Notes on Discontent: Instagram, Desire, and the Digital Nomad

By Kristin Sanders

In Madame Bovary, Emma’s desire comes from the novels she reads. These novels are so full of fantasy that they lead her to a life that bucks the status quo or is full of immorality, depending on how you see things. But either way, her obsession with fantasy and desire kills her in the end. 

I was not killed by my desire; I became a digital nomad. A digital nomad goes wherever she wants. All those potential lives are now hers to explore.

 ***

Over a period of three years I lived, for weeks or months at a time, in Paris, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Perth, Bali, Barcelona, Bogotá, San Diego, and New Orleans. I briefly visited Prague, London, and Milan. In Arles, I sat beneath the yellow awning of the café in Van Gogh’s “Café Terrace at Night.” I saw quokkas and kangaroos and aggressive, horny monkeys in a monkey forest. I found romance with a German man, an Italian man, many French men, an Australian man, and the occasional American. These romances never went anywhere, but I’m not sure I wanted them to.

I desired so much, and I made my desires a reality. I could go anywhere I wanted. 

***

In 2012, Krysta, my best friend from high school—we had graduated in 2002—came to visit me in New Orleans. We reminisced about our past selves, the teenage girls we’d been ten years ago, explored the city, ate alligator at a festival, and caught up on all the life that happened since we’d last seen each other. Beside me in my bed that night, she held her iPhone above her head with two hands, the light illuminating her face. “You can scroll through your Instagram feed at the end of the day, to kind of check out and get sleepy.” She did not say that, exactly, but something along those lines. It was an idea I’d never thought of before. 

So I copied her. For the next ten years.

Since that night, I have looked at Instagram throughout the day, but mostly in the thirty minutes to an hour immediately after I wake up and in the hour or two before I fall asleep.

I do not watch television, and hardly any movies. I think of myself as a book reader and a writer, so I don’t have time for those “lesser” forms of entertainment. And yet I spend roughly three hours per day (as my phone has confirmed) scrolling through Instagram and Twitter. That’s 1,095 hours a year, or 12.5 percent of a year. 

Which is also about 11,000 hours spent on social media over the last decade of my life. A decade being 87,600 hours, this means 12 percent of my life has been lost to scrolling. 

***

When I scroll, I’m taking in people’s conversations, thoughts, opinions, experiences. I’m taking in their anger and love and friendships and frustrations. I’m seeing their lives—lives I often want.

I want to live there, in that city.

I want my apartment to look like that.

I want to live in a house like that in the future.

I want a family that looks like that.

I want children who do things like that (never mind that I don’t really want children).

I want a partner who takes photos with me like that. 

***

An American woman who married a Frenchman in New York City moved five years ago to Provence, where she is raising her two daughters. On Instagram, I watch her girls swim in the Calanques outside of Marseille or run through cobblestone towns. I think: I want that life, if I end up having kids.

Another American woman who moved to Provence with her American husband six years ago has since figured out how to live there. She recently had a baby. I watch her daughter grow up right before my eyes. This woman is a photographer and posts luscious, curated, well-edited photos of their life in Provence, and I think: I want that simple life they are living, I want to go back in time and wear long, flowy dresses as I walk through medieval villages.

An Italian woman who looks like a modern-day Sophia Loren or Brigitte Bardot, with her curves and tousled updo, eats only pasta. Pasta in Italy, pasta all over Europe, pasta spilling down her blouse. I think: I want to be that happy, that overflowing with appetite for life. 

A married American couple, both yoga instructors, who have lived in Bali for years just had a baby. The woman teaches meditation and sacred femininity. Their baby is blessed in the waters of an ancient Buddhist temple. I think: I want that life, I want a partner who is so attuned to his spirituality and his body, and to be a woman myself who is so attuned to her femininity, the divine inside her.

I want I want I want. To change, to become the ultimate version of myself, to live fully in the world, to escape. I have a lot already, for which I’m very lucky, but what I have the most of is desire, and I place my desire on each square box over which my eyes skim.

