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An Actual Life
Twelve or thirteen years ago, my wife and I had the opportunity to tag along as chaperones on a trip with some high school choir students who were competing in a competition of sorts in New York City. One of the evenings, while in the city, all of us went to see Wicked on Broadway. After the play, the students hung around and several of the actors came out, sat on the edge of the stage, and took questions for 20-30 minutes.
One of the actors was Miriam Margolyes who is, perhaps, more famously known as “Professor Sprout” in the Harry Potter movies. She said something that night that has stayed with me and is related to something I’ve been pondering on a bit lately. Ms. Margolyes gave some sage advice to the students about pursuing a career in the arts. She said that they would have to decide if their goal was to be famous or to develop and hone their craft. She talked about how a lot of people are drawn to the arts as a pathway to becoming famous, and she talked to the students about how unlikely it was to actually achieve that goal. But she also talked about the worthiness of pursuing excellence in the arts for its own sake, without regard to fame.
Kephalithos’ recent post on E-Girls has had me ruminating on the accelerating cultural tendency for many to live a predominately virtual existence. Adjacent to that phenomenon is how, for some, social media seems to have altered their entire approach to even the non-virtual parts of their lives. I seem to observe ever more people whose lives are dominated by an overarching calculus regarding social media. These people seem to have stopped pursuing their lives for their own sake, and started performing their lives instead. Or, at least, it appears that way.
I hope I’m wrong. But I wonder how many people are actively doing things because of the impression it will leave on social media rather than because of the intrinsic worthiness or desirability of the thing itself. How many people, in the midst of their lives, are no longer fully engaged in their own pursuits, but are instead secretly anticipating the ‘reactions’ they hope to elicit from their social media friends? As if one’s life is just a reality show, lived for the entertainment of others.
I wonder…
C.S. Lewis alluded to a related phenomenon in his book, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. Eustace, one of the characters in the book, is a young boy who has a great deal yet to learn about life. He’s a selfish, spoiled brat. To illustrate the deficiency in Eustace’s character, Lewis observes that boys like Eustace don’t care much about learning, yet they care a great deal about their grades.
“He always had this notebook with him and kept a record of his marks in it, for though he didn’t care much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks.”
What was important to Eustace was not the actual learning or competence but, rather, the impression he created. He was in it, as it were, for the fame.
Social media has a powerful effect on the thought lives of billions of people. For some portion of them, social media appears to have captured such a significant portion of their mind space that they are now performing Facebook lives rather than pursuing actual lives. Life has been reduced to a never-ending quest for yet another Tweet. (Full disclosure: I signed up for Twitter early on, but it quickly started to feel like I had taken on an unpaid part-time job. I’m now bombarded with e-mails from Twitter telling me, “You’re missed”. LOL – Twitter.)
Some number of unfortunates appear to have been reduced to some degree into making choices, not based on their own interests – or the intrinsic worthiness of the pursuit itself – but based on how it might play online.
Slavery comes in many forms.
Published in General
I think much of this comes from a lack of church or family. In Church, you have friends that you are close and with a close family you have reliable people. Our wealth and our technology has fed into our loneliness and living your life for your facebook page. Facebook and twitter may have accelerated this tendency but they are more of a symptom than a cause.
The social media moguls know the likes are addictive. A year ago, Facebook was considering using them less and less. It would be better for the world’s young people if they did. Unfortunately, that probably won’t happen because the social media companies are addicted to the revenue the likes bring in from their advertisers.
A very wise post. My own metaphor for this is Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, who lives her life unable to see the outside world except by viewing it in a mirror (she’s been placed under a curse, which also, somehow, seems apt). So everything she sees of the reality, and the world and the fantasy that she weaves, both actually in her tapestry and ‘virtually’ in her head about it, isn’t based on anything real, but only on pictures of reality, and as a result, it’s not real either. One day, she’s enchanted with the sound of ‘bold Sir Lancelot’ wandering along the river shore singing (of all things), “Tirra lirra, tirra lirra,” and she can’t resist taking a peek out the actual window, into the actual world. When she does, the curse plays out, she breaks, and she dies.
That’s what I think about when I see young people (and a depressingly larger number, seemingly every day, of codgers) living their lives with their eyes glued to a tiny screen a few inches from their face. It’s particularly depressing to watch them at major life events such as birthdays, weddings, graduations, or even concerts for which they sometimes paid hundreds of dollars for a ticket to attend in person, when I see vast swaths of the audience, and many of the participants, not actually watching what’s going on in real time, with real people, right in front of them, but again, watching things unroll on their tiny screens. Take away those screens, on which they’ve become largely dependent, and it seems many no longer have the life skills to survive, just like the Lady. I wrote a bit about this, from a slightly different POV in this post: Shadow Lands and Cyber Worlds.
Whatever the reason for this depressing and empty state of affairs, it seems to me we need to find a way to change it, if not for the world, at least for ourselves, and the people close to us who are missing out on so much, and who’ve replaced that “so much” with “very little.”
But what would the 653 people who follow me on Twitter do without me? I mean, that makes me a thought leader to .0000019% of the country!
Honestly, I’m only archiving my “wisdom” for my children!
@ejhill – This made me laugh. It reminded me of something that happened in a board meeting once. I did technology startups for about 20 years, and in one board meeting, after our marketing VP had “spun” the marketing story for the board, one of the venture capitalists on the board responded with, “All I hear you saying is that if you define your market narrowly enough, anyone can be the market leader.”
You’ve hit the nail on the head: everyone on social media can be their own thought leader. :)
Seriously, I don’t think social media is worthless of necessity. Much of the toxicity is, I tend to believe, an artifact of the ad-based business model. It creates incentives for very bad behavior on the part of the tech companies which leads them to intentionally and actively prey on the unsuspecting. It’s going to get worse I’m afraid.
@marcin Ideally they would do this, the problem though is rooted in the fundamentals of their business model. An ad-based model nearly requires them to hoover up all the data they can get their hands on and manipulate user reactions. “Likes” and their ilk offer valuable inputs to the sentiment analysis that contributes to maximizing Facebook revenues. Alas.
My television brethren are really good at that.
“Your show is 67th in the Nielsens.”
“We’re the highest rated new drama program on television!”
”Your show only had 200k viewers last week and you debuted with 36k.”
”We’re the fastest growing new show on TV!”
Framing the narrative is a thing.
I’ve heard references to people “performing their lives” rather than “living their lives” for maybe a few years at least, including from those on the GLoP Podcast.
I have gone to many concerts in my life. I like live music! It’s a thrill to be there with the real people that mostly one just hears or sees on a screen. But it is appalling to me to see how many spend the whole concert with their phone up between them and the musicians. How can they enjoy it? I’m clapping and singing along. Is that crummy video you’re taking on your phone really going to be better than the recordings online or on your playlist on the computer?
I take a photo of me at the venue, yes. I take a photo of the people on the stage, yes. Then I put away the phone and just get my ticket’s worth of real music. It is weird to insert the phone between you and the real deals.
Somewhere on the interwebs, there is a glorious shot of a group of people watching the Prince Harry-Meghan Markle procession. Every person but one has their phone out filming the gala. Except one older lady. She stands there drinking it all in with a rapturous expression.
She had a far more excellent experience.
That’s not a bad point, but frankly I wish I had recordings of the music shows I’ve been to. Even the music is different from what you get on the studio recordings. But it might be smarter to bring someone else along to record, while you enjoy. :-)
As a person who pursued the idols of money/career for over 30 years at IBM, there was a lot of “guilty as charged” in the @keithlowery post. Eventually, the truth of ; “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” found me. I am less, he is more.
Whatever your idol — fame, money, “likes”, family, followers, wokeness, etc, you will need to “lose yourself” to “succeed”.
The very secular Nietzsche version; “He who has a why can endure almost any how”.
Pray for Grace to see that Christ is the only eternal “why”.