evening, where I was to be in conversation with my friend, the author John Paul (JP) Brammer, who lives in New York City. Under typical circumstances, a record-setting snowstorm on the day of a launch event featuring an out-of-town guest would be a crisis.

But there was no panic that day, and it certainly wasn’t because I’m good at staying collected under pressure. There was simply no need for it because nothing about the event had to change due to the snow. It was already set to happen virtually.

Yes, this is a book on what it means to be human in the digital age, but we didn’t choose a digital launch because it was thematically appropriate. There was no choosing.

You almost certainly already know why, but in case this introduction to the paperback edition of IRL is the one surviving piece of literature in some distant future in which anthropologists need help piecing it all together, I’ll sum it up quickly: a novel coronavirus, COVID-19, emerged, inciting a catastrophic pandemic that swept across the globe. In an attempt to slow the virus’s spread, much of society shut down in the early months of 2020. As the pandemic reached one country after another, experts suddenly urged people to stay home and physically distance themselves from one another as much as possible.

In Minneapolis, that suddenly came in March 2020. And so, just as spring was beginning to arrive, giving people in my neighborhood permission to reemerge after a brutal winter, we locked ourselves back inside.

In the beginning, many of us thought this lockdown would last a few weeks, perhaps a couple months at most. But by the time the snow roared back unseasonably early on the day the first edition of this book came out, little had changed. We were still inside.

What had changed from March to October was, for many of us, the entire way we lived our lives.

For some people, of course—medical workers, grocery store cashiers, trash collectors, others deemed essential (even in such cases where it was clear that essential meant essential to making money for their employers)—complete and total social distancing during the time of pandemic lockdown was impossible. But for many people in other professions, like office workers, therapists, and teachers, work moved online.

Work wasn’t the half of it; no matter one’s line of work, all people were asked to avoid socializing in person. To move group gatherings like birthday parties, game nights, church services, and happy hours to virtual space instead. For most of 2020 and 2021, for a great many of us, life was, like my book launch event, something that largely happened online.

As I look back on 2020, this unexpected year of living digitally, I find myself wondering what I can offer anyone who lived it themselves. Primarily because it’s still so fresh. I’m certain we’ll be trying to make sense of the ramifications of this rapid shift to digital living for decades to come.

But at the very least I can offer some questions—the ones that first drove me to write this book. These questions ultimately transcend the pandemic and our sudden shift to living digitally, as they are uncertainties we lived with both before and after lockdown: What does it mean to be human in an online age? In what ways are we using virtual space to meet our foundational needs for meaning, belonging, and a sense of realness, wholeness, personhood—and how does meeting these needs online change our understanding of who we are?

During lockdown, I began thinking about these questions through the lens of a new, more tangible one: Why was it so profoundly difficult for many of us to move huge pieces of our lives—schooling, church, holiday celebrations—online when the pandemic hit and widespread social distancing became a necessity?

There are certainly the obvious reasons. It had to happen fast. Most of us didn’t have time to prepare. Change of that magnitude is hard no matter what.

Beneath the surface, though, I suspect there’s another, larger reason. Yes, it was a big shift, but the truth is that many of us had been telling ourselves for years that the internet is less real than other parts of our lives. As a result, it was easy to think of yourself as being in a kind of holding pattern for much of the first year of the pandemic. To try to meet enough of your basic social needs online to sustain you, but mostly treat your digital interactions as substitutes for the real thing. Life was on hold until things could go back to normal, many of us told ourselves, even as the pause stretched on long enough that it became impossible to continue pausing.

Whenever I found myself thinking like that (something that was especially difficult to avoid during the early days of pandemic lockdown), I tried to reframe how I considered my digital life. This book digs in deeper, of course, but to get started, here are a few ways we might begin shifting this mindset—and even start using the internet to help us feel more human instead of less.