***

The digital nomad fucks shit up. She does not follow the rules or do what is expected of her. She is proud. She is made special, having adopted this unique way of life. She never cleans an apartment—she pays a fee for that to happen when she leaves her temporary abode, and that feels vaguely feminist. She doesn’t have to spend too much energy understanding any one culture, its quirks and demands, its problems and pleasures. We float through. How could we be contributing to a country’s complexities? we ask. How could the housing crisis have anything to do with us? The downfall of an entire neighborhood to Airbnb? Not our fault. Gentrification, rising rents? Climate change, carbon footprints? We’ll consider it. And we will stop, eventually.

***

Being a digital nomad stomped out my ability to be satisfied. It was not the happy life it might appear to be. For me, it was a life full of logistics and constantly looking ahead. How could I live in the moment, when I wasn’t sure where I would be living next month?

Cultivating happiness is about quieting your mind and learning to desire what you have—skills I do not yet possess. I haven’t learned how to be happy. I know how to fill my life with adventure and interesting people, with an excess of freedom and few obligations. I know how to untether myself from the traditional demands of womanhood, from the cyclical sex hormones of ovulation, from the compromise necessary to be in a relationship with someone else. I know how to be a selfish woman, how to become a monster. 

***

But maybe more women need to become monsters. Maybe more women should pursue the full and abundantly wild possibilities of their lives, their callings, their art, their contributions to the world. Maybe more women should live like men have lived. A period of nomadic sluttiness here and there would do a world of good for some women. As Jamaica Kincaid said at the 2014 Chicago Humanities Festival, “It seems to me a slut is a perfectly enjoyable way to go through life. You can’t have too much slutdom, I say.” 

Once you become a monster—by which I mean a selfish woman—for a period of time, is there any return from this particularly hellish heaven?

No, to me there is not. Maybe for some women, sure. The maternal type. Maybe they can be saved by their selflessness. To have that sense of direction must be a kind of gift. I won’t deny the ease of knowing where you belong, of feeling called to a certain place or role—of traveling, then returning home to do what is expected of you.

***

When I finally decided to take a break from Instagram by taking it off my phone, and Twitter too, and after blocking both devices from my laptop browser, I still picked up my phone as much as I ever did. I devised ingenious ways to get my fix. I started reading The New York Times on my phone. I culled through my phone’s old Google Chrome tabs, links left open years after I first clicked on them. I deleted a hundred contacts from Venmo so I would no longer see the oddly public financial dealings of acquaintances from years ago.

It’s as if I need nothing more than that blue-tinged light on my face. I need it to illuminate something about myself, something I’m seeking out there, both in the world and on the internet. 

***

I open another internet browser on my laptop to peek at Instagram. It’s not that I want to see if I have any messages, or to see if anyone responded to something I posted (I haven’t posted for weeks). It’s that I need the scrolling. I need images to fly past my eyes. Safe images are the scariest for me to see, and thus the most rewarding. Images of lives I haven’t chosen, but perhaps touched. I could have been that woman. I could have had that life. Because I have not yet committed to any one partner or place, it comforts me to know other options still exist. My fantasy of how life is lived in other cities or countries, worlds away. My fantasy of how other women exist, their carefully arranged lives and outfits, their studied insouciance, their passionate relationships: these images are a balm to my brain. Calm down, brain. There, there. 

These other lives are still out there, and as long as you make no promises to anyone here, in this life, in this world—as long as you remain untethered and un-tied down, weightless, absolutely free, unburdened, you can be, what, happy? 

***

I put my book down around one a.m., having not picked up my phone, since there are currently no social media apps on it with which to distract myself. My eyes are closed. And yet I can see the scrolling—a square here, a square there. I see my friend Emily’s art, and I have a whole conversation with myself about how our friendship fell apart and what I could do to resurrect it. I could invite her over to my apartment to look at her own piece of art on my wall. It’s a fuzzy painting of an RV, as if seen through a fog. She would look at it, photograph it, and write an Instagram post about seeing her old art in person. That’s what she does on Instagram. For the longest time, she resisted joining. Then she joined and resisted posting. Now she posts regularly.

