One of the themes throughout the entirety of The Circle, but especially throughout this section, is the idea of the great tear that opens up in Mae when she lacks any sort of attention from her friends. Evidence of a similar reaction in others is also very clear, especially with Annie and Francis, in a way a psychologist might want to label as extreme rejection sensitivity (okay, I’m not actually a psychologist, but in my opinion, that’s what their reactions seems like to me.) While waiting to fall asleep, Mae was scanning through social media when, “she felt the tear opening up in her again… The tear was growing within her, opening quickly, a fathomless blackness spreading under her” (336). When Annie doesn’t respond to her message right away, her parents don’t respond to her messages, and her watchers aren’t really paying much attention to her, Mae starts to feel empty and as if her entire life is falling apart. She feels rejected by the lack of interaction with her friends and family, as is not able to entirely distract her brain with the constant fake social interaction that the Circle normally provides. It continues the next morning when no one really responds to her phrase, and “she was momentarily deflated” (337). The same type of response is apparent in Annie’s jealousy of Mae, and her inability to accept that Mae is moving up so quickly in the company. It’s apparent when Francis says, “I want you to rate me,” after their sexual encounter (383). It’s especially evident in the people Mae meets through CE who won’t leave her alone, like Helena from New Mexico. The constant attention to social media and constant simulation has left these individuals unable to cope with their own thoughts and with not knowing, to the point where they have become irrational and dysfunctional to some degree.
What really interests me about these reactions is that I have felt the same way myself, and it’s terrifying how dependent I (and other individuals our age) have become on this constant distraction and interaction. I have had days myself where no one responds to my snapchats or my texts and everything just seems to come falling down, even though these interactions are really incomplete and unintimate. Personally, I have done what I can to counteract these feelings, and cutting out social media that causes them until I feel like I can return and behave rationally again. I’ve given up my phone for a week before, deleted Instagram and Facebook each for months at a time, and I never watch Snapchat stories, just because I know how invasive this irrational rejection sensitivity can be. Social media brings so much to our fingertips that it causes us to forget how to act without it. Beyond that, it causes us jealousy as we view the lives of individuals around us through rose tinted glasses, as Annie does with Mae. And like Francis, it causes us to need constant reassurance and to avoid criticism at all costs, because our self esteems become completely build upon the way everyone around us sees us. There are definitely many positives to the internet and social media, but this poisonous atmosphere that leads to rejection sensitivity and vicious FOMO sometimes needs to be avoided.
I am no psychologist either, but I 100% agree with you. I can relate to Mae’s rejection sensativity in the same way that you can, as the open arrow on snapchat showing that some one has chosen not to respond is often the worst part of my day. Your use of the “momentarily deflated” line was an excellent choice. This is something we all can relate to, and it also provides insight into Mae’s obsession. In a life where social media type interaction is all that one has to fall back on, losing that interaction even just for a few minutes is devastating. This book is really making me consider just how much control social media has over me….yikes.