I just wished people would stop chasing illusions in favor of what’s real! I cringe every time I post too, thank you for putting words to this experience
This makes me think of a passage from John Berger's book Ways of Seeing:
“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
Of course, Berger wrote that in the '70s, long before social media exacerbated the issue and made us all into passive consumers of each other as content. I'm of a generation (X, to be specific) that came of age prior to the development of social media, so I haven't experienced what it's like to develop selfhood in a fully mediated environment that enables such scrutiny. I did find the book Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara to be a keenly insightful read, though: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/745381/searches-by-vauhini-vara/
I just wished people would stop chasing illusions in favor of what’s real! I cringe every time I post too, thank you for putting words to this experience
“i don’t want you to covet my life, i just want it to mean something to you.” Indeed!
This makes me think of a passage from John Berger's book Ways of Seeing:
“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
Of course, Berger wrote that in the '70s, long before social media exacerbated the issue and made us all into passive consumers of each other as content. I'm of a generation (X, to be specific) that came of age prior to the development of social media, so I haven't experienced what it's like to develop selfhood in a fully mediated environment that enables such scrutiny. I did find the book Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara to be a keenly insightful read, though: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/745381/searches-by-vauhini-vara/