One of the strangest things about our current moment--in addition to the (hopefully permanent) dissolution of Envy Culture--is the struggle some of us are having not flexing.
I think we can all feel that the time isn't right to be bragging about anything, but at the same time, it's how we accomplish so much.
Flexing has become a way we flesh out our identity, how we promote our businesses, and one of the main reasons we even bother keeping up with social media.
A friend and I were talking recently about a celebrity apology (there are so many these days) that included a mention of how many Instagram followers the person has.
"Why would they bring that up," my friend asked.
I said that for some people it must be like speaking a language, but the better analogy might be like speaking a language and being told you can't say thirty percent of the words available to you from that point on.
Either you start watching what you say, or you just keep putting your foot in your mouth at a time when ohmygodgetthatfootoutofyourmouth.
We're now forced to express ourselves in ways that are not necessarily self-deprecating, but sensitive to the fact that flexing now looks...kind of tacky.
Before you could rationalize it away by making it sound inspirational, centered on loving yourself, being proud of your accomplishments, etc, but if that were all true--wouldn't we still be doing it?
People are still getting engaged, having kids, and even experiencing some triumphs during this time, but it feels inappropriate to talk about that now in a way it didn't before, doesn't it?
Like I said last week when I wrote about not missing FOMO, I also don't miss the constant competition that existed on social media. If you head over to Twitter, you can find eight thousand gay men all freaking out about the fact that they're not going to have six packs to photograph in exchange for validation in a few months, and the thought that nobody else is either doesn't seem to make them feel any better.
We all have our currency--or we did. The circumstances remain terrible, but the liberation from needing to worry about how you're doing versus how someone else is doing is a development I welcome. I find myself genuinely wanting everybody to be okay in a way that's more sincere than I think I've ever felt before--at least in a way that's this expansive.
I also see people holding onto that expired currency, devastated because they felt like when the lights went out, they had more than everybody else.
We're all slowly getting on the "capitalism is the devil" train that used to be fringe, but we're still not acknowledging all the other equity gaps we've created when it comes to how we interact with each other, like how we use how we look to place ourselves on some sort of imaginary ladder knowing full well that ladder is rickety af. I've seen people make clever quips on Twitter about those who play Animal Crossing as if Twitter and Instagram aren't the biggest video game ever created--made up of imaginary people making imaginary friends who are somehow a distant connection to an actual human being.
I hope we can start to move away from all that, I really do.
As long as we're going to be at rock bottom for awhile, we might as well start thinking about who we want to be when all this is over.
Comments
Post a Comment