Of Course We Stalk You
Social Media & Surveillance: Part 1
Phil McAuliffe
Every few years, a journalist takes special interest in the high school I attended.
They embed themselves in our community for a few days, talk to students and administrators and the occasional brave parent, and publish something that confirms what everyone already suspects: that the expectations are crushing! The stress is unbearable! This has to stop! The pieces are always a little breathless.
And the students and alumni—we read them and shrug.
They're not wrong, the journalists. The expectations are crushing. But we didn't have anything to compare it to. Our rival school is our sister school, an institution that mirrors us in its mercilessness. And the rest of the academic landscape didn't really exist to us. This was just what school was.
And we were fine, mostly. Until we weren't. The pressure builds up over time and needs to go somewhere eventually—we just tried our best to implode in a way that didn't show.
In my case, the stress manifested in my body. I was severely underweight in high school. I rarely finished my lunches. I drank an amount of caffeine that I now understand to be genuinely alarming, just to stay vertical through a courseload and an activity schedule that left no margin for anything as inconvenient as rest. I moved through my days in a fog, running on nothing, performing at levels that grown adults would find taxing. I don't know how I did it. I don't know how any of us did it. We called it normal because everyone around us was doing the same thing.
The environment we were in produced this.
Our parents are engineers, surgeons, and big law partners. They're quantitative traders and C-suite executives at investment banks and companies whose names you would recognize. They're people who built their careers on precision and rigor and an intimate familiarity with success through achievement. And I don't think they set out to transfer the weight of all their accomplishments onto us, but we inherited a hunger from them regardless. We grew up orientated toward measurement and ranking and this constant awareness of where we stood relative to everyone else in the room. And we built a community in which excellence was expected, and success was the only acceptable outcome.
For school-aged students, this meant one thing: an all-consuming focus on college admissions. It was widely regarded as the first real performance review, and everything before it—every grade, every leadership position, every extracurricular activity—was a line on our resumes leading up to it.
The competition had become barely liveable—students were being hospitalized, and families were moving their children to different schools.
The teachers, overwhelmed by the amount of pushback they received from students and parents alike, lost their passion once they were tenured. The guidance counselors steered students away from challenging classes—sometimes, it seemed, with pleasure.
And every time the school retreated, the community filled the vacuum. Standardized test prep. Private tutors. Admissions consultants. They were all hired quietly and never discussed—because if you found an edge, you kept it to yourself. The institution kept pulling back and the parents kept stepping in, because the stakes were too high and the resources were there and nobody was going to let their child fall behind just because the school had given up.
The administration, to their credit, had caught wind of the pressure that we were putting ourselves under long ago and made a few attempts at improvement. They removed plus and minus grades because students were fighting ferociously over a single notch on a letter. They also stopped publishing class rankings to protect our student body's mental health.
But we are relentless. And when the official leaderboard disappeared, someone built a private one.
There was a boy who kept a spreadsheet of everyone he perceived as a "threat" in our graduating class. He catalogued their extra-curricular activities, their GPA estimates, and their application targets. Nobody thought this was particularly alarming. People thought he was a little much, the way you might think someone is a little much for color-coding their planner, but the underlying behavior—monitoring your peers, treating other people's achievements as data points in your own calculation—was completely unremarkable to us.
I only realize now how absurd it all was. Unsurprising, given the context, but still absurd.
I wonder if I made it onto the sheet.
I excelled in leadership. My teammates kept voting me in, repeatedly, across every activity I seriously participated in. I was good at it, and the people doing the work alongside me knew that.
Their parents, however, were far less enthusiastic.
A normal Tuesday night occasionally involved a peer's parent yelling in my face about how I should give up my leadership positions so their child could have them instead. I always kept my composure in these situations. Something about watching a grown adult throw a temper tantrum over a teenage girl's accomplishments had a way of putting things in perspective.
At a computing competition, a girl slightly older than me—someone I had just beaten for an award—swaggered to me and said, in front of everyone: I'm still better than you.