Few of us are immune—to its allure, to the way we think it might help us, whether in our business or with our artistic pursuits or our search for love or other ambiguous goals. To not participate in social media feels like not participating in achieving your own dreams. It feels like sitting out the dance of modern life.

I lie in bed, and the images careen by, in the same rhythmic cadence that my pointer finger always orchestrates. It takes me a moment to realize, with a shock, that I’m not looking at Instagram. I’m remembering—with a mixture of pleasure and dull routine—what it feels like to be fed other people’s thoughts and dreams, to have those dreams blend with my own, become my own. To have someone else’s dreams implanted into my brain, day after day, image after image. 

***

In the same way that my dreams are not my own but are increasingly crafted out of the actual images I see on Instagram—images of digital nomads and expats and beautiful mothers and beautiful older non-mothers and cobblestone villages and breathtaking villas and handsome husbands—so, too, was my sexuality spun from a lifetime of internet porn viewing. The very fantasies I see in my head and think I have made up, perceiving them to be my own fantasies, are just images I once consumed.

Neither my dreams nor my fantasies feel inherently mine. I wonder if they ever really were.

What is a dream? It’s something I saw someone else achieve and want for myself.

What is a sexual fantasy? It’s something I saw in a porn video, and imagining it for myself is how I get off.

***

One of my favorite games to play is to ask people what is the opposite of phallic. Do they know the term? What would we call a Georgia O’Keefe painting, for instance?

Then, once they know the term yonic, I like to categorize things, wildly and with gusto: Is a car phallic or yonic? You enter it, so it must be yonic. And a hamburger, phallic or yonic? Grilled cheese? A shaved ice? Socks? 

A cell phone is phallic, by the shape of it. And Instagram, or any social media for that matter, is yonic. You fall into it. You emerge hours later, drenched.

***

I own a tank top from the queer American artist Sophia Wallace. Printed on it are the words: THERE IS NO LACK, a rebuttal to Freud’s theory of female sexuality, to Mulvey’s theory of the castrated woman as the lynch pin on which the male gaze revolves. 

Oh, but there is plenty of lack. You can find it on the internet. And you can find photos of women, too, not castrated but captured and framed. To not participate, as a girl or a woman, in this spectacle of voyeurism and objectification feels like being a caged circus animal who refuses to perform. If you don’t perform—your happiness, your beauty, your politics, your rage—you’ll never know how close you could have come to freedom.

***

If I have one love, how will it be enough for me? If I make one of my dreams come true, choose one identity, what about the other lives, the people I could have been? What possibilities must I shed in order to achieve just one thing? 

What if I keep scrolling instead, forever, through countries in real life and through images online, endlessly wanting, endlessly experiencing the thrill, the excitement, of newness—new lovers, new places, new people, new cultures. 

What if this is the real person I am meant to be? I mean this version of myself, the one who does not know and cannot decide. 

The digital nomad is, at best, a chameleon, curious enough to seek an understanding of and adapt to each new location’s customs, solid enough in her sense of self to accept this permeability.  

And at worst? 

I have scrolled so far, and seen so much. Who would I be if I stopped now?

About the author

Kristin Sanders is the author of the hybrid poetry book Cuntry, a finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series, and two poetry chapbooks: Orthorexia, and This is a map of their watching me. Her poetry has been recently included in Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press) and Axon, Dream Pop, LIT, Eleven Eleven, Powder Keg, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction, reviews, and interviews have been published in Longreads, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bitch Magazine, The Guardian, HTMLGIANT, Full Stop, and Weird Sister. She holds an MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University and currently teaches at the University of Arizona Global Campus. She previously served as poetry editor at the New Orleans Review and book review manager at The Southern Review. Originally from Santa Maria, California, she is based at the moment in Paris, France.