Social Isolation In Hulu By Matt Spicer

It is often said that those closest to a problem are closest to its solution. But in order to start working on the solution to a problem, you must start by defining the problem. Social isolation is a modern anxiety that uses social media as its vessel, the abuse of social media distorts the good that it was created to do: bring people together and enable them to learn from each other and share experiences. Ingrid Goes West is a movie released at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, later available for viewing on Hulu by its director Matt Spicer. Ingrid Goes West is an impeccable example of a modern mythic narrative designed to explain the reason why social isolation occurs, what causes social isolation, and the proposed solution to this problem.

In the movie, a young girl Ingrid (who has a mental disorder revealed later in the movie) loses her mother and travels to California to start a new life. She is obsessed with social media and falls into its trap, she begins to feel socially isolated and metaphorically drowns in the crowd of Instagram stars. She desperately tries to become famous through lying, cheating, assault, and stealing but ends up realizing she was never socially isolated after all. Her fear was never true, but it drove her to do crazy things just like in today’s society where people will try as hard as they can to appear as if they have friends and live a great life.
To start talking about the fear of social isolation seen in social media, the root cause has to be identified otherwise there is no hope for an impactful solution. Ingrid Goes West offers two possible origins to this modern anxiety - greed and envy. This movie displays how greed drives social isolation because most people who are obsessed with social media tend to elevate it above everything else in their lives, falling into a sort of addiction. In Ingrid Goes West, the main character Ingrid has just lost her mother and is looking for something to fill the void she feels. She finds out that social media helps her feel less isolated and starts to idolize the Instagram famous. This mindset that Ingrid has causes her to also hold herself up highly, believing that she deserves more attention than everyone else. As the movie progresses Ingrid decides to move to California to stalk and befriend an Instagram model, Taylor, and Ingrid decides that she needs to look the part to live like her. During this movie, the viewer gets the chance to see Ingrid equate her worth with a financial aspect, eventually developing materialism. Materialistic people like Ingrid tend to be socially isolated anyway, due to their love of wealth and objects. This type of person wants followers and likes and believes that they are owed those things more than anyone else, exhibiting the root cause of greed. The second root cause of social isolation that Ingrid Goes West proposes to us is envy, because when Ingrid (or anyone similar to her) sees something another person has that they like, she tends to develop a desire for that thing. This belief is seen Ingrid’s social media use through her constant comparison of herself to others, leading to FOMO (the fear of missing out). Anxiety is revealed through this way of thinking; Ingrid eventually thinks she needs to measure up to the lives of others she sees portrayed on social media, which can be an impossible task to fulfill. Ingrid actually tries to take over Taylor’s life and become her, she flirts with her boyfriend and copies every picture she posts. These actions are still seen in real life and are a major contributor to the fake-ness seen on social media because the only side of people we see is the one they want us to see. These people desperately try to hold their notifications and followers close, so that they don’t feel lonely. According to Ingrid Goes West, The Fear of Missing Out affects Ingrid by making her feel like she is not good enough because she is missing out on life experiences without her mother. In the movie, she feels as if she cannot fully experience life unless she makes every moment perfect online. Ingrid wanted her online reputation to look like she was having fun and needed to appear like she has great experiences for the camera. She eventually developed an unneeded anxiety to go to every event – even though this was never explicitly stated in the movie. This type of mental health stress ends up being a battle between social media and social reality, whichever wins will pave the path to fulfillment or destruction.
Right now in today’s society and in Ingrid Goes West, social media is being abused as a maladaptive coping strategy for mental diseases that are often underdiagnosed.

Ingrid’s problem was that she was already bipolar, but her bipolar depression was hidden until the end of the movie where she tries to commit suicide. Ingrid Goes West also explains that the problem of social isolation is downplayed by many older generations grouping millennials together as narcissistic and blaming the world’s problems on technology. This does not help anyone work towards a solution; it just shows how far people will go to shift the blame off of themselves. In the movie it can be inferred that social media is simply the tool being used to blame new problems on, similar to guns being used to blame for a rising death rate. Ingrid wakes up in a hospital after her attempted suicide to her fake/now real boyfriend kissing her from his wheelchair. At this point she opens her eyes and sees all the flowers and presents she received from her suicide video that went viral. This movie never offered a specific solution, but one possible solution that can be pulled out of this movie’s message is to look away from our devices to see who is really there because there are people around; no one is really socially

isolated.
Ingrid Goes West demonstrates to its’ audience the consequence of these mindsets (greed and envy) on social media is the alienation of individuals in an area that was meant to thrive in community.

The anxiety that fast-paced social media creates with social isolation necessitates a reason to take a tech break and de-stress, just like Ingrid had to. Social media is everywhere now, and too much of it can distort our worldview with the constant notifications and 24 hour news channels. This movie was created so that the age range from 15-28, the group of true digital natives can figure out their own way in the world– since birth these millennials have developed skills to learn how to be good citizens in the digital world, something that was not a problem in older generations. Ingrid is a perfect example of the fear of social isolation social media creates for society today. It necessitates breaks every so often, as Ingrid took her break in the hospital; her mind and body needed to relax from the hyper-activity of social media to re-center each other around positivity and real relationships. This problem of social isolation anxiety is so widespread and very likely to follow those affected by it now through their adult years; it needs to be addressed immediately, only after that can a head start on a solution

begin.