This relates to my discussion on living a āsymbolicā life as opposed to a ānaturalisticā one. The symbolic life is a somewhat trance-like state where the individual is hyper-focussed on some form of interior āidentityā and seeks to accumulate symbols in their life that validate that identity in order to generate meaning and narrative sense/structure in a life that, if lived āauthenticallyā, would feel deeply confusing. The identity is very much ārealā in the sense that any identity is real, but the symbolic identity generates incredibly powerful feelings that allow it to be a perfect substitute for living in the natural world - to feel āmore real than realā. People, places and activities are not āgoodā in their own right but rather because they fulfil symbolic meaning, and without the symbols life can feel genuinely hollow and meaningless.
This state is sought after due to a desire to escape from trauma, but it is fueled by a powerful cultural lexicon of āaestheticsā which are easily accessible due to internet access and a childhood of heavy media consumption. Nostalgia is a form of symbolic life, where millenials are buying super mario merch not because their current selves actually feel any genuine fondness for the characters or even play the games, but rather because they wish to hold onto that symbolic child-like state.
A symptom of the symbolic life can be a form of arrested development already - like age-regressors and otherwise emotionally immature people who cling to nostalgic symbols. But nothing is more fuel to the symbolic fire than the imagined audience - something that the youth is being primed into having due it no longer being imagined but now being literal. It must be said here that the symbolic life is deeply performative (and consumer-based) as much as it is deeply personal. Itās much more easy to live your symbolic life when you can get everyone else to play along (as long as theyāre not privvy to how much theyāre being used as pawns), and the easiest way to do that is via performance which is via consumption. And in a social structure where everyone is trying on āaestheticsā to fit in and documenting that publicly, the social pressure piles on and weāre all collectively encouraging each other that living symbolically is the only way to live. So itās a double whammy - the imagined audience that sustain the legitimacy of your symbolic life are now also the literal people who are directly encouraging you that your symbolic life is the true version of you!
I also want a make a note that a perfect priming tool for a symbolic life is spending a lot of the time interacting with āthe worldā through a screen, thereby increasing its legitimacy and decreasing the legitimacy of the naturalistic world. Iāve started to notice that if I re-evaluate my laptop and phone as nothing more than big fancy books, their influence starts to slip away somewhat, and touching the fabric of my bedsheets has a different emotional quality, in a sort of emotional version of re-focussing my eyes.
What we have is a world where people are encouraged to think that āreal lifeā is via the screen and everything else we do is just sort of flavour; our physical bodies only making sense in the context that we use them to type messages to other people. And in some sense, yes, the āwhole worldā is available through the screen, in frankly a dizzying capacity - I can learn a whole lot more and interact with a whole lot more of people via my digital life, but itās important to remember that the human experience is primarily tactile before anything else. Our words and our big thinky brains are only part of the picture, and the majority of the time the people Iām speaking to online are not friends who care about me as a flawed individual but rather a literal audience. It is only the people in my natural life who will be able to love me in much more physical terms - body language, hugs, gentle touches of affection.
There was a post I saw a while back by someone commenting on ASMR and how online videos have gotten a lot more āsensoryā and I believe that the phenomenon of these videos also relates to how weāre using symbolic sensory stimuli to substitute real tactile feeling.Ā
I do not think all is lost, although I am very nervous about our children being primed for living a symbolic life judged by an imaginary audience. Itās much easier to break away from the symbolic life when you can remember the ābefore timesā, and Iām fortunate that in my teens I have many fond memories of merely existing in my room, seeing the light come in through the curtains, and being otherwise wholly āpresentā in the moment. Mindfulness is indeed a great way to break the trance, but if you donāt believe itās worth it - after all, whatās the point of doing things if other people canāt see them? - then itās much, much harder to break the spell.
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