I said nothing. I never did. I just watched what the pressure did to the people around me and made a decision, every time, not to let it do that to me.
When I got to college, her profile picture started appearing in my "Who's viewed your profile" tab on LinkedIn every few days. I blocked her eventually. I wasn't angry. I felt pity. The competition she was still running only ever had one participant.
I graduated. I left. I assumed the competition dissolved when we dispersed.
But I was wrong about this. It's just that I couldn't see it anymore.
Our student council rented out a golf club for a high school reunion sometime back.
It had been years since I'd seen most of these people. We had scattered and then, somehow, most of us had reconverged on New York City—working in finance and law and tech and healthcare, already accumulating the kinds of credentials that would have made our high school selves feel vindicated. Many of us have Ivy League degrees. We work at prestigious firms. We're in med school. We had all, by every external measure, done the thing.
And we were standing in a golf club, exchanging pleasantries with people we hadn't spoken to in years. Hi! Oh my god, you look amazing! How are you? It's been so long!
The braces and bad haircuts were gone. The awkward phases had resolved themselves into something accomplished and polished. But underneath all of it was the strange intimacy of people who knew each other before any of this existed—before the degrees and the firms and the curated LinkedIn headshots. We knew each other when we were unfinished.
Most of us decided we could not get through this event sober.
I was drinking. A boy—I'll call him Liam—was not. Liam already has a bachelor's degree from an Ivy League institution and is an MD-PhD candidate at another. We had gone on very different paths after high school, and I had not spoken to him in years.
And in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable conversation between the two of us, he told me, very casually, that he had been stalking me. There was no apparent embarrassment. Nothing in his inflection to indicate that he was ashamed.
I found it hilarious.
People I've met since leaving home are sometimes baffled by the stories about my upbringing—the spreadsheets, the parents, the ambient intensity of all of it. Liam is who I bring up now when I need to make it real for someone. He is a person brilliant enough to be pursuing two Ivy League degrees simultaneously, who will also just tell you, unprompted, that he has been tracking your career for years. He is a perfect encapsulation of what we are.
Then other old friends and peers in the peripheries of now-disbanded friend groups joined the conversation. And they admitted to the same thing in their drunken states.
Of course we stalk you, they said, casually. Like it was the most natural thing in the world—which, I was realizing, standing there in the golf club, it was. They had been tracking my career moves and my relationship status. They had tracked the trajectories of the people I dated. There were group chats. There were theories about where I'd end up, what move I'd make next.
I had been a person of interest for years.
I was flattered in the way you are flattered when something confirms a paranoia you had mostly talked yourself out of. These were people I hadn't spoken to in years—no ongoing relationship, no recent contact. And they knew things about me, had discussed me, theorized about me, followed me, in complete silence, without ever once reaching out.
The spreadsheet boy had just found a new medium.
I've thought about that night a lot since. What compels a room full of wildly successful people to spend years quietly monitoring someone they could have simply called?
I think it's that the competition never actually ended.
In high school, there were GPAs and admissions results and captaincies to organize the anxiety around. You knew where you stood because the institution told you. And when that scaffolding disappeared, the anxiety didn't suddenly disappear with it—it just lost its measuring stick. And then social media handed one back.
You don't have to reach out now. You don't have to admit that you care how someone turned out. You can just watch, silently.
Social media has made the surveillance instinct frictionless.
This is self-preservation dressed up as curiosity. It is vanity with an interface. It's a way of running the old numbers without admitting you're still keeping score.
What baffles me is that we are not struggling people grasping for reassurance. We are, just a few years out of high school, already in rooms with finance titans and tech billionaires and researchers whose work shapes the world. Our network alone—the doors that open, the calls that get returned—is staggering. We grew up together. We survived the same things together. That means something.
And yet, we are still going home and opening each other's Instagram pages to check if we're still winning.
It is self-indulgent. It is small. And it is beneath every single one of us.