Post #174: Selfie-Centeredness

1 March 2025

     Say it happens to be Valentine’s Day, and you’re headed to a particularly popular and picturesque temple to pay your respects. What will you see but a veritable anthill crawling not with devotees of the Buddha, nor of Lady Aphrodite, but with creatures of a very different description (I narrow my view here, in view of the occasion, to those of conspicuous mating age). In the spirit of loving-kindness, let’s call them lambs, not noxious insects.

     Are the bleating beings perhaps making bold to go out on a date to honor an obscure saint on this “special” day (in fact a very poor substitute for the Roman Lupercalia and, in more recent times, a blatant fraud perpetrated by a third-rate industry, greeting cards, with the connivance of rackets in roses and like peddlers of wretched “romantic” cliches)? What a thought: not only would such an outing be far too emotionally risky, it would also be a case of mistaken priorities, nay of infidelity even: for the day belongs by rights to their most intimate acquaintances—their phones, or more precisely, the cameras that go with them.

     Whatever, just another ageing crank with his tiresome gripes, you may say: what’s so wrong with a little fun among friends? Ah, but notice the nasty undertow here—how not only the temple, but nearly everything else that might be worth going out for (rather than vegetating in a dimly lit cave that shows the screen best) is emptied of all meaning and degraded into a shallow backdrop for an endless series of self-promoting photo-ops. Never mind the devotional or at least contemplative function of the specific place before us, the inspiration to introspection that it was meant and designed for; camera-toting hordes have been defiling sacred sites in this manner for so long already that I has become more or less synonymous with the blessings of mass tourism.

     Alas, the bright and shiny rot brought on by the new generational blight goes much further: everything has become a mere stage-set for messages to the world  about me, myself, and me again, and again, and again. The only remaining reason why the scene is not deprived of its last vestiges of grounding in reality and replaced by something virtual altogether is that doing so would defeat the purpose of boasting noisily about having been places, and making one’s life seem more attractive than it is before the audience in the ether. The pattern is nothing new under the sun; but the noise of it all, not to the ear so much as to the eye, is as unprecedented as it is noisome.

     Yes, yes, I can see how snapshots might also serve, on occasion, a more benign and sociable purpose (once again, this bane has been around for a while, but as usual the devil is in the details, in this case the immeasurably increased intensity): they may help create shared memories, and they can be a way to connect and stay in touch. My mom, for example, keeps asking me for more pictures, which I am reluctant and slow to supply, owing to a longstanding aversion to the damn things. Even so, the request has nothing to do with egocentrism, nor does my grudging compliance, but with love, on both sides. And so it may be with plenty of pictures that are taken in a good-natured atmosphere among friends and loved ones, intended only for their eyes. If affection were truly the point, not affectation, then all other considerations might take a back seat and even the Buddha himself need not object. Good friendship, after all, is not only half the Path, but said to the whole of it (#6, #36).

     Alas, it is only too evident that the vast majority of the wretched selfies in question can boast of no such redeeming virtues. They are not meant to commemorate a special moment among friends, or to share something with mom; they are there, plainly and simply, to show off. (“All eyes on me.” Yikes.) What is more, in nine cases out of ten nothing distinguishes one from another: everyone seems to be striking the same silly poses, mimicking the same asinine attitudes, using the exact same idiotic hand gestures and infantile, pseudo-sexualized moves. The point is evidently not to do something original, heaven forbid, because that might be taking a chance, but to ape, with the safety of numbers and banality, what others have done a gazillion times before. That so unimaginative a strategy can hardly succeed in a crowded market might be faintly tragic if it were not so terribly trivial; as things stand, there is no danger of anything rising to the dignity of the amphitheater here, and what’s at issue remains a question of farce at best. Mindfulness zero, while the most inane egocentrism scores one goal after another, into its own net.

     Is such a circus inevitable in an age where the dual monarchy of the internet and the smartphone reigns supreme? Perhaps it is: but are any of us therefore under any obligation to join the frenzy and clamor for attention along with the great throng of publicity-hungry competitors out there? I think not. The internet remains, despite the inexorable pressures it may exert on all of us, a freeway on which we may drive largely as we wish. We are under no obligation to speed unduly, to honk intemperately, or to flash our headlights without provocation. Such things get done all the time, but that does not make them any less deplorable. Even the drivers of red Ferraris are not above making a display of themselves (beyond the million-dollar splurge itself), as if there were any danger of not being noticed enough. So let us recognize the problem frankly: we live among attention-craving contemporaries in a global economy driven increasingly by the fool’s gold of publicity and not much else. The more we feel the pull of this raging ego-orgy, the readier we should be to acknowledge how much the tawdry carnival atmosphere goes to the head, for winners and losers alike, forever feeding and reinforcing our worst invidious instincts (#173).

   It’s shocking to me how long ago, culturally speaking, 2005 already feels—the year of David Foster Wallace’s commencement address at Kenyon College. Most undergraduates today were not even born then, or only very barely, and neither the name nor the talk are likely to mean much to them. Never mind: I am not writing for them, if for no better reason than that they don’t read (#119). For the rest of us, who still live in some kind of historical space, it’s worth recalling what Mr. Wallace had to say twenty years ago. The tilt towards egocentrism, he pointed out, is a function of how we experience the world: going by what our senses tell us, we are all of us at the very center of the universe. Socialization, interested calculation, and the demands of child-rearing ought to teach us otherwise, with time; but how far we can get with such training remains everywhere a test of maturity and spiritual development in which failures abound as much as successes. Precisely because the currents running in the contrary direction are so overpowering, everything depends—for the sustenance of salutary societies and healthy individuals alike—on finding ways to counter the self-obsessive programming and replace (or at least temper) it with something more in line with our humane, rather than our beastly and banal, potential.

