This one goes out to all the kids who grew up doing this:
The modus operandi of this Substack is, if you’ll allow me to quote myself: ‘[to use] film, literature and music as a diving board for ideas.’ Whether or not memes can be considered works of literature is not a point I’ll be labouring over today, but in the interest of this post getting off the ground under the iron law of my own mission statement, I’m going to say that they can.
If your instinct is to cry foul – or if you’re just interested in a thorough exposé on meme culture and how these funny little clips, quips and images that saturate our mental landscape fit alongside the pantheon of the more respected arts – you could do much worse than heading to Chris Gabriel’s YouTube channel Meme Analysis, where, as he reminds us at the end of each video, memes matter. Besides being good for a laugh or two, they’re an incredibly insightful window onto the modern psyche, in all its fractious factions.
But this is not a post about memes. It’s a post about a train of thought that departed from the station of one specific meme. When I came across the above image – and saw how many people, myself included, related to it – I thought to myself: besides the basic needs of the body for survival, is there a more fundamental human desire than to make ourselves exist in the mind of another? (Or, if you like, the Other)?
One theory of the universe’s origin is that it split itself apart in order that it might know itself.1 Why do I bring this up? Because the splitting, or outsourcing, of our identity into the minds of others in an attempt to experience ourselves – as described in the meme – is that same cosmic drama being played out by our little microcosmic selves.
I think at the root of every human being there is an inborn fear – perhaps the fear – that we might in fact be alone. Solipsism is a philosophy that need not be attributed to any one thinker; it insinuates itself naturally into all self-reflective minds. If we are to entertain, seriously or not, the above theory of the universe’s origin, we could consider the Solipsistic fear to be the residue of the impulse that drove the singularity towards its split.
For the most part we may manage to keep this fear subconscious, especially if we were raised in an environment with plenty of positive physical and emotional contact, but which of us can honestly say that we never feel the need for the attention of another? However innocuous, normal, and even healthy that desire might be, the fear is there, down at the root, driving us on. Somewhere in the frightening depths of our minds (or should I say mind?) we can’t help but think: what if there is nobody else? What if life does not in fact exist outside of us? This worry does not have to be cognised to be in effect – we all learn (hopefully) to stop crying when we’re left alone as children; we understand object permanence, but living as we do inside of only ourselves, there is a kernel of solitude that is inescapable.
To feel that we exist in the mind of nobody else is a sort of living death. But, apart from in exceptional circumstances, even after death we expect a trace of our existence to linger in at least a small gathering of minds, like candles lit to dispel the gloom of our passage across the Styx into that eventual forgetting. This is why the notion of dying alone is horrifying enough to be brandished as a mortal insult when wished upon someone; to leave this world uncertain of the perseverance of our image is a terror of the most primal kind, a sort of twin-bladed death. Solipsism and death are the two most fundamental fears, both entirely inbuilt in the way that we instinctively conduct ourselves.
‘The world is my representation’ Schopenhauer said2. Crucially, he was not saying so from a standpoint of Solipsism, but pointing out the fairly undeniable fact that we are only able to witness the world as it appears to us through the apparatus of our senses. We cannot with any certainty know the world as it may be outside of our own witnessing of it. In the dichotomy that he illustrates, the body represents the world to us, and the Will seeks to extend itself into the world. It wishes to extend influence. Nietzsche saw fit to truncate Schopenhauer’s idea of the Will into the Will to Power – but instead of power as associated with force, we can think of it as a will to expression, and by extension, self-expression.
And how can we make our influence felt in any other way than transposing the idea of ourselves (or our creations, as a reflection and extension of ourselves) into other minds? For our output to be worthwhile there must be others capable of receiving it as input. The horror of Solipsism is that it proposes a world that is incapable of receiving us, a barren and unresponsive world – even worse, a world that feigns responsiveness. The relationships we build with others act as positive feedback loops to stave away this fear. It is difficult to feel the yawning maw of the Solipsistic nightmare when engaged in a friendly conversation, or sharing a meal with family, or making love.
