I don’t know about you, but with the completion of Follow Me, I’m breathing a tremendous sigh of relief

Shortly after she’d made a wedding, I met my neighbor. We chatted about gowns — she’d worn a beautiful, custom-made gown — and I asked her what she planned on doing with it now. Rent it out, save it for her next child’s wedding?

“Oh, I sold it already,” she told me.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I posted it on Instagram and it got sold right away.”

I was dumbstruck. I knew there was a world out there that I wasn’t part of, but I’d never realized how immediate the reach was within our own community.

I learned over time. Not by joining — I have no social media access and my flip phone hardly cooperates with sending a simple text message — but by living in the 21st century and picking up on the reality. Every ad includes an Instagram handle, and many clients I worked with requested content for their social media feeds.

(I also learned new definitions for old words: handle, feed, tag, share, like, follow. You don’t have to open an Instagram account to learn all this, you can simply sit down in your sheitelmacher’s chair and get a complete education.)

At one point, I was involved in a marketing project and hired a girl to set up some social media accounts. That venture introduced me to yet more of the technical makings of this unfamiliar world. I learned about influencers and stories, hashtags and reels. If the girl found my ignorance stunning, she politely kept it to herself, answering my green questions and continuing to do what she was hired to do.

Throughout all this, I developed a fascination for this foreign habitat. Who were the people who followed, and who were the people they followed? How much of this existence was straightforward — and how much an illusion? How did a poster turn into an idol — and what was it like to live with thousands of virtual eyes on your back?