Cover Me

For several years, I have been having conversations on how the line between fantasy and reality is increasingly blurring, where people will start relying on technology to cover their flaws. This is not a new conversation perhaps, but it is one for which many people ridiculed me, as I described scenarios where people would create avatars of themselves, and augmenting reality so that they only saw what they wanted to see, and appeared as they want to appear to others.

Doesn't seem so farfetched now, does it?

In fact, a few months ago one of my colleagues uses a filter app in Teams to give herself makeup and fuller eyelashes, smooth her skin and narrow her face slightly. Other than occasionally her eyelashes floating over her glasses, it does a pretty good job. However, what I was more interested in was how doing this would affect her over time, and it is tipping toward being quite profound.

For instance, she goes into the office less than she did earlier, because it takes more time and effort to get ready and it is far easier just to brush the hair and put on a shirt, not evening bothering with any makeup. This sounds healthy, doesn't it? Well, until you extrapolate that behavior out into all areas of life, where "putting in effort" is just too much work, when there is a workaround instead.

I have equated it to the people who buy "slimming" clothing, which in itself isn't a bad strategy. However, when it replaces actually looking after oneself, it means that it becomes a cover that keeps spreading in order to hide a growing list of flaws. Black is slimming, whether it be on a person with a BMI of 60, or one with a BMI of 10.

But, it isn't perhaps the looks that are the major issue I have with these things, it is the effects it has on our emotions and our self-esteem. Scan a few news pages and you will quickly find a story of an influencer who "tragically died" from suicide. Yes, it is tragic, but not just because a single person killed themselves, but because the conditions that facilitate it are systemic. The influencers are dropping like flies it seems, and I think it is because there is such a difference between what they claim to be, and the reality of their lives, or what they see in the mirror when they look at their reflection.

When we become used to living in a fantasy world, not only does life become dull and plain, but it also seems much harder, because to have something in reality, it takes energy, effort, time, patience, skill and all the other factors. It is like the taste of the sweetest strawberry in comparison to an artificially sweetened cola. The strawberry is now tart, perhaps even sour.

There is no "filter" for reality, but we are continually creating tools that allow us to augment reality on the go, so we don't have to live our lives as who we are, we can pretend to be anyone. And just like people who see things and hear voices, we are both mixing our realities in a way our brain is unable to process and resolve the conflicts, and splitting our personalities across multiple identities, losing ourselves in the process.

What I believe a lot of people aren't considering is that as we expand our use of tools to make ourselves feel and appear better, is they aren't actually getting better. If anything, we are getting worse. The more we are able to cover what we perceive as flaws, the more we will try and cover. But, the important part here is not what we cover, but what we will see as a flaw, as we become increasingly sensitive, turning small blemishes into big, molehills into mountains.

And, that is what at least I am seeing in the younger generations clearly, but it is also appearing in older people too, like my colleague on Teams. We are becoming hypersensitive, more fragile, and far less capable to deal with the cracks in life before we crack ourselves. And, the pressure it takes to cause a fracture, is lessening.

Stoicism is dead, not because it is no longer relevant, but because we condition ourselves to be its antithesis. Rather than robust or hopefully antifragile, we are making ourselves weak and brittle, So when reality inevitably shows its true colors from behind the fantasy, we crumble in its face.

All the digital platitudes, the beliefs, the movements, the emojis and avatars that we choose to represent how we look and feel, are meaningless. We can design our perfect digital persona, but when the program fails and the analog life shows through, we glimpse what we have become, and we might not be able to processes it. So what do we do?

Cover me a little more.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]