First, we need to be honest about what’s actually happening when we log on. For years now, beginning long before the pandemic, our world has been undergoing an immense cultural shift, from a predigital age to a digital one. At the same time, more and more people in the United States and many other parts of the world are leaving the institutions in which we’ve historically wrestled with life’s big questions, like religious communities, and moving that work into digital space—which we’ve been told, time and again, in ways both overt and subtle, isn’t real life. (Of course, many people are still religious. But even those who continue to participate in religious communities increasingly do so with less frequency, and supplement their religious participation with other, often digital, ways of making sense of the world around them.)

What happens when a large segment of the population stops going to church, altogether or often, and begins logging on instead to find identity, community, and meaning? The answer to this question won’t be found in pretending we don’t use the internet for things that are central to how we understand what it means to be human. The sooner we start being more honest with ourselves about what we’re using the internet for—things that are absolutely real, and consequential—the better we will understand the ways this change in how we organize society and understand ourselves as individuals is impacting us.

Another thing that would help us shift the narrative that life online is fake: we need to stop expecting digital activities to precisely replicate offline experiences. Rather than hoping a Zoom happy hour might feel the same as one held in my favorite dive bar, or that a worship service on Facebook Live could evoke the same feeling as sitting in one’s regular pew, it helps to look at online activities as their own distinct kinds of experiences—replete with challenges and opportunities unique to them. (For example, you can do a Zoom happy hour with friends on the other side of the world, instead of just with people who live in your area or are visiting—though technically that’s only a happy hour for one of you.)

I find a worthwhile parallel in some of the vegan meats I’ve eaten that imply they will exactly recreate the experience of eating animals. Some people enjoy these substitutes, but as often as some hit for me (big Beyond Meat fan here), others feel like they sit in a kind of uncanny valley of almost-but-not-quite real. They’re nearly there but are off just enough that I feel like I’m not having the experience I’m supposed to. Tempeh and tofu, on the other hand, don’t shoulder this same burden. I don’t expect to feel like I’m eating meat when I consume them; they’re their own thing. Similarly, life online is its own thing—even when, like tofu that’s not prepared well, it’s not always great. If you’ve ever had really good tofu, though, you know it’s unlikely you’ll find yourself wishing you were eating steak instead.

The third thing that can help to alter our mindset about life online is taking it seriously. I teach in a department of religion and philosophy at a Lutheran university (see, I’m sounding more serious already). Though an atheist myself, I’ve learned a lot from Lutheran ideas—among them, those of the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who participated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He argued that Christians should live as if there’s no God. Instead of waiting for God to intervene, he argued, Christians should work to discern God’s will and act on God’s behalf in the world. I found myself thinking about the power of acting as if something is real, and the work of discernment it requires, quite a bit during my year of living digitally.

Ultimately, whatever we think of our digital lives, there’s a lot to gain by treating them as if they are as real as any other part of our lives. By discerning what digital life demands of us, working to bring the same values we practice elsewhere to our online presence, and considering the internet a space that can teach us vital things about ourselves, we can become more intentional about our digital habits and spend our time online more meaningfully. No matter where you land on the life online is real life versus life online isn’t real life debate, you can change the way life online feels by opening yourself up to the possibilities of realness it offers.

Fourth, life online allows constant opportunities to embrace uncertainty. In a year defined by uncertainty, this recognition felt especially critical.

Many of us use the internet anxiously, guided by invisible algorithms that care less about what kind of experience we’re having and more about extending our time online (even when it comes at a cost: rising crises in polarization, misinformation, and mental health). No matter how much we doomscroll or how many apps we use, though, we will never optimize our way out of uncertainty.

When we anxiously use digital tools to try to feel safe, secure, and certain, our digital actions will be unreflective, reflexive, mindless. Operating solely at the mercy of algorithms that don’t care about human cost, life online will inevitably feel unfulfilling. But when we are honest about what our digital habits so often lay bare—that we can’t stand uncertainty and will use any tool we can to avoid it—these same habits can reveal us to ourselves by showing us how easily uncertainty arises in us and how wired we are to avoid it.

