Metabolise Now
What is happening when people start to view experiences in their own lives as content opportunities for social media? Our ability to be “lost in the moment” is replaced by trying to capture the aesthetic or feeling of being lost in the moment within a video or image. The result is that we are watching the events in our lives very closely whilst being largely unaware of the true motive for doing so. Behaving in this way consciously would be truly absurd and entirely defeat the purpose of doing it in the first place (the goal being happiness in the broadest sense). This level of commodification of the individual regarding social media has to involve the individual lying to themselves. There must be a sufficient degree of wilful unconscious ignorance to lessen life at the expense of documenting and publishing a better artificial alternative. This degree of commodification is so intense because the individual has morphed into the product, and through performative acts of documenting an idealised life, they are essentially marketing themselves to themselves. It is a deeply neurotic and schizophrenic way to live and is a key reason social media makes people unhappy.
The individual is stuck in a feedback loop where the conscious mind essentially serves a dream governed by the unconscious mind in which we are both the actor and the audience. The idea that social media is social is an illusion. The fundamental controlling mechanism occurs as millions of individuals solipsistically present an idealised version of themselves to themselves that deep down they know is artificial. That intense unconscious fire of self-denial finds a host in an imagined audience – the other followers, the people followed, the likes, the comments. Much of which is automated by social media algorithms or third-party apps or by the same psychological process occurring in other people behaving in the same way.
Social media is not the inherent cause because social media is a medium of consumer capitalism. It is the combination of the technology and its cultural context that makes it such a potent form of commodification. The medium has embedded so deeply into our behaviour and culture that social media is now a state of mind rather than something we log in to. It has gained primacy in our lives - we are on social media in our heads all the time. The commodification of the individual started well before social media, but nothing invites a simulation of life as explicitly as social media does. Commodification began with marketing but took on a new life in the nineties when the idea of PR evolved into presenting an aspiration and set of values for life over the function of the products themselves. Social media is an expression of that same commodification of values but without separating the brand and the consumer - they are all part of the marketing process. It is a process that takes place on the inside of our heads because we are now the product, marketing ourselves to ourselves, with any search for meaning taking place within an entirely illusory platform that presents only the aesthetic of meaning.
That the world on social media is more real to us than real life is a weird concept that almost nobody would agree with when considering it consciously. Yet what we think or say about a topic and how we behave in relation to a topic are often at odds. This is especially true when our motives and actions are influenced by a system that continually commodifies what it means to be human whilst promoting a thoroughly shallow individualistic ideology. That ideology is one of self-actualisation, transcendence, enlightenment, power. There are a myriad of motives, all of which are fundamental human drives – it must be worth remembering that people who engage deeply with social media suffer psychologically as a result. However, an arena that encourages people to view themselves unconsciously as both a PR consultant and product will inherently adopt a flavour of consumer capitalism. The result is a metabolisation of material in pursuit of the aesthetic of value and meaning, which instantly pollutes the integrity of the end goal. The futility of all this is not without a certain tragic component, characterised mainly through the waste of time and effort.
In the age of individualism and consumer capitalism, the individual cannot truly separate a cause from what it says about their identity. Events in life are tools of self-actualisation first – a sort of currency. It is important to understand that this psychological process expresses itself to different degrees in different people. The behavioural pattern, as dystopian as it sounds when laid out explicitly, passes through the majority of our lives subtly, manifesting maybe as a moment of gentle malaise, casual hopelessness or quiet despair. If we are to live lives with more meaning and happiness, we must choose myths that are not futile in their pursuit.