The Appearance of Living
I sit on a rocky hill. The dried moss of late summer adorns the firm surface beneath me, and it subtly scratches my skin. I pick up a twig and fiddle with it, while my gaze wanders over the trees and the sea and takes in the large and minuscule details of the world around me. The sun dances across the water, and my body feels more here, somehow. I didn’t know I wasn’t here, but wow, now I am here.
I sit on my couch, covered in dog hair. (I’m always covered in dog hair). Light from my phone emanates towards my face, while my gaze narrows to the content I consume. I scroll, I laugh, I cringe, I love, I hate. I respond to a text message, I check an email. I look at eight photos of myself, taken in quick succession of one another, and decide which subtle variation is worth posting. Too bad, I don’t like any of them. I am more connected to the world, and yet I am no longer here.
I am there, in the place where living becomes performance.
Philosopher Guy Debord writes that modern society has turned life into product. Everything is marketable, and therefore able to be bought. Our relationships become consumptive. Our hobbies become performative. Even our faiths, our politics, and our values become about appearance. It all becomes an appeal to the world around us that says “look at me, I’m achieving the dream” while every advertisement ensures we know we are missing the next best thing.
To quote him directly, “just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
Life is less about living, and more about the appearance of living.
When I began to consider deleting social media, I realized how subtly this idea has wormed its way into my psyche. I started to question. What is my life if it is not shared? What is the point of taking photos if they sit in my camera roll? Why is it that life suddenly doesn’t feel real if it is not edited and posted in a laissez-faire way, where I ensure it looks like I don’t care that much but deep down, I do?
I began to face the ugly in myself. I compared and contrasted the ways the unhealthy parts of me show up in social media with the ways the healthy parts of me do. I recognized how compulsive social media can become, and began to pay deep attention to the way it makes me feel in my body. I noticed the slight constriction in my chest, and the ache in my stomach, and the hollow emptiness I felt after consuming the lives of people I love and people I don’t know.
I felt that dopamine deficit, big time.
Dopamine, a “feel-good” neurotransmitter involved in our experience of pleasure, is heavily involved in social media use. Every like, DM, and comment creates a hit of dopamine, a reward that is pleasurable. Scrolling until we find a video or post that is funny or interesting to us gives another hit, too. The very fact that these dopamine hits are unpredictable makes them even more powerful, and creates a pleasure high.
And, as Anna Lembke states, “repeated exposure to the same or similar stimuli ultimately creates a chronic dopamine-deficit state, wherein we’re less able to experience pleasure.”
Our brains essentially adapt to the high level of dopamine we get from social media, which means everything else in life starts to feel a little lacklustre. We don’t get the same reward from sharing a photo of our travels with a friend, for example; it needs to be shown to a few hundred (or thousand, if you’ve got a following) people to get that sense of pleasure.
And, let me be clear, this isn’t the case for everyone. Some people are able to use social media without becoming addicted to it or noticing any deficits it brings to their lives. There is much good that comes out of social media. I’m disinterested in leading a mass exodus from these places, because I don’t think that fairly represents the complexity of the role social media plays in our world.
But I am interested in a shift towards the living of life, as opposed to the appearing of it. I am interested in paying attention to my attention, and giving it to the people and resources I think are worthy of it. I am interested in being bored, for I want to find pleasure in the mundane things of life. I am interested in being here, truly, with my feet on the ground. I am interested in writing words that are read by my mom (who will text me immediately after reading them) and the few of you who are here.
I want these small (by our culture’s standards) things to be enough.
To finish, here’s another quote from Guy Debord:
"Revolution is not 'showing' life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.”
Living, for real, is a worthy act of protest. Vive la révolution!