Marionettes: Losing our Soul To Social
When I first went to Kenya in 2005 I stayed with the Maasai and made friends with a young man named Joseph who I got to teach for a week at a rural school of theology. The Maasai are a warrior tribe that wears bright red and carry clubs and spears as they herd cattle from mountain to savannah. Joseph told me that among the Maasai, people don’t like to have their pictures taken because they believe that when someone takes your photo, they captured a piece of your soul. He insisted I ask before I take a photo of anyone there. I was packing my Kodak digital camera everywhere but did as he said. and shrugged if off as some primitive belief, some antiquated icon of superstitious days.
Joseph, I get it now. Seeing yourself from the outside-in does more than I realized.
The average person is on some form of media over 8 hours a day. We wake up, turn on the news or TV for 1.5 hours, scroll social for 3 hours a day, and finish with 3.5 hours of Netflix or video games when we get home… I’m awake 16 hours, work for 9, that means no life outside producing and consuming and when you’re on social media, you’re being consumed as a marketing product as well.
Calling it Analog Life, I haven’t watched any TV/Streaming/News in 2022 and have all but stopped posting and viewing social media. After the near death experience of being hit by a SUV while cycling last year I began to dream of a life that would be so sacred, time spent so intimately, that I dare not post it in the public square. You can see my posts fall off from there. I set timers on the apps, deleted them from the home screen, then the device, and then cancelled the subscriptions..
I began to sense that I had been curating my experiences as a viewer, a camera operator tracking an avatar, looking for the right angle, the right shot. It is said “to know thyself is the beginning of wisdom,” how can I do that if i’m looking for identity in the acceptance of others?
Walking out of the hospital that night meant I was in the less than 5% of people that survive being hit by a car going over 40MPH. I saw before me a life in which I would dare not waste a moment by posing, smiling, and pretending instead of being, feeling, breathing in that place.
What if I enjoyed a life like a meal that is so savory, in a candlelight ambiance so sacred, that I wouldn’t dare cheapen it with a pose flash of a plastic camera. We never did this before. Life was wonderful we had this crazy rectangle in our hands–this glass barrier between us and living. Now we are observers instead of experiencers of our own lives.
Projecting an idealized version of yourself for laughs and attention begins when we’re young. We like the feeling of being what people want. I see it in my daughters. Acceptance is such a powerful siren’s call. If we’re not careful, we spend our whole lives trying to please at the expense of learning how to be “me”. How do we, like Odysseus’s men plug our ears with wax? We unplug…
Knowing yourself is the beginning of wisdom. Projecting yourself is the beginning of folly.
Consider the cost of posting your every thought. That emotional signal resulting in a post or a scroll is a signal to introspect. Anxious thought–social, Netflix, news… I found out how to break the cycle. Anxious thought– get out my journal–find resolution. After a life of anxiety and depression, I have neither anymore.
In reaching for acceptance as an answer to our anxieties we let fall the most essential acceptance–acceptance through knowledge of ourselves. No one’s acceptance matters more than your own. You have to stop seeking approval to gain that.
We’ve worked so hard to project a media identity that we have become the projections. “Real boys” tirelessly working to become marionettes, our noses long from the lies we’ve told to ourselves. Pinnochio would wag his head.
Like the Maasi, every time I post to social media I realize I’m at risk of giving a piece of my soul away. I measure, I weigh, I wonder if it is really me in what is said. Or am I just saying something so a few likes will reassure me that I am not alone? That I am understood? Rather than taking responsibility for my feelings of aloneness and misunderstanding by facing them and planning the right corrective action.
That thought you have, that moment you shared, is sacred. It's precious. It should be kept, journaled, shared intimately in the quiet company of embodied friends.
Chasing “authentic” in a world of avatars is a game tricky to play. Which marionette can move the most fluidly? Who can catch the light just the right way? It’s a game of pretend, a life wasted on the stage of an auditorium surrounded by majesty, love, loss and wonder. And we’ve been doing it so long we’ve forgotten how live beyond 280 characters or 180 seconds.
Social media, you say, may be a way to build what we now call “life” but it’s not living. We call it influencing but it's just stimulating.
You hear in silence, not in noise. Creativity happens in boredom. We’re losing ourselves for lack of silence and are just rehashing old creativity because we lack the downtime to be truly innovative.
Influencing requires action, more posting is not more action, it's more pretending, more curating, not living.
We are hurtling towards a day when, facing the nursing home wall, our 3D META goggles fail and the weight of our terrible loneliness crashes upon us. It sounds extreme but Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 warned of this day. Our children, our friends, all passed or plugged in and our skin absent of human touch and sunlit day.
What counts in life is what we’ll have at the end of our lives. If it can be taken away, does it really matter?
Do not waste your life projecting life. Unplug. Stop photographing and start living. All that will matter is your spouse, your kids, two to three friends. Will the others on social even know you’ve disappeared? The algorithm replacing you with other stimulants for their day.
Live life, live a moment, each moment, have thoughts, feel feelings too sacred, too deep to share in such 120 character count ways. Don’t take the photo. Take it in, take a breath and listen inward instead.
And ask before you take a photo of me, I’m practicing the Maasai way.