Perhaps the most crucial reframing I’d like to offer, and my final suggestion, is that it is critical that we understand our terrain. Left without a map, uncertainty-induced anxiety will rule our digital lives.

A large number of Americans are leaving the institutions in which many have traditionally made sense of their lives and built meaningful connections, including religious traditions, and moving their search for realness and meaning to the internet. But while a lot of us may feel we’ve rejected institutions in favor of a more individual path, we’ve merely swapped one kind of institution for another.

The internet is an institution all its own—private, not public, space—and like the guardians of so many institutions before it, the people who maintain our social platforms are guided by the priorities of profit and power. If we don’t understand their influence, we will find ourselves shaped by their concerns instead of our own. But we can reset our course, placing ourselves back on the path of our own priorities, when we see the internet for what it is. And once we have, we can try to embrace the inherent contradictions of being human that digital life, at its best, can unveil.

The internet is simultaneously permanent and fleeting; a place to experiment and play, and a space where we feel immense pressure to be coherent and consistent; a platform for imagination and experimentation, and one driven by the demands of profit; one that reveals life’s uncertainties to us, and offers us countless opportunities to try to avoid them. In these contradictions and tensions, we have a chance to see that to be human is to be inconsistent, imperfect. Once we see that tension, we have a chance to try to become more comfortable living in it. By calling into question what it means to be real, digital life gives us a chance to explore the complexity of humanness anew.

Of course, simply becoming more aware of the challenges of digital life and trying to adjust our individual mindset and behavior alone is nowhere near enough. We also need systemic transformation, so that our social internet becomes a genuinely public space, instead of one that pulls us in the direction of whatever makes money for private corporations. But systemic change begins at the individual level. We can’t demand a better internet if we don’t first treat it as a space where real life happens.

None of this should deny that life online differs substantially from offline life. Pretending they’re the same (like a bad meat substitute) won’t do us any favors. But neither will suggesting that digital life is just some shallow replacement or shadow. It is different, yes—but its differences present not just problems, but also boundless opportunities to explore new ways of being human.

Early on in the pandemic, grappling with its world-rending horrors, I struggled to remember these reorienting perspectives on digital life. Yes, I had just finished writing this book a few months earlier, and yes, I had already been spending a good amount of time online long before the pandemic. Still, while I was perhaps more prepared than the average person for the shift to an almost entirely virtual way of living, I was not at all prepared for the reality that I would completely stop seeing other human beings.

I’d already been working from home, so that didn’t change, but I quickly realized just how many offline socializing opportunities I had built into my life’s rhythms to compensate for the percentage of my daily interactions that was mediated by screens. Before lockdown, my dog, Tuna, and I would stop in at our neighborhood coffee spot, butcher shop, and hardware store—places she was given treats, obviously—multiple times a day. On these stops, I would interact with employees, who then became my friends and community. When those businesses shut down, I realized that these visits had often been the only times I’d see people offline on any given day.

Other forms of in-person socializing came to a quick halt, too. No more dinner with a friend, no more canvassing with my local DSA chapter, no more visits with my mom and stepdad. Apart from waving to my sister and her kids from a safe distance when they dropped off some cards and a tray of Rice Krispies treats, my birthday (which happened a few weeks into lockdown) was celebrated solo.

Before long, my pandemic days began to adopt a nearidentical pattern—long stretches of sitting in front of a phone or computer screen in the small studio apartment Tuna and I shared, trying and often failing to get work done, punctuated by very long walks with her through Minneapolis’s largely deserted streets. These walks—already a big part of my prepandemic life to help break up long stretches of writing and get my very athletic dog the exercise she needed—became all the more necessary. Living in a studio had been fine when I could go work at a coffee shop any time I felt cooped up, but it was far too tiny to spend all day every day in. At the same time that it felt suffocatingly small, my apartment also suddenly seemed strangely cavernous, quiet, empty. I suppose what I actually mean is that it felt lonely. Living on my own had been different when I could see people outside the home.

