I was looking way down on my Instagram feed for the post about my visit to the Cenacolo Vinciano. If you’ve never heard of this place, it’s no wonder. It’s just the Italian fancy name for the place where Leonardo Da Vinci painted the famous Last Supper mural. This is not a painting, by the way, but a mural, as in, he painted it right on a damn wall!
As I was scrolling down the feed, I was met with 2017, 2016 and even 2015 me. And the nostalgia that hit seeing me there, young and beautiful, an undiscovered Giorgio Armani model, was as strong as a Frecciarossa train. I was instantly back to a place where I’ve never been in years, the young me, the explorer, the doubt-free me, the me who I am… and also used to be.
Presence or Presentation?
My dilemma is, with all of this distraction around us at all times, have we really forgotten who we are? Is the internet standing between us and our past, present and future? Are we so entangled in posting, sharing, online-ing, that we’re literally out of our minds and not able to tell even where we’re coming from? And if so, why? And who has to benefit from this nonsense?
Maybe that’s the tragedy of it all. That we’ve traded presence for presentation. We’re so busy recording our lives that we’ve forgotten how to live them. The light hits the cappuccino just right, and before tasting it, we’re already searching for the right caption.
The sunset becomes content.
The moment becomes memory, before it even has the chance to breathe.
In the rush to post content and our craving for likes, we traded genuine interaction for pixels and bytes.
The Dead Internet
The internet, once a mirror reflecting our curiosity, has become a hall of distorted reflections. Everywhere you look, algorithms whisper what you should want, what you should buy, who you should be. We scroll not out of interest, but inertia, as if the next swipe might reveal the meaning we’ve misplaced somewhere between a meme and an ad for skincare.
But… it’s never there.
Nothing good is ever there.
Yet we keep scrolling, on and on.
We are connected to everyone, yet anchored to nothing. We share endlessly but rarely speak. We’ve built a digital self, curated, filtered, polished, and quietly starved the one that lives offline. Maybe that’s why nostalgia feels so sharp lately; it’s not just for the past, but for the version of ourselves that once felt real. 2015 me took photos but can also remember taking them. 2025 me? Shares photos but often can’t remember where he was when snapping them.
For my sake, I always forget going to Stonehenge, a place where I’ve been dreaming of going for ages. Why? I’m not sure. But it stands to show just how unpresent we’ve become.
Logging Off…
I guess my favourite book of all time is “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle. Yes, motivational, inspirational, spiritual, I don’t really care what you think about that. It’s awesome, and it grounds me like no other book, whether fiction, non-fiction, the Bible, or Martha Stewart’s recipe handbook, ever does. The whole point of the book is that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to log off for a while.
Not forever, but for long enough to remember what silence sounds like. To feel bored again. To notice things without having to name them. Because who we are isn’t found in the archives of our feeds. It’s in the unposted, unfiltered, unnoticed seconds.
The breaths that no one else hears, sees or feels. Those make you, you.
And maybe that’s the strangest part of it all. We can’t even say what we are anymore without consulting the damn computer first. Our identities, even our damn genders, our opinions, our sense of right and wrong, all need a digital seal of approval before we dare to name them. But the truth is, breaking away from that constant need for definition might be the most human act left.
In boredom, in silence, in the so-called nothingness, that’s where the real stuff hides. That’s where creativity stirs, where motive forms, where change quietly begins to breathe. It’s not in the noise of the feed, but in the stillness of being, unposted, undefined, and deeply, defiantly alive.
