I Don't Want to Die Poor

by Michael Arceneaux

  And there’s lots of entertainment value. Yo, niggas love sharing a meme! Not to sound like a Gulf Coast elitist, but I don’t find most of these memes at all comical. They’re unimaginative and my LOL palate is, respectfully, higher. (I recognize that people who know me reading this will continue to send me those dumb-ass memes anyway. I love you more.)

  I hate most of the memes I’ve been sent because not only are they not funny to me, but they typically need an editor. I suffer enough already skimming inane op-eds written by twenty-somethings or white male hacks in their fifties who would have benefitted from working with an editor that cared. But, since I don’t like to be a spoiler, I try to always play along and feign laughter. Call me a fake-ass bitch for doing so if you must, but they feel seen and heard and I feel like Meryl Streep in any performance—never mind it’s realistically more along the lines of Tommy “Tiny” Lister, Jr., as “T-Lay” in Master P’s I Got the Hook Up; point is, I put on to make others happy. I’m so generous.

  Instagram is a much better dating app than anything else I’ve tried. Grindr left me with scars and bedbugs. Jack’d had someone trying to get me caught out there and ready to jump into the streets like old Kelis. Tinder is like me trying to get at a hologram passing the time.

  Can someone explain to me what is the point of matching someone and never planning to speak to them? If by chance you do speak to them, chances are slim that you ever engage them in person. For all of the people I’ve matched on Tinder, I have only gone on a single Tinder date.

  He was some Black boy who lived in Williamsburg and taught yoga, but ultimately wanted to work in film or something arts-adjacent. He went to the same liberal arts college as a friend, who, after I noticed the connection, told me that she intended to try and set us up. We met at a spiffy pizza place on the Lower East Side that is now closed (R.I.P. to a real one). He told me he liked pizza, only he needed somewhere that had vegan options. Someone else put me onto this spot, but that wasn’t this dude’s business.

  I found him even more attractive in person. It helped that he was smart and good at conversing. I thought the date was going well until he abruptly mentioned having just gone through a breakup and not being in the space to be actively dating someone right now.

  If you’re this person, do humanity a favor and stay your ass at home. Try crying and masturbating in the dark. Don’t let your pain beget someone else’s waste of time. It wasn’t a total loss: the lamb sausage pizza was to die for and shit.

  That date was several years ago, but guess who I stumbled across again on Instagram? He looked fit and flexible as ever, so I was tempted to slide into his DMs. But the more I scrolled down, the more the page reminded me that as good as he looked, he was more or less a beautiful gluten-free granola bar that would irritate me eventually.

  Another point goes to Instagram for being a fine way to sniff out incompatibility.

  I used to write against people looking up the social media of someone they recently met before getting to know them in person, but never mind. Seek out all the warning signs one way or another all you want. In nosily scrolling through his post, I found someone else that turned out to be worth spending some time with. Who doesn’t love a platform that provides strong referrals?

  I continue to scroll through Tinder while on the toilet, so my ability to match with people without ever yielding another actual date remains intact, but I’ve learned from others that it’s not totally my fault, as it’s happened often to them, too. For whatever reason—New York, me, men are awful—Instagram works much more efficiently than Tinder for that type of pursuit.

  When it’s not helping me connect to new and interesting people that conjure impure thoughts, it is also adept at helping me maintain minimal contact with people I have no plan of seeing in real life ever again. Yes, girl, I loved you in AP History, but I do not want to reminisce over happy hour margaritas at Taco Cabana whenever I am back in Houston, about something that happened around the time “Bootylicious” originally dropped. Just take the likes and let it be. That sounds so mean, but I still don’t want to go.