And so Tuna and I would walk. Besides getting us out of my apartment, these walks also served another important purpose. On them, it became a bit easier for me to not mindlessly pull my phone out of my pocket and scroll, scroll, scroll. So often, in the first days of pandemic lockdown, the anxious pull of each new bit of bad information that popped up on my Twitter timeline felt too great to resist. Eventually, overwhelmed by my digital life and missing my offline interactions, I found myself wanting to withdraw from my virtual world altogether—feeling as conflicted about it as I had the summer I began working on this book, as you’ll soon read.

Fortunately, thanks to the insights of the people I learned from while writing IRL, I was eventually able to reframe my approach to digital life in those early days of lockdown, a time when I needed digital connection more than ever.

Because of this reframe, I soon got more intentional about my digital life, acknowledging its limitations but also allowing it to connect me to others. With my self-imposed isolation brought to a close, I began FaceTiming with loved ones, watching movies online while using a chat program to discuss them in real time with friends, playing virtual chess and visiting friends’ islands on Animal Crossing, and going to Zoom gatherings.

These weren’t just things I did to pass time, to get through the pandemic until things could go back to normal. They became my real, actual life. And so, on the day this book entered the world, as snow piled up on the ledge outside my window, I was able to fully appreciate just how lucky I was to sit down at my computer to celebrate its release with people I love, who were sitting down at their own screens, some just a few snow-covered blocks away.

Several months into the pandemic, as I was beginning to adjust to a bizarre new normal, and more fully embracing the internet as a part of it, I lost the primary thing that was keeping me grounded offline: my sweet walking, and life, companion.

Tuna entered my life in 2014 when, one idle afternoon, I came across her picture on a website where animal rescues list dogs in need of a home. I showed the photo to my then boyfriend, who responded, We’ll see. A week or two later, the rescue was hosting a pop-up event at a chain pet-supply store, so we went to go see.

While he wasn’t convinced until we met her offline, I was sure the moment I saw her picture—especially her cartoonglossy eyes, one a bit more closed than the other (a harbinger of future eye problems). I knew right away that Tuna (though that wasn’t her name then) was the dog I wanted to bring home.

Tuna, however, shared my boyfriend’s hesitance. Not specifically about us, but about everything. I think that’s why I was drawn to her, at least in part. It wasn’t her eyes, but what I saw in them. They reflected so much of my own anxiety, my fears about almost everything.

In our first months together, I patiently tried to teach Tuna to become less afraid. Surer of herself and, with this increased confidence, more herself. As I coaxed her down a staircase that scared her, placing a treat on each step and showering her in earscratches at the end of a successful descent, I had no idea that I would end up needing her to do the same for me. I didn’t know then that she would help me find myself, too—or how big a role the internet would play in what our relationship would become.

For our first couple years together, I only posted photos of Tuna occasionally. I kept my social media dispatches largely focused on professional updates, just as I had for most of my twenties. But then the things that I thought defined me as a person and gave my life meaning began to come undone, one by one—and, along with them, the online brand that had developed around my career as a writer and activist.

As the brand fell away, the boundaries around what I should or shouldn’t share online, a question I’d fretted over for years, went with it. I started posting more about my life as it was, rather than worrying about how it should appear.

This coincided with a shift in my relationship with Tuna. Living alone, with me working from the studio apartment we shared, Tuna and I became inseparable. If I went to a friend’s house, she usually came along (often at their insistence). We spent hours on walks every day, even during the coldest stretches of Minnesota winter. And when one of my best friends died by suicide in 2019, Tuna—usually more aloof than the average dog—snuggled me every night and, when I inevitably couldn’t sleep, got up and walked with me through the dark streets of Minneapolis.

As we grew closer, she became so much of what I shared online—everyday Instagram stories of her chewing on sticks or sleeping with one paw in the air, but also bigger personal and professional updates, like a photo of her posing with my advance copies of IRL when they arrived in the mail.