And what is the desire to be loved, when analysed down to its root? The desire to duplicate our existence in the mind of another who really knows us. It is the psychic analogue of the physical drive for procreation. It is the soul’s urge to go forth and multiply, by planting itself as a presence in the interior of another. (If this seems too cold an assessment of love, I explore the topic in much warmer terms in my post on Portrait of a Lady on Fire). The two extremes of this urge are the desire for romantic love with one other individual – the intensive end of the spectrum – and the desire for fame or adoration by many other people – the extensive end of the spectrum.
Especially in relationships of love, we are very sensitive to the of image of ourselves that persists in the mind of the other. We want our projected avatars to be emotionally compelling enough to have agency, to make people act a certain way towards us – generally, but not always, to invite positive (or at least pleasant) behaviours towards ourselves. We want them to be like little messengers that we send forth to put in a good word for us.
But I did say not always, so when is this not the case? Simply put, when the need to make an impression is greater than the need to make a positive one. This is most dramatic when there is an urgent need to make a lasting impression. Probably the clearest illustration of this would be to imagine a couple having a relationship-threatening argument. Imagine, as we often see, one partner spiting the other, saying the most hateful things, maybe even resorting to physical violence. This is borne out of the feeling that it is preferable to be hated than to be ignored or forgotten. If we can’t guarantee the maintenance of a positive representation of ourselves in the mind of our partner, then a malicious one can at least do the important job of being impossible to forget.
People who habitually seek to make this kind of impression boast a deeply unstable self-image – the need to impose themselves on other minds becomes one of urgency, and any thought of maintaining a positive reputation becomes secondary to the need to stabilise a crumbling idea of self by multiplying it, either severely – through acts of violence or abuse, usually towards one person – or expansively – through the desperate pursuit of attention, usually from many people. This instability comes from a lack of reconciliation between disparate parts of the self, so that there is no unified nucleus – no persisting I – for the identity to cling to.
While I do believe that we all share the same need for self-projection, an over-reliance on it in lieu of seeking internally for knowledge of self is a pathology that seems very present in our current day. The above example of a partner acting out of spite during a break-up is one illustration of how this pathology manifests – so much energy has been put into the maintenance of their image in their partner’s head that the final acts of malice are simply an attempt to keep that image alive, a sort of survival mechanism not for the physical body but for this externalised life-source.
It is a time-worn cliché to say that you must learn to love yourself before you can truly love another, but at its core this is what is being expressed by that aphorism – you must first be able to house a stable image of yourself to safeguard against becoming over-reliant on the avatars that you project onto others. Two people who have cultivated a well-rounded self-image are more suited to then maintain a healthy relationship without the anxious mind-games that come from persistently worrying how well our avatars are representing us in the mind of the other.
What is social anxiety but the feeling that we do not have agency over the versions of ourselves that have taken root in the minds around us? This affliction leaves us on high alert, fearful that we might come under attack for some aspect of ourselves of which we may not even be aware, and which we are therefore incapable of defending. It almost goes without saying that the remedy for social anxiety is self-love, but I also know how that sounds. How do you learn to love yourself?
When directed inwards, the desire for projection becomes a desire for exploration – like turning a telescope around – we become magnified under the lens our own attention. Persisting with this attention, and learning not to look away, is the route towards self-knowledge, and the more you accept what you discover in this process, the more beneficent becomes your attitude towards yourself.
It’s a journey that looks different for everybody, and a difficult one to undertake in a world that keeps us constantly distracted, that always seeks to take us outside of our minds and bodies. We have to learn to feel our way back into ourselves. This is something that the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan – who predicted the World Wide Web 30 years before its invention – intuits as one of the fundamental ailments of the technological age:
‘With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.’3
This uncovers a fascinating new depth to the issue: not only are we outsourcing our identities into the minds of others, but increasingly we are doing so into the only superficially responsive interfaces of technology. In our engagement with modern devices, we are encouraged to construct profiles and avatars in a much less abstract sense than we have already been doing on an interpersonal scale. Now we can create an online version of ourselves that can be beamed, theoretically, to everyone else with access to the internet.
