Inside the Rotted Mind of a Social Media Hype Seeker
What I mostly remember are the rice noodles tossed in soy sauce and merkén in between browned squares of tofu. It was my first time at Planetarion, an invite-only vegan supper club hosted in a second-story walk-up apartment nearly a decade ago. Every Monday night, Orion would welcome about forty people into his home for a three-course meal. Complimentary pre-rolled joints were the amuse bouche that was always followed by a fennel and cabbage salad and a rotating selection of vegetable stews served potluck-style. Each table would form a line, grab a plate and be served directly from the pot in a kitchen the size of a bathtub—eggplant beat intensely with heat, beans with every tuber at the vegetable stand or zucchini cooked in a tomato and red wine sauce. Already overflowing plates of food were topped with spoonfuls of lentils, whole wheat bread, beet mayonnaise and nasally orange hot sauce. At the end of the night, Orion would come around with a hat and let you pay whatever you wanted.
I don’t remember the food being particularly great. Orion wasn’t an inventive cook but he was a natural host. He was creating an experience before there was a word for it. Orion fascinated me. He couldn’t have existed any further from the food scene that was taking root in trendy spots just a neighborhood north where molecular-inspired tasting menus and the puerta cerrada, or closed door dinner club, were setting the stage for a new food scene. I was 23 and making just enough money to pay rent and go dancing on the weekends, living off of rice and beans, cheap cheese pizza and fernet by the liter. The world of restaurants was intriguing but utterly inaccessible.
Orion existed in another solar system. He was making up the rules and thriving without the hype that fuels popular restaurants yet week after week people fought for a seat at his table. It was the first time I saw someone who cared so little about the rules of the game and ran counter to any aspiration of notoriety. It was the first time I saw that having a creative idea was enough to start and that validation should come from within through self-conviction.
I came to Buenos Aires in my early twenties feeling like I needed to escape. I had spent my first two years in college breaking myself down, failing half of my classes because I was too busy sleeping or stoned, too overcome by how hard everything suddenly felt and in particular how easy it seemed for everyone around me. A professor once went out of her way to email me that I was the first person to fail her geology class in the two decades that she’d taught it and suddenly the anxiety that I was already feeling multiplied—it was enough to feel bad about myself, I didn’t need someone else to join my echo chamber. Depression never just appears. It coils around you like a snake before devouring you whole and in that moment I felt eaten alive. I knew the way out was to get out and hit refresh. Dropping out of school wasn’t an option so I applied to a study abroad program with the lowest GPA requirement and crossed my fingers. I remember getting the phone call and dancing in my room by myself.
When I arrived in Buenos Aires I felt an energy I’d never known before. On Sundays, I would buy a newspaper and search through the culture agenda and map out my week. Every afternoon I would hop on a bus to go to art shows, theaters, cinemas and concerts in neighborhoods that my host parents’ didn’t even know. I don’t think that I fell in love with Buenos Aires, rather the idea of being in a place where everything was new. The rules and social pressures that guided me towards the herd were effectively erased as soon as I stepped off the airplane. Being the [willful] foreigner that doesn’t inherently understand the culture or is unable to speak the dominant language can be lonely but isolation can also be an incredible gift. It’s like getting back a piece of your childhood, following your most basic whims and being fascinated by the minutiae of everyday again, guided with little influence of those around you. After 11 years, that feeling has of course mostly gone away but I haven’t stopped trying to chase it.
Getting that sense of freedom back feels more and more distant the deeper I dig into a career as a self-employed creative. My profession is completely wrapped up in the personal. There is absolutely no defining border. I work with what I’m passionate about which is a net positive for the new independent workforce but the success of my ‘passion’ projects are increasingly predicated on social media. Editors frequently post commission opportunities on Twitter; nearly all of the stories I wrote in the last year came from my Twitter presence. My pop-up requires me to constantly entice potential diners on Instagram and it is also where I find all of my purveyors and potential collaborators. Both roles require me to maintain a personal brand across platforms that demonstrate a multitude of characteristics: that I am an authority on my beat, that I’m smart, that I’m cool, that I’m someone you might want to hang out with. Twitter engages mostly with my rage posts, Instagram with personal ones, and I don’t feel entirely comfortable with either. I am constantly polluting myself with imagery and information and projecting an image of myself that is only partially related to the truth of my professional and personal lives. Sometimes I feel like I’m living two different lives in parallel and I rarely feel in control of either.
