I Met Someone IRL and It Was Disgusting
In Real Life, everything is a live, unedited broadcast running on an ancient, unreliable server.
I had a loaf of bread go mouldy last week. Bought it on Monday, forgot about it in the cupboard, found it Thursday looking like a science experiment. Fuzzy green colonies spreading across what used to be a perfectly functional source of carbohydrates. The physical world just does this. Left to its own devices, everything organic immediately begins the process of becoming disgusting. There’s no pause button on decay, no undo function for entropy. Just the relentless, unstoppable march towards fuzzy green horror.
And I thought, this is it. This is why we all retreated into the warm, glowing rectangle. Because the physical world is constantly rotting, breaking down, falling apart at a speed you can’t control.
The Great Unlearning
Which brings me to the absolute horror show I inflicted on myself last month. I agreed to meet a friend. An actual, physical friend. In person. At a specific time and location. Like some sort of medieval commitment ceremony.
The whole thing started with five days of asynchronous text negotiation, because committing to 19:30 on a Thursday felt like signing away my immortal soul. In the digital world, nothing’s binding. An appointment’s a suggestion, a maybe is a hard no, and tomorrow’s just a theoretical concept that may or may not occur depending on whether I can be arsed. But somehow, stupidly, I said yes.
I hauled myself out of my perfectly ergonomic chair, away from the comforting hum of my router, and onto the bus. The air was thick with the exhaled breath of hundreds of other soft-tissue life forms, all of us packed into this metal tube like slightly expired sausages. The noise wasn’t the clean, filtered audio of my noise-cancelling headphones but this chaotic mess of coughing, rustling, and one-sided phone conversations I couldn’t skip or fast-forward through.
The pub smelled of disappointment and spilled lager. He was there, my mate, and this is where it all went wrong.
On my phone, he’s a clean, two-inch square JPEG from 2018. In real life, he was this vast, constantly moving column of flesh with poorly defined edges and, horrifyingly, texture. Skin. Hair. All of it moving in ways I’d completely forgotten about. He smiled and his face crumpled into these deeply unsettling creases. No undo button. No edit function. Just there, happening, in real time.
The Moisture Problem
Then he started speaking, and I noticed the thing we’ve all trained ourselves to forget. Every hard ‘P’ or ‘T’ came with a tiny spray of moisture. Like a poorly maintained garden sprinkler attached to his face. The mouth movements, the moist tongue, the slight whiff of old coffee with every earnest statement. I wanted to hit pause, wipe down the screen, ask him to re-render in a more sterile format.
The latency was brutal too. I’d finish a sentence and his reaction wouldn’t come for two full seconds, forcing me to fill the gap with these horrifying verbal manoeuvres. He’d start talking, forget where he was going, fiddle with the sticky coaster, knock over a glass. A loud, genuinely un-muteable crash that made everyone look over.
This is the fundamental problem. Real life is a live, unedited broadcast running on ancient, unreliable hardware. You can’t minimise the window when it gets boring. You can’t refresh the feed when conversation stalls. You’re stuck in a one-to-one interaction with a fleshy device you can’t reboot, and it demands your entire, undivided attention.
Why We’re All Broken Now
We’ve spent twenty or-so years training ourselves on a highly compressed, sanitised, lag-free communication system. Text messages, DMs, comments, emails. All of it edited, spell-checked, carefully timed for maximum effect. We’ve outsourced our empathy to algorithms that suggest the mildly concerned emoji when someone’s cat is sick. We’ve learned to skim-read massive blocks of information and respond with a thumbs-up.
The digital world gave us pause buttons, edit functions, and teh blessed ability to simply close the tab when things got uncomfortable. We could delete our first four attempts at a joke before submitting the perfect, punchy line. We could Google a reference while pretending we knew it all along.
But IRL there’s no safety net. You’re on a mental tightrope, one mispronounced word away from social catastrophe. You have to process whole paragraphs of unedited narrative about trips to Manchester that sound exactly as shit as you’d expect. You have to demonstrate genuine concern for someone’s badly timed train journey. It’s exhausting.
I watched him dip his unmanicured fingers into the communal peanut bowl, touch the oily shells, disappear them back into his mouth. The primal, germ-ridden horror of shared space, shared air, shared snackage. This is what we were escaping.
What I Actually Do Now (Because I’m Still Damaged)
Right, here’s the bit where I’m supposed to tell you how to fix this. I can’t. You’re ruined, I’m ruined, we’re all fundamentally broken by the smooth efficiency of the digital world. But I have learned a few things from repeatedly failing at physical human contact.
First, I stopped pretending I could just ‘turn it back on’ like some sort of social switch. The skills have atrophied. Accepting that you’re now genuinely bad at real-time conversation is oddly liberating. It means you can prepare for it like any other unpleasant task. I treat IRL meetings the same way I treat the dentist: necessary, horrible, requiring recovery time.
Second, I’ve started being honest about my limitations. When someone suggests meeting up, I now say, ‘I’m absolute rubbish at this now, fair warning.’ It sets expectations properly. They know they’re getting the deteriorated version of me, not the carefully edited text-message persona. Turns out most people are relieved because they’re equally terrible at it.
Third, I’ve learned to build in escape routes and recovery periods. Meeting someone for two hours is a full day’s worth of social energy gone. I don’t book anything else that day. No other calls, no writing, nothing that requires me to be pleasant or functional. It’s damage control. Your nervous system needs time to decompress from the assault of unfiltered human proximity.
Fourth, and this is the bit that sounds pathetic but works: I practice. Not the conversation itself, that’s mental. But I practice being physically present somewhere public without my phone as a security blanket. Ten minutes in a cafe, just sitting there, tolerating the ambient noise and movement. It’s like physiotherapy for a muscle you’ve let waste away. You won’t get good at it, but you’ll get slightly less awful.
The Damp Flannel Speed of Reality
I managed the full two hours with my mate. A Herculean effort. We mumbled the required lies about doing it again soon. Then I was back on the bus, headphones on, filters up, instantly retreating behind the glossy firewall of my screen.
I still haven’t booked another physical meeting. Probably won’t. I’ll stick to WhatsApp. They don’t breathe on you, and they certainly don’t smell of stale cheese and onion crisps.
Much like a queue at the Post Office, the physical world runs at the speed of a lethargic snail. The difference is, now I know I’m the one who’s slowed down to match it.