by Greg Dybec
Twenty-Four Truths about Life on the Other Side of the Internet
1.We’re not shotgunning beers and throwing back vodka shots throughout the workday. We usually wait to do those things until the exact moment 5 p.m. hits.
2.There are sometimes extremely cute dogs that prance around the office evoking sporadic “awws” throughout the day.
3.Imagine sitting on a couch with your closest friends talking about all the things you’d normally talk about (dating, movies, sex, hangovers, corrupt politics). This, for the most part, is how we come up with story ideas and topics to cover.
4.Nerf-gun battles have broken out during work hours. Warning: Nerf darts sting a lot more now than they did when we were children. Maybe because we’re all a bit flabbier and susceptible to pain.
5.I have never worn sweatpants to work.
6.I do get to meet and talk to celebrities, but just because I meet them doesn’t mean we’re friends. Believe me, I’ve tried.
7.Running a website is not all lounging on couches and overanalyzing trends and world issues. There are meetings with agencies, advertisers, investors, and advisors. Corporate America is always close by.
8.We do have happy hour every Friday. If you can get in touch with me and guess the password I’ll invite you.
9.As much as we want to say we don’t read the comments on articles, we sometimes can’t help it. The funniest one I’ve ever received was, “Your Western efforts to discredit my country will not succeed.”
10.People really can make a substantial living working for a website. Writers, editors, and English majors rejoice.
11.Knowing that tens of millions of people from around the world are reading the site on a monthly basis is as exciting as it is terrifying.
12.There is no such thing as a nine-to-five when working in digital publishing.
13.Most awkward celebrity encounter: a tie between the time I asked Alesso if I could pee in his tour bus midinterview and the time I made eye contact with Steve Buscemi while he peed in the urinal next to me.
14.Having a boss (the Elite Daily founder and CEO) that is a year younger than me is not as weird as it sounds. Though he does hold it against me at times.
15.It is impossible for me to read anything on the Internet anymore without viewing it as a potential story to cover; a story I’m jealous we didn’t cover first; or a story that I’m happy we covered better.
16.There is not some giant turf war between competing websites. We do not seek out Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and Thought Catalog employees and pelt them with eggs and water balloons. Some of us are even friends.
17.Pizza Fridays. Bagel Wednesdays.
18.No, I can’t post your video rant about string cheese or the photos you took of your cat in a tiny dress. But send it to me anyway, because on second thought, maybe I will.
19.I don’t speak using Internet acronyms. My laughs are real guttural heaves, not phonetically pronounced LOLs. I’ve never spoken the letters OMG or SMH in my life, so please STFU.
20.If I see you on your phone or laptop reading an article, I am studying every single one of your habits. How long it takes you to scroll, where your eyes move, if you click into another story, if you’re only reading headlines and looking at photographs. Maybe I am that creep on the train.
21.One week in Internet time is roughly one year. We age differently.
22.The key to setting trends on the Internet is paying painstakingly close attention to the trends in real life. Do overalls seem to be making a comeback? Do people seem to be drinking one particular type of coffee? What global issue are people arguing most about in bars? Life online can’t exist without life offline.
23.Knowing your words will live digitally online does provide a level of confidence and honesty that is difficult to attain through face-to-face interaction.
24.Yes, there is a method behind the numbers we choose for lists like this one. I can’t tell you what that method is.
Point being: the Internet is a funny place when you take a peek behind the curtain. People forget it’s crafted and sustained by actual living, breathing, flesh-and-blood people, who are working actual hours for actual currency to live their actual lives. You probably see us every day and don’t even know it, the same way I wonder how many people I walk by every day on the streets are serial killers who have yet to be caught.
This makes me think about the girl on the train. The one with the boobs that aren’t big but aren’t tiny either. She’s a reminder for me that outside of the four walls of the office, the work I help produce on a daily basis is actually reaching people. And not just reaching them in a way that’s measured by page views and all the other metrics that are as valuable as currency in the business world of websites. Reaching people in a way that can cause an actual smile, or even an LOL on a crowded train. That has to count for something in this world.
The incident with the girl on the train was enough to keep me believing in the power of evolving communication and the influence of the written word. She must have felt the electricity of that virtual connection, too. She had to have appreciated the fact that a stranger—whether myself or one of the countless people around the world who throw their voices and personal thoughts into the digital abyss—could produce something that appeared at her fingertips and made her feel something.
But let’s be real. She’s probably still freaked the fuck out.
At least we got the page view.
