The Art of Living Other People's Lives Read online

  © 2016 by Greg Dybec

  Cover illustration © 2016 by Mario Zucca

  Published by Running Press,

  An Imprint of Perseus Books, LLC.,

  A Subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions

  Printed in the United States

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.

  Books published by Running Press are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at Perseus Books, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016934633

  E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-6107-3

  987654321

  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

  Cover and interior design by Ashley Todd

  Edited by Jessica Fromm

  Typography: DIN Condensed and Minion Pro

  Running Press Book Publishers

  2300 Chestnut Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19103-4371

  Visit us on the web!

  www.runningpress.com

  To Mom and Dad,

  for never considering my dreams

  anything other than reality.

  Contents

  Introduction

  People of the Internet, You Are Not Alone

  Translation

  Seeking an Underwear Expert

  #Mom

  The Uber Diaries

  Breakup, Breakdown

  The New American Dream

  James Franco Syndrome

  What a Day

  My Summer as a Pick-Up Artist

  Bridging the Gap

  For the Kids

  Millennial Mousetrap

  Confessions of a God-Fearing Atheist

  Homeless Joe

  Savior of None

  The Spaces We Share

  Life on the Other Side of the Internet

  The Art of Living Other People’s Lives

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  I’m one of the few people who think they were born in the right decade.

  I grew up in the nineties, so I can still remember a time when the Internet wasn’t the Internet it is today, back when cell-phone screens were black and white. I was a wide-eyed college student majoring in English when I watched the Internet blossom into a place where inexperienced writers could share their thoughts and reach a wider audience than most established authors. I didn’t dare admit it in my literature classes, where we studied the works of eighteenth-century greats, but I wanted so badly to be part of the new digital gold rush that so many unknown writers were capitalizing on. I also wanted real books like the one you’re holding now; but I’m a millennial, so I never once thought I couldn’t have my cake and eat it, too.

  After college I spent some time working a mind-numbing retail job, interning once a week, and freelance writing for failing websites. I knew I wanted more, and finally an opportunity came along that I thought could be my big break. I took a job at Elite Daily. At the time, the website was less than two years old and had a ramshackle staff consisting of college dropouts and first-time writers. Luckily, my decision to come on board was the right choice. Shortly after I joined the team, the site exploded onto the digital-publishing scene in Justin Bieberesque fashion, quickly becoming one of the most widely read websites in the world. Through articles on dating, news, and the honest millennial experience, we began reaching millions of readers, and it was nothing short of amazing.

  My secret college dreams had taken shape. I was part of the new digital wave that was taking over the Internet, and I didn’t even have to wear a shirt and tie to work. The Elite Daily team was just a small group of twentysomethings with little to no professional experience who ended up turning a passion project into a globally recognized media company. It was the greatest natural high I could have hoped for. I was living the modern-day American Dream in which white picket fences were replaced with page views, and 401(k)s meant nothing in comparison to Twitter followers.

  As with any good thing, there was a trade-off. After some time, I couldn’t help but feel I was losing a part of my real-life identity to my Internet personality. The term IRL (in real life) is like a safe word for millennials. It’s a reminder that despite spending the majority of our time meticulously crafting our online personas, we still have vital organs that need to be taken care of and family members we should probably interact with. More than anything, it’s a reminder of the world we were introduced to the day we left our mothers’ wombs. Those brave women didn’t push us out of their vaginas just so we could strive to be interesting online and disconnected in the real world.

  For me, it’s more complicated than spending too much time on the Internet and not enough time focusing on what’s going to get me ahead in life . . . because the Internet is what’s getting me ahead in life. It’s a strange dynamic, especially because when you work in the online space, people expect you to be someone who’s always plugged in and spewing insights about how to make it in the modern world. And for a while, I felt an obligation to be that Internet version of myself at all times.

  The struggle to live a life that looks as effortless as the life portrayed on social media is draining. It’s no secret that the glimpses of our lives we show online aren’t a completely honest portrayal of our actual lives. One of the most popular photos I ever posted on Instagram is of Steve Buscemi and me at a movie premiere. We’re all smiles and the caption reads, “Hanging out with Steve Buscemi.” You’d think we were best buddies and that he invites me to his Super Bowl party every year. The truth is that earlier in the night, Steve caught me staring at him in the bathroom while he was using the urinal. He shot me a disapproving look and walked out as quickly as he could. It wasn’t until later in the night that I caught up with him and practically forced him to pose half-heartedly for a picture. But did my followers know that? Of course not—that might have hurt my chance of getting more likes.