In a recent piece for Vittles, food and city writer Jonathan Nunn writes about the way that social media hype is changing the way that we make, sell and consume food. “From 2011 right up until restaurants closed in March 2020, it would probably be fair to say that an entire industry had been built on this mountain of hype. Social media has turned from a tool into the very thing itself; if you are not on it, constantly, relentlessly, then you may as well not exist at all.”
Social media is a double-edged sword. It provides wider access to information and more democratized channels to monetization but also rewards projects, sometimes exclusively, for being able to engage the social media zeitgeist. In Nunn’s piece, he wonders what this means for the homogenization of food. “You can now go to a bakery in Melbourne, in London and in Buenos Aires and probably get the same sourdough as in San Francisco, which is probably specifically a tartine sourdough. Meanwhile, regional traditions have been flattened and forgotten about, rather than reinterpreted and reimagined.”
This is the tightrope that I am constantly walking: a rejection of homogeneity and an acute understanding that success and opportunity relies on the acceptance of others. My self as a brand is measured by the community that consumes me and that consumption is predicated on being both original and harmonious. My authenticity must be both consistent and constantly changing because consumers are built to always need something new to desire; authenticity is a mountain without a peak. Burnout for me rarely stems from an absence of ideas or energy, I have too much of both, but rather the feeling that the ideas I have won’t resonate on the algorithm. That I’m either being too alienating or too common. It is an existential exercise that is emotionally and physically exhausting and frequently distracts me from my actual work.
I wonder what it all implies about the evolution of my mind as cook and writer (and what it implies about any creator). A few weeks ago, I did my first pop-up in more than a year. 60 people showed up and all gave great feedback but I couldn’t help wondering why more people didn’t share pictures of their food on their stories. Don’t they want everyone to know they were here? Don’t they want to be a part of this? The thought ate away at me throughout the entire service and seeped into the planning of the event that followed. That feeling isn’t infrequent. I often find myself feeling envious and doubtful. Not envious of other people’s work or doubtful of my own but by the attention or lack thereof that each receives.
Recognition is a strange drug. I would assume that most serious writers and creatives aren’t motivated solely by recognition but it certainly can motivate the work. Social media conditions us to seek recognition constantly and the lines between recognition and validation, for me at least, are increasingly blurred. When my work isn't recognized locally by journalists and influencers or widely embraced by my target, when I'm not included in any stories about the emerging taco scene, about local newsletters, about pop-ups and the changing foodscape, despite having worked since the origins of each scene, I can’t help but obsess about what isn't resonating or if it ever will. Since me and my work are completely interconnected, I can’t help but wonder if the problem is me. It’s that familiar feeling of being eaten whole. I feel like both a crybaby and an egomaniac for even saying that but it's the truth and it's the way social media has trained me to think. I've been successful, on my own terms, despite the lack of recognition, but I still yearn for the validation. I don't need the hype but my brain tells me to seek out that hit of serotonin anyways. How could someone who lives on social media not?
This week I went to visit a farm about 100 kilometers outside the city. On our way home, we stopped to visit a group of Gen Z cooks running a small bakery outside of one of the guy’s grandmother’s garage. Back in June the crew of 20 year olds started baking bread, one by one, in a home oven. They’ve since equipped the garage with an industrial oven, stand mixer and record player. A garden in the back had tomatoes, herbs and few stalks of corn. All week long they bake bread and pastries and when they feel like it they sell pizzas that can be eaten on the sidewalk. They brought out fresh baked bread with local olives, cheeses and charcuterie, plates of heirloom tomatoes dressed with grapes and an ingenious plate of medialunas with chocolate ice cream—the future menu of a secret restaurant they hope to set up on the patio and terrace.
The meal had clear influences from the stripped back, ingredient-driven pair-it-all-with-a-natural-wine food scene appearing in Buenos Aires (and across the globe) but it didn’t feel artificial. It didn’t feel like an editing experience. They weren’t working off a template but rather meeting producers, reading about breadmaking and figuring out how to build a garden and using that authenticity to build a menu. It was nice to see a group of young cooks making up their own set of rules, not quite Orion but far from the city’s hype machine, not as concerned as the generation before them with maintaining the image, as I instagrammed the entire thing.