Mirror Images

It’s been fashionable for a while to claim that agriculture is one of our biggest mistakes. Jared Diamond has claimed this, and so has Yuval Harari. I’ve never been fond of the hypothesis, for all the reasons laid out in great detail by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

Instead, I think we can count the mirror one of our worst inventions. By extension, the camera too.

That’s because for all their good uses, mirrors and cameras show us what we look like, and that’s caused all kinds of internal strife for humanity.

We never look like we think we do, or like we think we should. I, for one, can assure you that no part of my interior life thinks of “me” as a middle-aged potato with enough eye baggage to fill an airport. But objectively, that’s what’s in the mirror.

Look in a mirror and one thing’s sure; what we see is not who we are.

Richard Bach

It was the same even when I was younger, however. I would always be startled to catch sight of myself in the mirror because what I saw somehow didn’t match how I felt. I couldn’t tell you what the disconnect was, specifically. The nose? My height? Definitely those, but also … all of it. The whole package. None of it looked like “me.”

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

Pablo Picasso

At some point, unconsciously, I accepted that interior me would never align with exterior me, and I poured my energies into my family and my work. As I got older, I consciously realized that I wanted people to focus on what I had to say, rather than how I looked.

That’s not to say I don’t occasionally get jealous when I see someone who looks extraordinarily “well put together.” I do. Or that I’m not self-conscious about, and frustrated with, my weight, which remains stubbornly high in spite of a decent diet and plenty of workouts. It’s just that I don’t expend a lot of energy worrying about things I know I can’t change.

Some of that does come with age. One of the (few?) benefits of being an adult is that you get a wee bit more comfortable with yourself and less worried about what society thinks of you.

But most of it has to do with being aware of, and yet deliberately ignoring the media.

It was bad when I was a girl, but it’s so, so much worse now. All I had to contend with were magazines, TV and the movies, each of which was telling me I was too fat, too thin, that my hair was too straight, or too wavy… it was an endless list. And of course I had to contend with my classmates, all of whom absorbed all of that and fretted amongst themselves about it.

Now, we have normalized not only the selfie but being our own paparazzi. We post images of our food, our homes, our clothes, our bodies. We post pictures of ourselves looking at ourselves in the bathroom mirror! The bathroom, once a bastion of privacy. As if that weren’t enough, we make videos of ourselves too.

We routinely not only put ourselves on display, but submit ourselves to the court of public opinion.

Judge this, we say. Judge me.

Because all of these platforms we’ve been hooked into using all allow other people to comment on what we post, so now, kids don’t have to just worry about their classmates’ opinions but what strangers on the other side of the planet think of them.

Performing. For strangers. For free.

Which then, of course, becomes a self-reinforcing spiral of negativity. Because all those other people out there are suffering from their own insecurities, and will punch down, hard, to get the tiniest bit of relief from that.

Even if we’re not actively putting ourselves up on display, we’re bombarded with images and videos of other people doing so.

All hail The Algorithm ^(TM).

I paused to look at one reel last week, because it was of a fitness instructor showing the correct technique for a kettlebell exercise, and I like using kettlebells. Ever since then, my feed has been stuffed full of not just fitness instructors (which is at least somewhat useful) but guys documenting their transformation from slightly out of shape to ripped. You just know their feeds are full of the same, and that they’ll be worrying about how they compare. Am I bulked up enough? Cut enough? Vascular enough?

Mirrors reflecting into mirrors reflecting into mirrors. With all the image distortion that implies. We’ve allowed a system to evolve that creates, encourages, and perpetuates that distortion.

Why? There’s a whole lot of money to be made when you feel really bad about yourself.

In business, there’s a saying that suggests that the pathway to riches is to “find a need, and fill it.” That’s a reasonable approach. Solve people’s problems, make things easier and better for them. It’s almost noble, when you put it that way.

But what we have is “create a need, and fill it.”

Except that it doesn’t fill it. And it certainly doesn’t ’t fix it. But it will make you poorer and them — the folks selling you the goods — richer. Profit from pain.

It’s madness, that we allow this.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Joshua/WOPR in the movie, WarGames

It’s hard, though. There’s a lot of pressure on us to both submit to judgment and to be judgmental. Social media is optimized — literally and figuratively — to hook you and keep you addicted.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, save to do what I’ve already done: opt out.

Turn away from the mirror. Don’t let your self-worth become someone else’s profit centre.

You’re far too valuable.