The Art of Living Other People’s Lives
I have perfected a technique that I call wireless wiretapping. If it were a sport it would be called competitive social listening. If it were a profession, my title would be eavesdropping specialist. If it were a diagnosable condition, doctors would name it hyper-attentiveness disorder. If you’re calling it like it is, the word would be creepy.
Over the years, I’ve found that the key to successful eavesdropping is simple: wear headphones but don’t listen to music. Throw in a book you’re not actually reading or type out a long text message you’ll never send and you’re all set. That way you can lean nearer to a person on a crowded train or walk unsettlingly close to a couple on the sidewalk, all while evading suspicion. People assume you’re just preoccupied and not paying attention, which, lucky for me, most people in New York City are to begin with.
It’s not so much a person’s conversation in its entirety that interests me. It’s more so the fragmented dialogue and morsels of stories we tend to catch in passing. It could be the couple arguing on the street corner or the guy that runs into someone he knows in Starbucks. How often do you walk by friends engaged in conversation and hold doors for people on the phone and suddenly, without asking for it, you’ve become intermingled with their words? For that brief moment, their world becomes yours.
It’s like when a car playing loud music drives by and you catch a lyric or two without context. But the context doesn’t matter. The words live on their own. These abrupt glimpses into the lives of others are always filling up the spaces around us, invisible but real, and it wasn’t until my sophomore year in college that I began to take notice.
I was at a bus stop in Jamaica, Queens, when a couple in the middle of a conversation strolled by. But the only fragment I caught was as follows:
MAN. I swear I thought Spike Lee was Asian.
WOMAN. That’s stereotypical.
MAN. How’s that stereotypical? Asians always have the last name Lee.
For some reason the words sent a wave of excitement through my body. To me it was the perfect exchange. Hilarious yet strangely telling. It had the framework of a staged comedy bit, though the man was truly oblivious to the fact he was indeed being stereotypical. I quickly typed the words into my phone. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew they needed to be saved and revisited. I decided I’d be their guardian.
The same day, back on my college campus, I walked past two girls on the way to class. When they came within earshot I overheard one say to the other, “I definitely woke up with cloth
es on when I know I went to bed naked.”
The words echoed in my ears as if they were spoken directly to me, but as the girls made their way down the hallway, the rest of the conversation faded into inaudible static. Why the fuck did she wake up with clothes on if she went to bed naked? Was there a guy involved? Did she spend the night with the ultimate gentleman? The perfect guy that doesn’t have sex on the first date and dresses the girl when she accidentally falls asleep naked? Or was he trying to cover up something more sinister? I wrote the sentence down in my phone right below the Spike Lee exchange from earlier and spent my entire class staring at them. It felt both illegal and enlightening.
Since that day I’ve made it a point to not only write down the strange, profound, ominous, comical, prophetic, joyful, philosophical, and straight-up insane things I hear in passing, but also to make sure I seek them out. It sounds creepy, and I suppose it is, in a way. A lot of people say, “I think I’ll go for a quick walk to clear my mind and enjoy the day,” but not as many people say, “I think I’ll take a walk while deceptively pretending to multitask so I can write down the words of others without their knowing.” My theory is, when in doubt, call your questionable habits a social experiment or say they’re in the name of art.
While walking the streets of New York City alone, the portions of conversations I’ve overheard have been everything from heartbreaking to hilarious. There are stories unfolding every second around us. If you listen closely enough you’ll find the lives of others both strikingly similar and drastically different from your own. Personally, I can’t think of a better representation of our existence. Just don’t get caught without your headphones. You may have some explaining to do.
Here are some of the notable blurbs I’ve collected over the past six years:
“Sure, I think about going to the gym. But then I think about how I’m going to die one day.”
“I just really don’t get why when one person gets fired everyone else doesn’t just get a raise.”
“I was walking home last night and saw Courtney Love peeing on a stoop.”
“Show me where Kuwait is on a map and I’ll give you a blow job.”
“I can’t do it. I can’t just wake up and go to the dentist.”
“The lord is my neighbor. The lord is my pen pal. The lord is my golden retriever. I don’t have a golden retriever.”
“I’ll be late for dinner, again.”
“I swear I’m not mad. Keep asking me and I will be.”
“Fuck those tiny paper cups at doctor’s offices and shit.”
“I’m waiting for him to say ‘I love you’ first.”
“Rest in peace to the dick I once I knew.”
“Good luck in life.”
“Got that crack, X, dope . . . you need? Got Adderall for the white people, too.”
“Keep swiping right, you idiot.”