Tuna worked her way into more and more of my social media output, and online strangers started expressing how much they cared for her and about her. Seemingly mundane Tuna posts—photos of her stalking squirrels, or videos of her standing on her hind legs so she could see the baristas behind the counter of our beloved neighborhood coffee shop—started getting more responses than just about anything else I shared.

Her online popularity underscored something that grew clearer the closer we became: Tuna wasn’t really my dog. Or rather, she wasn’t only mine. She belonged to herself, and to a community. This community was made up of the employees at the neighborhood businesses we frequented on walks, who all spoiled her to such an intense degree that she insisted we stop to see them multiple times a day; the friends who watched her when I traveled for work, whom she loved so much that she would tug me in the direction of their apartments on walks; and a group of people who had never even met her, who knew her only through my posts on social media.

This last community, the online one, was so much larger than I even knew, in part because of something that happened in early 2020, just a month before lockdown. While she’d had a doting following for years, Tuna’s moderate online presence reached new heights when a video of her appearing to watch one of the Democratic presidential primary debates, and wagging her tail as Senator Bernie Sanders spoke, went viral.

This video was viewed nearly a million times, and soon Tuna began appearing in memes and on political T-shirts. Journalists reached out to ask about her, and eventually, incredibly, even the Sanders campaign itself contacted me to set up a meeting between Tuna and Jane Sanders. (I was her plus-one, but all eyes were obviously on Tuna in that meeting, and in the accompanying video the campaign released.) She even got her own fancam—a compilation of clips of her set to a song popular in online fan communities.

There are countless cute dogs online, but even before Tuna went viral, people interacted with her posts in a way that felt different to me. They seemed invested in her life, her happiness, and our relationship. But I didn’t know how true that was until one of the worst days of my life.

Less than six months after her biggest viral moment yet, at six years old, Tuna suddenly died. One afternoon in July she had a seizure, her first ever, and in just over twenty-four hours went from seemingly fine to dying in my arms. My sweet girl—who had grown from a skittish little lump of fur into a remarkable creature with a mind of her own, who could command the attention of a busy coffee shop or a crowded Twitter timeline—was reduced to lying limply on her side beneath a Christmas-themed fleece blanket provided by the animal hospital, her nose dry, her breathing rapid and shallow, those glassy eyes dulled and faintly opening only when I whispered to her: This will be over soon. I’m so sorry. I love you so much. Thank you for changing my life.

The next morning, after maybe two hours of sleep, I posted a couple of photos of her, of us, and a brief caption sharing what had happened. I was in shock, unsure how to express what I was feeling, but felt I should say something. I had shared so much of her life, it seemed wrong not to say something about her death.

I knew she was loved, but even still I didn’t expect the intensity of the response I got. Beyond the thousands of likes and hundreds of replies on that tweet, and more on others that followed, there was an emotional outpouring unlike almost anything I’d ever experienced online. It was so much more than comments; people were creating art and recording music celebrating Tuna’s life, sharing memories of her, expressing how sad they were. As I absorbed the shock of losing her, online strangers were doing the same, memorializing her life and grieving with me.

How was it that so many people who had never even met her were lighting candles for her, holding toasts with their loved ones in her honor, even talking to their therapists about her? Though Tuna never knew about them—people always remarked with a laugh that she had no clue she was famous—in death it became clear how real the love of her online community was.

In the years following the end of the relationship during which I adopted her, I had to figure out who I was in a new life. Tuna helped me find that new life, and we became something new together. A large part of that something was forged online.

After she died, I had to figure out who I was without her, what new thing I was. It became work I largely did online, too. I couldn’t gather with her offline community to honor her life because of the pandemic, and so I memorialized her on social media. In the months following her death, my feed included a steady stream of Tuna videos, photos, and memories. The grief I felt over her absence was so large, I needed to put it in different places—and so I put some of it online, where so much of her community was.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand why Tuna connected with so many people. My friend JP says it’s because she had an otherworldliness to her, that she sat between the real and the unreal.