  I do appreciate the mess value of Instagram, too. By mess, I mean the Shade Room and the people arguing in the Shade Room for reasons I cannot explain and have opted not to try, for the sake of preserving my amusement. And I’ll forever be intrigued that Instagram is also one big-ass virtual flea market and time-sensitive infomercial. I have never seriously considered wearing a corset, but dammit, if Mrs. Gucci Mane can look like that by hiring a waist trainer, maybe I need one? I’ll try that over the diuretic tea all of the reality stars and fledging R&B singers pretend is the key to their weight loss. I do respect everyone’s #fitnessjourney, however.

  I’m on Instagram every morning. And afternoon. And evening. It’s become a daily habit. I’m checking it not necessarily every nanosecond, but it’s too much all the same. I know this thanks to my iPhone that sends me a weekly reminder of how much I squander my time staring at a screen, and which apps sucked up the largest percentage of those hours.

  Yet I wouldn’t say I am addicted to Instagram, though I can acknowledge that it can be addicting. I’d say my activity is rooted in trying to find ways to not be stuck in total solitary mode. I work from home, which means I don’t get to socialize with people outside of social media during a lot of the workweek. I work a lot. Working from home can be fun, but it is not as fun as it sounds.

  I need escapes like everyone else. I do go to the gym, but I don’t want to talk to people there. I want to lift and bop to ho tunes in peace. That’s supposed to be my escape from humanity’s nuisances.

  Social media is intended to provide connections. I’m not a fan of being disconnected, so I value outlets to make connections with people—especially in my adult life, where it has become harder to make connections of any sort with new people. I love Instagram for giving me quick bites of, if not real intimacy, something in proximity to it until I can go do hood rat things with my friends in real life.

  If I were an addict, I’d be an addict in great company. There are people who will respond to an IG DM faster than a text, FaceTime, or if in a throwback mood, a phone call, after it is brought to their attention, once you’ve make a second effort, that you did indeed call on purpose. I can get off Instagram long enough to entertain texts or take phone calls from a limited list of people. With respect to FaceTime, though, I prefer to be given a proper warning. I loathe unsolicited FaceTimes—my friends could care less, so I end up making time for those, too.

  And when I’m with friends—especially on the weekend—I don’t use the app as much. I’m old-fashioned in that I prefer spending time with people. I also like to call people by the names their parents gave them. I scroll too much on Instagram, but I don’t monitor my follow count, I don’t call people by their IG names in public, and I try not to theme conversations around Instagram heavily. Should I ever end up one of those Instagays that post their bodies all the time only to get blocked after some bitchy gay reports them for violating the terms of service, I would absolutely not launch a new account with a bio listing my original follower count. Yeah, there are people who engage in such antics. God bless them.

  Speaking of follower counts, I have never felt the urge to buy followers either. I understand why some might believe they need to do that—if they are chasing #influencer money or have some other careerist intention. It looks stupid to have a profile that boasts tens of thousands of followers, with posts having an average of hundreds if not dozens of likes, but who am I to tell someone how to scam?

  My slickness aside, though, I have not been influenced by Instagram in any of those ways, and my frequent usage hasn’t impacted the way I think. That’s why as much as I love and enjoy Instagram, there are some parts of it I do not enjoy: how it occasionally makes me feel about myself, for example.

  For the most part, I’ve learned not to allow how other people view me to alter how I view myself. It’s easier to stay on top of that task when you’re not subje
cting yourself to carefully curated depictions of other people’s lives. The longer I use Instagram, the more those images start to seep in.

  A slightly older friend of mine once gave me pause as we were discussing my disappointment with the state of my career as compared to select contemporaries of mine. “I don’t believe in that,” she said of measuring myself against others. “Sometimes you actually do need to compare yourself to other people to gauge what you’re not doing right.” She meant this more in the professional sense, but I had already been doing a less than ideal version of that through my Instagram feed by the time she dropped that spicy nugget.

  Overall, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that most of the population aged twenty-five to forty are living their best lives. They frequently travel to Dubai, Brazil, and Bali. Very few folks still have body fat, thanks to their personal trainer and intermittent fasting conducted while doing Keto or Whole30. Everyone is in designer clothes. Everyone looks like they’re having more fun than you when you’re not so thrilled about your own affairs.

