You’re a real star, that is. Unpredictable, unscriptable, sometimes shining, sometimes imploding, forever existing.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s start with what happened in the world during the last 20 years. The rise of an astounding tech invention, the Internet, turned information into a commodity. On top of it, a new economy, the “attention economy” was rapidly built.
In just 2 decades, we made it so everybody can be now his own broadcaster, everybody can project whatever image of himself sees fit. And indeed, almost everybody does this broadcasting, incessantly. We call it “social media”, but it really is just an amplifier of our artificially crafted image, beamed 24×7 across the world wide web.
All that Instagram feed filled with “too beautiful to be true” influencers, all those fascinating pictures of exotic places, all those trainings that you’re so incredibly lucky to be the first to learn about, all this is just an enormous movie, made out of individual scripts, isolated characters trying to project and impose a valuable image on top of a normal human being, in an endless race to get your attention.
Because this is all that’s happening: all this effort is to capture attention, the same way a good movie drags us into its story. People became the screenwriters, producers and actors of a relentless self-directed movie, scattered across devices and timelines. You’re not a person anymore, you’re a brand, you’re a character.
And if you choose this as a “profession”, if you keep doing this for a few years, then whatever traces of a normal personality you may have had at the beginning of this, are now lost. You are literally scripting and living according to your own ideas about how your life should look like. You’re devoid of any authentic traits that you possessed before.
The race to identify ourselves with our own ideas about who we are, and who are we projecting onto others, made us slaves to these artificial, non-existent concepts. We became anxious when we’re not posting about it, aggressive in protecting it, attached to the point of identification to something that’s just pixels on a screen.
Life is not a movie.
Life is unpredictable, sad, joyful, terrifying, exhilarating, it’s all of this and more. Living means riding these waves, not trying to flatten the ocean, turning it into the movie set in your head. That character that you’re projecting, that image, that sequence of intelligent, charming and charismatic posts, is not you. Stop living like that. You’re not a movie star.
You’re a real star, that is. Unpredictable, unscriptable, sometimes shining, sometimes imploding, forever existing.
Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash
