The summarized life
For some life is becoming a performance.
Be present for life or it passes you by; control your use of immersive technology; those who live to harvest dopamine are not living at all.
I came across a quote I liked from Stoic Philosophy:1
This is a great way to think of it. Summarizing a life. It captures the idea we are artificially compressing our lives rather than living them.
Many are dismissive of this idea. Where is the harm in a quick photo or video? It’s not like anyone is stopping others enjoying themselves.
But this summarization mentality is really a sequence of ever decreasing circles that starts with an interruption but may culminate in a life spent chasing thrills.
As dramatic as this sounds, many people are concerned about their phone use and its effect on their lives.
A downward spiral
Interruption is the initial step.
A phone or device is used to capture some aspect of an experience. A concert, a sunset, a child’s first steps.
This is normal. It is certainly not new. Since the advent of photography people have attempted to preserve moments for posterity.
But they are still interruptions. The event is not seen through naturally.
Stopping to record introduces distance and this disrupts the flow needed to fully enjoy something.
Many will later share the moment with friends, which usually means broadcasting it on social media. This attracts attention. Likes, follows, comments.
Everyone likes being liked.
This can create a feedback loop, a little dopamine hit that can become addictive. A thumbs up, even from strangers can be enough.
Likes are then expected. We can become depressed when content is added and gets no recognition from followers.
Negative reinforcement makes them try harder next time. The interruptions then have a new energy behind them.
Events can even become staged just to produce the eventual videos and images needed to keep the likes coming. The carefully posed night out. The exotic holiday. The new outfit.
The addicted can find themselves manufacturing a fake life to harvest social approval. They live to impress others.
The polite term for this is a curated life.
The less polite term is digital narcissism. A projected facsimile of a life is used to seek social approval and the fleeting pleasure it generates.
For many in this trap their identity can become enmeshed in the fake image presented to the world and the mental rewards it delivers.
Mood can become affected by others interacting with this fake online profile while the real person remains safely hidden. It can become a convenient way to attain the mental highs without the risk of social activity itself. A win-win situation, especially for the socially anxious or those with low self-esteem.
Needless to say life is not a one-way street as the very online imagine. We must always pay the cost for living since nothing is free.
The digital narcissists pay for the abuse of their reward centres. The hollow lives, the lack of spontaneity, an inability to cope with boredom. Reality itself can be pushed away, at least for a while, but it asserts itself eventually.
Easy prey
Does any of this matter? Isn’t this just a concern for the influencer types?
Not really. Plenty of ordinary people find their reward mechanisms can become distorted in this way.
They may never get to the extremes of staging events just for likes or posting filtered images to fish for compliments. But a version of it can creep into our lives and affect us.
An edited online projection runs the risk of making the mundane reality of our day-to-day existence look boring by comparison.
Going to work, doing the dishes, changing bedclothes. A lot of life is uneventful necessity. None of it looks like a photo opportunity since for most of us that would look like bad hair, excess body fat and a pile of ironing.
It would surely be much better to be well dressed at a concert or lying on a beach drinking cocktails.
Problematic device usage is certainly backed up by research. In the US, polls show up to 60 percent of adults admit to some form of phone addiction. Globally it is just shy of 50 percent.
The average American checks their phone a whopping 144 times per day. Other developed nations have similar numbers.
But it is more than just phone checking, it is the compulsive behaviours that emerge. Using the device to escape boredom or being alone with their thoughts. Becoming anxious when separated from the phone. Persistent phone use even when causing obvious issues such as sleep deprivation, impaired concentration and social withdrawal.
These effects are routinely reported and observed, and the numbers are growing every day. Many are demonstrably addicted to devices. We see it all around us.
But for those whose addiction extends to posting online for approval there is something destructive and ancient lurking underneath. The need for external validation.
It is this dependency on others bolstering our sense of self that is dangerous. It is a sign some lack the capacity to generate self-worth. This makes them easy prey to anyone or anything that promises validation, whether it is a friend liking a photo or a well-funded cause offering meaning.
The explosion in support for progressive movements is one consequence of this. In the last few decades we have witnessed Western nations embrace suicidal policies often endorsed by only a minority of people and yet with the appearance of great popularity.
Dangerous ideas around climate and the environment that will impoverish us. Open borders and enabling the movement of millions to our homelands with financial and civil upheaval almost guaranteed.
Multiple attacks on traditions like gender roles or the innocence of childhood, all sacrificed to seek popularity and avoid social exclusion.
Many of these draw considerable support online; they are often the latest thing people mindlessly endorse. Why not? To the unthinking it is just another piece of content to garner likes. A foreign flag or a rainbow graphic are low-risk ways to demonstrate one’s social worth. The cost is overlooked, an irrelevance to the distracted.
Those who look outward for approval inevitably relinquish personal agency, so they make excellent cannon fodder for movements seeking foot soldiers to amend society in ways many of us object to. Creating the illusion of support has never been easier thanks to an army of distracted addicts on the search for their next hit.
It is often overlooked that narcissists, the master manipulators, are relatively easy to manipulate themselves as they cannot generate self-worth internally. It is always external. Offer a semblance of admiration or praise and you have them.
What then for those lost to digital narcissism? There certainly seems to be a correlation between the social media addicted and progressive left obsessions. It is hard to miss as many causes seem manufactured.
Much of the material posted is driven by the need to be liked, to be socially endorsed by strangers. And a great deal of this begins with those innocent interruptions to events shared online in the search for quick meaning. Such are the dangers of turning life into content.
A life worth living
There are many ways to destroy our lives. But modern technology provides a subtle way of eroding our capacity to live in the moment while convincing us we are preserving some important aspect of it.
We can expect this only to accelerate as the tech-bro elite tighten their grip with ever more immersive devices and content.
The feelies cannot be far away.
Avoiding this fate may be as simple as heeding the Stoic advice above. Stop disrupting your life and learn to live without the need to showcase it for likes.
In this way we can downgrade our powerful devices to occasional tools we make use of but not as filters for life itself.
The sequence we witness can be a steep descent, from interrupting events to eventually performing like a dancing monkey, all driven by a need to harvest approval or popularity. A sad attempt to hack our ancient reward mechanisms and chase feelings or connection, all of it managed through a screen. By necessity this is a deep reduction in what life ought to be, more than a process of summarization and akin to a reduced experience intentionally compressed for the entertainment of others.
Conversely, the non-summarized life is too busy living to offer up sacrifices to the gods of dopamine. As with much of the teachings of the Stoics, it makes immediate sense but is more challenging to implement. Distraction is always tempting, especially in our ever more complex lives, and we are hardwired to seek out the rewards even as they destroy us.
But the uninterrupted life is the only one worth living. Taking steps to fully immerse in it begins with refusing to succumb to the easy virtues of fast likes and shallow connections. We must go deep to go far. Which means the addicted have to retrain themselves to actually live.
You’ll miss your life if you’re always summarizing it. Take fewer pictures. Don’t turn every moment into content. Stay in the conversation. Let the meal be just a meal. Train yourself to be in the moment. Train yourself to actually live.
Well put, and it can’t be said often enough. I hope people are listening. My mother had one of those “thought for the day” calendars which are pretty trite, but one stuck with me. “We wouldn’t worry so much about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.”
“There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real.”
G. K. Chesterton - Chaucer (Collected Works) 1932
And that light will never be found nor experienced in the displacement of reality with simulacra.