“Job titles are like eyebrows, they can change everything.”
“My rent money went toward the lobster in my stomach.”
“I’m always cold. It could be a problem. But doctor’s offices are always cold, so why go?”
“I feel like I’m doing a lot better than most of my friends.”
“I get it, we’re all immigrants, but we’re also fucking Americans.”
“I want some popcorn, yo! I’m dead-ass about to buy some!”
“I wouldn’t be mad if ISIS attacked Whole Foods.”
“Definitely herpes.”
“Is redneck a race?”
“My Tinder date wants to be a Bill Clinton impersonator.”
“Who needs love when you have Starbucks?”
“I’m busy Friday. And then Saturday I’m turning the fuck up in the club.”
“Sometimes you just gotta be your own hero and save your own little heart. Because sometimes the people you can’t imagine living without can live without you.”
“Carla’s pregnant and doesn’t know how to tell her mom. She wants me to do it.”
“I need money so bad I can’t even jerk off.”
“I can tell if a girl is blonde or brunette just by looking at her legs.”
“Siri, where am I?”
“I was cheating on her ass the whole time anyway.”
“If the Knicks win a championship before I die I’ll donate my balls to science.”
“It’s not about the money. Trust me, it’s not. It helps, but it’s really not about the money.”
“Do you still love me?”
“They accepted my application.”
“I’m on a gluten-only diet, motherfucker.”
“My boss caught me putting booze in my coffee again.”
“Every dude in a relationship has a girl on the side as a backup plan.”
“I didn’t get in. It’s okay, I wasn’t expecting to anyway.”
“I’m one of those guys who peaked in high school.”
“You need to tell him you’re worth more than the way he treats you. You should only ever feel like you want a person. Not like you need them.”
“Go protest somewhere life doesn’t matter, like Nebraska.”
“All you need to do is tell a girl you’re taking her on an adventure and she’ll do anything.”
“The sex wasn’t the best. It also wasn’t the worst. So basically marriage material.”
“People are just hook-up whores these days.”
“Kids are a lot like Post-It notes.”
“Christmas is everybody’s favorite holiday, even the Jews.”
“Anxiety is great, it’s like getting high without taking drugs.”
“When I cry you always say, ‘Cheer up, you’re not dead.’ But you don’t know if dead people are sad.”
Acknowledgments
This book wouldn’t be possible without all the people out there whose lives are far more interesting than my own. Thank you for letting me observe and take notes.
I have to give a colossal thank you to my agent, Eve Attermann, and WME for sticking by my side. Thanks for taking a chance on a first-time author. A big thanks to Jessica Fromm for making this collection stronger and funnier than I ever imagined. And thanks for admitting you eavesdrop on people, too.
A huge thanks to the entire Elite Daily family. To David and Jonathon for building the dream and taking so many of us along for a wild ride. We disrupted an entire industry and learned a ton about ourselves along the way. I’ve never once been upset I had to get up and go to work in the morning.
I have to give a shout-out to Elite Daily’s fearless editor in chief, Kaitlyn Cawley. Nothing is more fun than being your copilot. I also have to give a special thanks to Phil Portolano. The first halves of our lives are forever intertwined and our bond remains unbreakable. To Kyle for saying yes to the trips around the world and to Patrice for being there through the ups and downs. And to everyone else from back home, you know exactly who you are.
I would not have been able to stay sane throughout this writing process without my new support system and second family, the Bifulcos, and everyone else I’ve been blessed to get to know since meeting Brittany. And to Brittany. Thanks for being the most genuine and kind-hearted person I know. You inspire me everyday.
Nothing in my life would be possible without the endless support of my family—cousins, aunts, uncles, and all. I only hope to make you all proud.
Mom, Dad, Cole—you guys are my world and my best friends. You’ve taught me the values I will carry with me forever. You also all love food, and what’s more important than food?
I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t end this with a thank you to my grandparents, both here and no longer with us. This book is also dedicated to Nanny and Pop, who didn’t need to fully understand everything I was after to know they supported it. And of course to Grammy, who knew more words than I will ever know. You taught me the power of storytelling.
About the Author
Photo by Alec MacDonald
Greg Dybec was born in Huntington Station, New York. He gradu
ated from St. John’s University in 2011 with a Bachelor’s degree in English. He worked as writer and editor for a number of digital publications before joining Elite Daily in 2013. He lives in Astoria, Queens. Keep up with his work and writing at www.gregdybec.com and follow him on Twitter and Instagram @gregdybec and at Facebook.com/gregdybecauthor.