     Hence the conclusion that Mr. Wallace drew about the meaning of his own liberal arts education: “I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means becoming conscious of what you pay attention to and choosing how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life then you will be totally hosed. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head.” Mr. Wallace knew whereof he spoke; he did not shoot himself in the head, but hanged himself by the neck, only three years after his talk.

   The challenges of knowing where to direct your attention are, in principle, nothing new. The Buddha made the call to mindfulness one of the central pillars of his teaching, as did Epictetus and the Stoics, for whom philosophy was about precisely this: knowing how to “make good use of impressions.” Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning), James Stockdale (Courage under Fire), or Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram) have all described this ultimate human liberty—remaining free to choose, if nothing else, one’s orientation towards things, whatever they may be—as the key to mental-moral survival in the most extreme conditions. We have the good fortune, for the most part, not to face life in a concentration camp, a Hanoi torture prison, or an unreformed Indian jail; we only need to keep our heads above water in the great digital delude, but that can be challenge enough.

     For us, as for all human beings, everything is on the line, even if we may not always realize it: our minds and our sanity, our souls no less than our physical lives. The internet itself and even smartphones need not be our enemies: but they are treacherous friends and terrible masters. Everything depends on knowing what to do with them, and what not, which we are rapidly unlearning as the remnants of the epistemological stabilizers we have inherited from a slower, more print-based and reflective culture are wearing out. Trying to swim against the tide, at the height of a perfect storm, may seem a hopeless exercise. But not all that is hopeless must be futile: such is life.

     Now try telling it to the ants on the hill, or the lambs. Good luck!

     (This one goes, with a heartfelt salute, to all duty-bound, disciplined, deep-souled, and diligently well-read youngsters in the world, whoever they may be, and wherever they are hiding.)

PS: The extraordinary double hook whereby practically the entire planet has been internetted, via smartphones, in barely one traditional generation-span of 25 years, would alone suffice for a cognitive upheaval without parallel. Those who did their growing up before this mind-bending transformation (born before 1980 or so), and those who know no other world (born after 2000 or thereabouts), only appear to be inhabiting the same world; they cannot do so in fact, because for the latter, the virtual realm has already become more real and relevant than the physical, which remains, for the pre-digital  minds of the former, largely incomprehensible, bizarre, and disturbing.

     Alas, it is not the great digital shockwaves alone that have transformed, or perhaps deformed, the late-born into something unrecognizable to those still raised under the regime of books. Other factors have been aligning at the same time to force the pace towards the total bratification of mankind. Sharply declining birth rates and continuously rising wealth (thus many more single children, fewer and more valuable offspring in general, and consequently ever more indulgent and over-protective adults hovering around their precious socio-genetic investments) have meant a worldwide experiment with the little emperors that the Chinese learned to dread even at a time when the rod of late-Confucian discipline and post-Maoist deprivation could still be counted on to counter the effect, though only partially and at its own exorbitant human cost.

     More recently, the war in Ukraine furnishes us with the first example in human history of protracted trench warfare in which 18 to 25-year-olds have been deliberately spared (not completely, but to a remarkable extent), while the brunt of the fighting has been borne instead by men already in their thirties and forties. Whether this restraint with respect to the younger cohorts was necessary to secure the acquiescence of their parents (see above), or whether it was to give them a chance to have children themselves (no very promising prospect, the way things are looking), or whether they were found so unserviceable for any serious purpose that making them soldiers in large numbers was out of the question, remains a disputed point.

     That conspicuous procreation was not identified by Veblen (see #173) as a prime strategy to rival conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption in the great arms-race for imputed pecuniary respectability was not an oversight on his part so much as a function of his times. When he wrote, just before 1900, outstanding fecundity remained, as it had been throughout recorded history, the distinguishing mark of poverty-stricken peasants and impecunious urban proletarians, so named, since Roman times, because their primary contribution to the public weal was thought to be the production of bodies.

     With advanced urbanization and the advent of double-career professional couples, however, children ceased to be assets for their parents and became increasingly heavy liabilities. The opportunity cost alone—from income and career prospects forgone through taking time off for the birthing and bringing up of children—skyrocketed; combined with the ever more exorbitant price-tags of fancy schooling, fine housing, high-end dining, elite private tutoring, suitably cosmopolitan vacationing, and the like, the expense of elegant child-rearing (or what passes for it in our day) has kept rising in the course of two or three peacetime generations to such staggering heights that from being little more than the small-arms of invidious combat, large families are now to be found among the heavy artillery in the status-game.

     (While the personal qualities of the familial products may reflect better on their producers than any expense incurred in the manufacturing process, the treacherous fact that children can turn out badly despite the best parental efforts—call it the Commodus effect after Marcus Aurelius’ unworthy heir— while the very reaction to bad parenting can work positive wonders, threatens to spoil the fun of the game, especially when one understands the dynamics of random genetic variance in general, and the brutal logic of reversion to the mean in particular. Thus the contest tends to get pushed, by the tacit consent of the players, to the more easily managed and compared pecuniary standard.)