  My fear is that the tendency to perfect our self-image on social media ends up bleeding too much into our IRL existence. Sure, I’ve got things pretty put together in some areas of my life, but that doesn’t mean I’m not knee-deep in personal issues, insecurities, and confusion. When I tried to push those less picturesque realities under the rug and exist only as an Instagram-worthy version of myself, I started to feel like maybe I’d lost touch with who I was.

  For me, this book is a confessional. It’s a reflection on the times I’ve displayed my weirdest tendencies and made borderline regrettable decisions, both on the Internet and offline. It’s a collage of uncertainties and a collection of the moments that haven’t been glamorous and predictable, because those are the moments I’ve learned from the most. Life (and especially my life) is awkward and confusing and full of bad sex and spilled coffee, and we shouldn’t just throw a pretty filter over those memories. When we neglect those imperfect moments, we miss a chance for real growth.

  I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with keeping our social-media feeds as a highlight reel to look back on. But we owe it to ourselves to own up to the fact that we don’t have every aspect of our lives—from our beautifully plated breakfast to our relationships
and work life—figured out every single day. It’s easy for me to tell someone to work hard and remain patient, that it will pay off eventually. The truth is, though, that I spend most of my time overanalyzing everything I do, as you’ll soon find out. Life, after all, is a lot easier online than it is offline.

  If life is indeed all about balance, then it’s important to embrace the imperfect and the strange. If we lose that personal honesty, then whom exactly are we living for—ourselves or everyone else? Who knows, maybe it’ll always be a bit of both. I’m still trying to figure that out, one step, click, swipe, and text at a time.

  Or maybe someone out there is close to discovering a way for us to live inside our computers for the rest of time. In the event that happens, forget everything I just said.

  People of the Internet, You Are Not Alone

  I spend nearly every single day on Google Analytics for my job. Google Analytics is a service provided by Google that tracks everything possible to know about a website’s traffic. A large portion of my time is dedicated to analyzing Elite Daily readers: tracking how many people visit the site, the cities they live in, how many articles they read, how long they read them for, whether they’re male or female, young or old. The list goes on and on. I often have so many charts and numbers on my screen that if a stranger were to see me working, they’d assume I was in finance. But the numbers have nothing to do with budgets or yearly revenue; each one, instead, represents a person, living and breathing, completely unaware that I care so much about their existence, habits, and interests.

  Attracting people to a website shares similarities with the techniques used by pick-up artists. You begin to learn and understand peoples’ behaviors, or at least you try to. You start tracking what piques their interests as a collective group and what makes them come back for more. There’s predictability to human behavior that often goes unseen, but when you search for it, and most of all, when you use it to your advantage, people become one rhythmic, faceless mass, almost like a wave, swaying and growing and shifting, just asking to be tamed and given what they want—even before they know it’s what they want.

  It’s the job of any website to determine what stories its audience wants to read and share, and why. How do they want these stories delivered to them? What’s the best time to deliver them? Do they like their titles long or short? Do they prefer pictures to be tall or wide?

  Admittedly, there is a semispoken-but-mostly-unspoken truth across the digital media industry that working for the Internet will make you jaded. The consistent goal of driving people to a website can make you forget that those same people are more than just numbers that are tracked on a screen and tallied up in pretty graphs at the end of each month. It’s not a life-altering jadedness that makes you incapable of human contact, but it does cause you to spend your morning commute viewing the people around you as potential clicks and page views. Each person a potential set of new eyes. Another visitor for the books.

  Viewing people as statistics is nothing new in any business, especially media. The realization didn’t leave me contemplating my purpose in life or whether or not I should quit my job. It’s simply part of the game, and besides, it’s rewarding to know you have the ability to influence so many people at one time, even if you’ll never know them on a personal level. More than anything, the feeling of being disconnected—while at the same time connecting with millions of people online—is a side effect that lingers. It never quite festers and worsens. But I still found myself wishing for a way to find a hint of humanity in the numbers I tracked each day.

  Enter the most interesting discovery I’ve made while working at Elite Daily, or while using the Internet period. Technically, I didn’t discover it—Kaitlyn, the site’s editor in chief, first showed it to me. And the timing couldn’t have been better. Despite my borderline obsessive relationship with Google Analytics, I’d never paid attention to one function, a small, hardly noticeable feature labeled Top Keywords. Since Google provides the analytics service, the feature is able to show all the top searches that people typed into the Google search engine that, one way or another, led them to Elite Daily. Say you type a question like “Who’s running for president?” or “Why do hangovers hurt so badly?” into the Google search box. Then say that Google search yields many results, including an Elite Daily article that could potentially answer your question. You click on that article, and suddenly, your initial question appears on my screen in the top-keywords page on Google Analytics. Pretty simple. Also pretty spy-like.

