Being a self-loathing introvert in this day-and-age is a strange experiment in being and thinking. As someone who instinctively craves the respite of loneliness yet simultaneously hates to be alone, my strategy for the past couple years has been simple: work in coffee shops. After school or on Sundays, I walk a couple blocks, give up a handful of dollars, which I’m lucky to be able to do so mindlessly, and find myself in a fairly cramped room, surrounded by around a dozen people, whom I smile at or nod at as I immerse myself in legal briefs and math problems. I sip at strong black iced coffee, imagining I have some sort of invisible camaraderie with those around me, while I reap the benefits of being alone and focused in spirit.

A couple weeks ago, things began to change, somewhat randomly, when some friends and I downloaded an idiosyncratic video-chatting app.

This app, Houseparty, was most notable for a certain sense of spontaneity that stemmed from its intrusiveness. Whenever one of my friends opened the app, I would receive a notification that the friend was “in the house,” meaning I could hop into the app and start video-chatting that friend, and anyone else in our list of friends could then join the video-chat in that same manner and so on, ‘till madness inevitably ensued, and the app crashed. This in theory has the effect of mimicking the ease and democracy of in-person human gatherings.

In this new era of Houseparty, I was at first excited at the prospect of all the random people I would end up interacting with, people whom I would never just sit down and start talking to at school. To some extent, that happened, especially once a particularly vivacious group of eighth graders downloaded the app. But most of all I’ve been struck by how my life has since been defined by a constant stream of notifications. The sociologist in me has watched the pixels on my phone bear witness to all the different permutations in which people theoretically interact.

In essence, this phenomenon–of being acutely aware of all the social circles at Parker and consequently acutely aware of my position, or lack of position, in those social circles–has an effect which I think can best be described by the Marxian idea of alienation, which Karl Marx first used in the context of industrialisation, but which I think also applies nicely here. Alienation: The eerie feeling that one is almost entirely removed from social outcomes, that one is a replaceable cog.

While compressing all the complexities of our high school social experiment into lists of names currently involved in video-chatting and ten-second photos or videos in random Snapchat stories makes it infinitely easier to know shallow facts about nearly everyone and their relationships, it also makes it so much easier to see so clearly how easily high school would slug along if someone were to decide to spend the rest of eternity in a hole watching and rewatching “Gilmore Girl” episodes.

So without painting with too wide a brush, we often feel the need to be spotted. We want to prove to the world that we do matter, that we are a special part in the immense structures that connect us. Whether it means coming up with a particularly funny Snapchat story or simply mattering to more people in a deeper way.

The reality of high school given the overload of information means that we can form deep relationships with only so many people. Of course, if we really work hard, we can be spotted, we can be more important to more people, but at the end of the day, it’s too tiring, at least for me, and it’s a shallow sort of happiness, the pleasure in which is transient and always insecure. So I don’t open House Party every time I can. I take naps, watch “Gilmore Girl” reruns, and work in coffee shops instead.