  One doesn’t have to be superficial and materialistic to let it get in your head; repetition takes down the mightiest of us.

  There are some in particular that have gotten to me.

  I can’t tell if I’m attracted to him or hate his absolute guts—for reasons that are valid or rooted in envy. I suspect it is some uncomfortable combination of the two. Regardless, I’m tuned in. I can’t look away. I watch every single Instastory he puts up as if it’s must-see TV even though more often than not it’s some goofy bullshit. I check his timeline, too, where he is less frequent in output, but given Instagram’s enraging decision to no longer allow our timelines to be dictated chronologically—resulting in me seeing Father’s Day–themed posts a week before I have to tip to this Fourth of July turn up—I probably would have missed something anyway. Okay, no I wouldn’t have. I check the page too frequently to miss any, uh, content.

  My body recoils when considering how pathetic this sounds when laid bare.

  He is a particular type of braggart. Once, he posted his salary for the upcoming year. I already figured he made a lot of money. He was constantly posting himself shopping or showing off the aftermath of said shopping. Saint Laurent, Off-White, Gucci, and Thom Browne, among a sea of other high-end labels. His style itself isn’t particularly impressive. You can tell he’s a bit agnostic when it comes to having an actual aesthetic; he’s a label whore, if anything. It doesn’t totally cross the line into outright gaudy, but the tip is in.

  Not that it matters. It’s hard to imagine tact is ever a real point of concern for him. The intent here is to stunt, and in that aim, he is a great success. I would love to know if he at all was influenced by the show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. His antics remind me of that show. I used to get a kick out of that show. It made you want to be rich. Nothing looked better than being rich. Look at their houses. Look at their clothes. Doesn’t that look like the life?

  Obviously, there ain’t nothing but some white folks before you on the TV screen, but you block it out so your lil’ Black ass can dream and be caught up in the fantasy like anyone else watching.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that as much as I hear pundits (who should be providing the world anything else besides punditry) bark about “class warfare,” they don’t talk about its true culprits. The criticism of the rich is not rooted in people being successful enough to become wealthy, but a system that allows people to build massive fortunes based on exploitation—and using that power to consolidate power that prevents them from ever facing any consequences for such abuses. The problem isn’t whether or not you can afford the yacht you’re showing off on television, but whether or not activities like, say, not paying people livable wages are how you were able to pay for that yacht. Or was it being let off the hook for paying your fair share of taxes? Or was it through monopoly-building. Not to sound like I’m a TV character that just enrolled in a prestigious fictitious university where I am newly politicized, but Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was plutocratic propaganda. (Shame on you, Robin Leach!)

  Having said all of that, his flaunting is unnecessary, and his literal money brags tacky and not in tune with the times, but I’d still fuck.

  As for the other, who I’m even more zoned into, he makes me regret eating solid food for a significant portion of his frequent posts. His posts are somewhat self-aggrandizing, but I suppose Instagram is designed for self-aggrandizement. I guess what ticks me off a little bit is the poorly disguised humility. But not more than the overall corniness. Why can’t folks post their thirst traps and let the intended audience salivate in peace?

  You can always tell when a person used to feel lame, and following a new body, location, change, career, and so on, they now feel cool and are pressed to prove it. Somehow, that overtime will help offset past droughts. There’s something beautiful in someone being able to transform themselves in a way that makes them happy. I’m all for people who can embody the chorus of “Butterfly,” one of the trademark songs from the elusive chanteuse Mariah Carey. Spread your wings and shit.

  However, people who suffer from the Mike Jones can be nauseating. The line “Back then they didn’t want me, now I’m hot, hoes all on me” is a moment to stunt but not a place to permanently reside. He sometimes gives that, and if he hadn’t already shared his background with me and suggested he wasn’t totally over it, his online antics would have confirmed it all the same.

