I went into town the other day and apparently missed the announcement that we now need to supervise our faces full-time.
Everywhere. Front cameras open. Chin up. Chin down. Lips out. Head tilted like a confused Labrador with a personal brand.
Teenagers, twenty-somethings, women in their thirties. I thought this was a phase. Apparently it comes with renewal options.
One girl watched herself the entire way up an escalator.
An escalator. A machine specifically designed to free you from doing anything, and she’d still found a shift to work.
Face management. Unpaid. No lunch break.
Then there’s the expression rehearsal.
Pout. Smirk. Sexy but exhausted. Rich but approachable. Emotionally unavailable but accepting deliveries.
Forty-seven pictures to achieve the look of someone who wasn’t expecting a picture.
“Caught off guard.”
By yourself?
I watched another girl in a shop walk straight past a mirror while looking at herself on her phone.
Even the mirror must have thought, Oh, fuck off.
But a real mirror is an amateur. It just shows you what’s there. No smoothing. No reshaping. No opportunity to blame the lens.
Practically bullying.
And nobody can simply wait anymore. Lift taking eight seconds? Face inspection. Train arriving in two minutes? Emergency cheekbone audit.
God forbid you have a thought before you’ve checked how you look having it.
I’m not against vanity. I’ve checked my reflection in a dark shop window. Then I carried on walking, because the results weren’t going to improve through surveillance.
But this isn’t a quick check. This is a relationship.
The phone gets the eye contact. The phone gets the little smile. The phone gets taken everywhere.
The boyfriend walks behind carrying the bags, presumably grateful he hasn’t been cropped out of the shopping trip.
Meanwhile, an entire city is happening around them.
People. Buildings. Actual incidents. A man could ride past on a flaming horse and someone would whisper, “Wait. The lighting.”
And yes, I know. Self-expression. Confidence. Let people enjoy things.
Fine. But I watched someone spend five minutes looking disappointed with pictures of herself enjoying things.
At some point, the fun should probably make an appearance.
What gets me is the concentration. That fierce commitment to finding a face you already arrived wearing.
If I looked at a restaurant menu that intensely, someone would ask if I needed help.
But stare into your phone long enough and apparently you’re creating content.
Mostly evidence that you were somewhere you didn’t look at.
And I’m standing there trying to get past, because behind this deeply personal journey of self-discovery is a queue for the fucking lift.
You don’t need to love every angle.
Some angles are for checking traffic.
Your face is still there.
The afternoon, however, has fucked off.
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