At times, this is what digital life feels like to me, too: a space between the real and unreal. It’s not quite like real (or offline) life, but it is a place where previously inconceivable modes of being and belonging are possible. Where we can become real in new ways. After all, the internet is where I first found Tuna, and where, in posts from me and her online community, she still lives on. In Tuna’s death, and her life, I was offered another reminder of just how much realness we can find online if we’re open to it.

Tuna’s death wasn’t the first loss I experienced after I finished writing IRL, nor was it the first to cast the themes of this book in a new light for me.

One week after I turned in my manuscript for this book, in December 2019, one of my best friends died by suicide.

At the time, I was only just getting back online after a threemonth social media break I took so I could focus on finishing this book. During those months, I unplugged not only from the internet, but from many of the technologically mediated ways I kept in touch with people. As a result, I truly felt like I’d stepped back from the world and most of my relationships. And so, as my social media break came to an end, I began easing back into my digital world. Slowly, to acclimate myself, like the way I’d gradually wade into Minnesota’s cold lakes as a child.

One week after my break ended, I was sitting at my counter, mindlessly surfing Twitter, when I saw an email from my friend Alex. In his message, which he explained he had scheduled to go out after his death, he informed me that he had ended his life, explained why, and expressed his love. But this email also included one other puzzling detail: a link to a private SoundCloud page containing audio files of him talking to someone he met online who sounded just like his number-one idol, Britney Spears.

In the months after Alex’s death, trapped at home during the pandemic and unable to stop wondering why he’d sent those audio files to me, I began working with a group of his close friends and family to try to find out. Once again cut off from much of the world around me, this time due to the pandemic, I found myself connecting online with Alex’s family and friends, looking for answers about this internet mystery he left behind. This search led me down a virtual rabbit hole, a story I tell in my narrative podcast, Unread.

Instead of retelling that story here, I want to share a bit about the digital dimensions of my relationship with Alex, which I found myself reflecting on quite a bit while working on Unread. Alex and I met online in the late 2000s and, after a short period of dating, quickly became close friends. What started in flirtation, a summer fling, bloomed into something much more lasting and powerful—one of the few spaces in my life where I felt I could be fully myself.

In large part this happened not because of me, but because Alex was singularly and utterly himself, more than just about anyone I’d ever met. Yet he was himself in a way that made it easier to be myself, too. He didn’t suck the oxygen out of the room with his larger-than-life presence. He expelled more oxygen so that the lives of everyone around him could grow larger, too, showing us all what an uninhibited life could be like.

We were close during my years in Chicago, but after we both moved away our communications grew a bit more irregular. A few years after moving, though, as we both got smartphones and moved more of our lives online, we began talking with increasing frequency again.

In 2016, though we hadn’t seen one another in person in years, Alex and I began to grow closer than ever. When I started to suspect that my long-term relationship was coming to an end, for example, he was my first call. As I navigated that breakup and everything that happened in its aftermath, Alex was there—regularly texting to check in and make sure I was okay, sending me funny videos of himself and memes he created with the sole purpose of making me laugh, and reassuring me that I was still worthy even though my life wasn’t going how I’d thought it would.

At my lowest point during those postbreakup years, Alex’s digital dispatches were sometimes the only thing that kept me going. Even though he lived across the country, he was there for me, day after day, walking me back into the light. With Alex, I could be fully myself, no matter how much of a mess that was, without apology. Never once did I feel like he wanted me to be anything other than who I was. In those years when everything that had propped up my sense of self—my career, my relationship, my health—eroded beneath me, my friendship with Alex became a rare space for feeling real. Yet all throughout that period, I didn’t see Alex in person. Instead, we interacted exclusively through phones and computers.

Receiving Alex’s goodbye email was one of the most horrible moments of my life, but I am grateful to have it now.