  Kaitlyn first stumbled upon the feature after noticing a seemingly random list of questions while playing around with Google Analytics: hard-to-miss questions like “How do I change the taste of my vagina?” and “How to make her have sex with her ex-boyfriend?” She clicked into the top-keywords page and was greeted by a slew of similarly straightforward and unashamed questions and phrases that people all over the world were typing into their computers. The questions people were throwing into the Internet void were perfect combinations of vulgar, honest, and intensely private thoughts. She shared her discovery with me and we laughed like children, mostly at the fact that the bizarre searches were somehow leading back to Elite Daily.

  Later that night, back at my apartment, I couldn’t help but log on to Google Analytics for another dose of the top-keyword searches. I convinced myself I could use a laugh and decided I’d collect a few of the funniest searches to show Kaitlyn in the morning. In the darkness of my apartment, clicking into the keyword page felt like entering an AOL chat room my parents warned me to avoid as a child.

  Immediately, the real-time keyword searches populated my screen:

  How to enjoy my single life as a girl

  After many sex lady vagina are loose why?

  Human that make sex everyday

  Difference in red and white wine

  Do I smoke too much pot

  How to become famous

  How to pee with morning wood

  Seeing the keywords refreshing every few seconds made the whole thing feel wrong and dangerous. I felt like a secret agent with access to strangers’ most personal thoughts. Granted, I had no way of finding out who any of these people were or where they were located in the world, but the unknown made the whole operation feel even more scandalous.

  Suddenly feeling like I was seeing too much, I shut my laptop. But five minutes later I was back on, watching the searches refresh like a stockbroker eyeing the market. I’d take screenshots of my favorites and before I knew it I had a folder full of them.

  20 signs she is horny and wants to have sex

  Does he qualify as an asshole

  I felt powerful. I felt like the keeper of some great secret. I was obsessed.

  It was the greatest form of entertainment I’d found in some time. The directness of some of the questions—many of them sexual, because, let’s face it, all we think about is sex—were perfect in their delicate conciseness. They were written out exactly the way people thought them. Naturally, these sex questions were often the most absurd and humorous. Some of the more interesting searches included

  Girls favorite penis

  How many types of orgasms do we have

  How do girls feel during periods

  Effects of small penis during sex

  Can your vagina be loose when you don’t have a child

  Great sex with screams

  Does a hairy guy perform better in bed

  How to know person masturbates

  Desire to lick woman ass

  Corkscrew penis

  Can you get stuck together during sex

  Someone out there in the world is truly curious whether or not you can tell if a person masturbates just by looking at him or her. What about the person wondering if hairy guys are good in bed? Is it a hairy guy who wants to know, or someone considering sleeping with a hairy guy? How hairy are we talking? We won’t even address the corkscrew penis.

  The narratives I conceived about the mysterious figures on the othe
r end of the screen were endless. In my mind I was putting faces to the people I’d never know. Then there was the tantalizing thought that maybe, by some chance, out of the two billion people who use the Internet, one of the phrases I’d come across was written by someone I knew.

  It was easy to be initially drawn to the vulgarity of the sex searches, but after some time I realized that a whole different layer of searches was far more delicate and humane. The first nonsexual question to catch my eye was “Can you fall in love with someone through texts.” For some reason the words floored me. They jumped off the screen like poetry. I wanted to print the question on T-shirts and sell them in college parking lots. I wanted scientists to actually determine whether or not you could fall in love through texts. I wanted to write a thesis paper on it. I wanted to sell the words to Taylor Swift so she could use them as the title of her next song. I wondered how many of us have thought the same thing about texting before, too afraid to ask the question out loud. After noticing the “fall in love through text” question, I went on the hunt for similar questions, potent in their simplicity and sincerity. I quickly came across “How to hold hands with a guy” and “He said I love you too soon.” The new screenshots I took felt personal, and the entire procedure became more than just an entertaining way to pass the time. Hints of genuine uncertainty shone through these new searches, and for the first time I realized my prayers to be more connected with Elite Daily’s audience had been answered. Here was an entirely new look at readers as their most authentic selves—something flashing numbers on a screen could never reveal. You hear that people are their most honest selves when they think nobody is looking, and the Internet proves it. I cherished the new additions to my collection:

  How to move forward with life

  I cheated and I want to do it again

  How to go from being a side chick to a girlfriend

  Can’t talk to girl I like