  He’s so cute, though. And smart. Cultured, if not “classy.” Kind of perfect, if not stubbornly stuck in that period when he didn’t get to sit with the cool kids. I’m not now humming “We Shall Overcome”; you are.

  On top of it all, he looks like he did everything right. The schools. The line of work. Everything looks so well tailored. I can hear screams telling me to find a better fit for myself already.

  As specific as these descriptions might seem, I can guarantee the people who assume I am speaking about them will be wrong and the persons I’m talking about won’t have the slightest clue. It truly doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t be so engulfed in the images of these people anyway, right?

  As for why I don’t just unfollow, I know them both. Sometimes people take unfollowing as if you challenged them to a duel or called for their permanent exile from your social circle. I don’t want to be bothered with the blowback; I mute and boot in most cases, but in these, I can’t look away. I can’t even try to downplay how odd this sounds by noting that at least each person I mentioned is a person I actually know, but I have kept up with the habits of strangers on the platform, too. After all, so many of the gay boys on the internet look and post the same anyway.

  I know I should know better than to let any of this get to me.

  The median income in 2017 in the U.S. was $61,372. For Black people, the United States Census Bureau reported the median was $40,258. It was $39,490 for us in 2016, but hold your applause, as it was $41,363 in 2000. Those two folks I described aren’t lying about their lives, because I know their jobs, but how are the rest of you people in Fiji? I make more than both medians, but chose the wrong kind of debt. I wish I had chosen more fun ways to owe somebody—like going to Mykonos, for starters.

  I know some of these people are flat-out lying about their lives. The perfect couple that became an open relationship to satisfy one person’s urges at the expense of the other’s feelings. The one that’s tens of thousands in debt as a result of their need to present as perfect. The fool who is repurposing someone else’s material to the cheers of commenters who won’t ever know the con.

  Some are not technically lying. The flight attendant who feels the need to boast of being a world traveler—“While you were in bed, I was on a flight to Amsterdam.” Yeah, you were at work. You’ll be in Des Moines, Iowa, tomorrow. Safe travels.

  I don’t feign superiority. Many of us are showing the most favorable portrayals of our lives in one capacity or another. I’m no less guilty of this than anyone else. Wh
y would anyone want to advertise what they don’t like about themselves? But that emphasis on mainly positive portrayals gives way to us being a big circle jerk of false impressions of our nuanced lives.

  Knowing people aren’t being totally honest with what they are showing you doesn’t mean what they show you still can’t get to you. We live in a political climate in which the truth doesn’t matter. I suppose it didn’t hit me until it was too late that gaslighting may not hit me in some areas but will undoubtedly slap me on the back of my neck in others.

  Sometimes I wonder if the images I have shared on my feed might be causing someone else to have similar feelings. Everything looks better on someone else. Sometimes those images did exacerbate stress and anxiety I had over making more money. Sometimes I would go on there looking to feel connected and leave feeling lonelier than before.

  My best friend dré (as previously noted in my first book, he prefers a lowercase aesthetic, and friendship is catering to your friends’ aesthetic choices in all forms) used to profess his disdain of Instagram. His actual IG handle used to pronounce that contempt.

  dré is one of the most impressive people I have ever met and he’s a confident person, so I didn’t want to believe social media had any impact on him. I didn’t want to because I didn’t want to acknowledge how influenced I was, too. At least he had the good sense to stay off Instagram.

  Years had passed since that conversation. My incredibly smart, charismatic, talented, and skillful friend had become even more impressive in terms of titles and what else comes back with them. It was a by-product of years of hard work yielding just rewards. I asked him about that conversation because I was trying to recall specifics about what he said at the time that I couldn’t truly appreciate until later.

  “well my thing was always, IG was the greatest hits of everyone’s life,” dré texted me. “everyone’s best angles, everyone’s best job moments, everyone’s best relationship—and I was in a place where I wasn’t 100% comfortable about where I was in life. it wasn’t fun/funny/social; it was making me feel insecure about EVERYTHING.”