This begets a two-fold anxiety. Not only are we now more visible – more exposed – than ever before (in a sense we can never now be sure that we are not being observed, as long as we accept that our online presence is an extension of us whose perusal qualifies as an actual gaze upon us), but there is a more drastic kind of outsourcing going on, a more dramatic draining of attention away from our physical bodies.
It is much easier to cultivate and manipulate an online profile than it is to develop into someone who we can be truly satisfied with. Things like Instagram filters have made it much easier – especially for young girls, who are the principal target for these features – to present ourselves in a light more positive than anything we would be able to back up in “real life” (is there anything more illustrative of our techno-dystopia than putting inverted commas around that phrase?).
In living like this, even more anxiety falls back on us, burrowing down into our neglected bodies, turning into bundles of stress that we hardly even recognise are there, let alone know how to resolve. If you want a deeper insight into exactly how far we as a society have plunged down this rabbit hole, read Freya India’s fantastic article The Future of Beauty is Already Here.
But back to the salient point: how do we learn to love ourselves, and to stop channelling all of our energy into anxiety about how we are being perceived? We have to get to know ourselves, body and mind. We have to learn to attend to our bodies again so that we can heed the messages it sends to us. We have to learn what truly gratifies us – not instant gratification but real satisfaction – and to allow space in our routine to spend time on the pursuits that make us feel most alive. We have to learn to hold dialogue with ourselves, genuine dialogue that gives voice to the opposing forces that exist within us all, and we can’t run away from our thoughts when they become too distasteful (again, distasteful to who? This fear comes from the anxiety of being perceived in a certain way).
Am I saying that, if while holding a dialogue you uncover a particularly nasty part of yourself, that you should embrace it without question and adopt it as a core facet of your personality? No, but bring it out into the light so that it can interact with the parts of you that oppose it – learn which parts of you wanted it swept under the rug, and maybe the factions of yourself will be able to come to a compromise and learn from each-other. Denying the shadows inside of ourselves is how fundamentalists and ideologues are born. It is such a pressing matter in our times that we learn how to better empathise with one another, but first we must learn to have empathy for ourselves – as we really are, not as we would like to be.
This leads me back to the meme that kicked this whole thing off. As someone who has struggled with maladaptive daydreaming for most of my life, I feel confident in asserting that daydreaming is a kind of falsification that distracts from genuine inner work. We do not daydream ourselves as we are. Case in point – a daydream about performing a great song in front of an awestruck audience. It seems harmless, and maybe it is in small doses, but it can become addictive. It adds layers of removal to direct experience, so that the mind is engaged in a kind of gymnastic manoeuvre to funnel things through a false channel – from my own experience this can persist as a kind of tension in the body; stemming from the almost unconscious effort that is being put in to redirect the experience of the music into the imagined scenario, and to generate a false – and unearned – sense of gratification vicariously obtained through the imagined admiration directed towards your imagined surrogate. And, as has been suggested by various schools, the unconscious is the body. So the body is where the traces of unconscious effort can be found.
The genuine task of inner work, of truly getting to know yourself is the inverse of this. In a journey of self-discovery, there is no space for revelling in the exploits of romanticised versions of yourself that bear no resemblance to reality. Instead, you have to hold difficult conversations with yourself. You have to try to assess your position in life as it really is, and to accept responsibility where it rightly falls to you. Sometimes you have to come face-to-face with ugly parts of yourself, parts that might have been trying to reach you through bad dreams, or localised stress-sites.
Every night for almost six years I experienced jolts of adrenaline in my chest when on the verge of sleep, sometimes paired with momentary hallucinations. Some nights so many consecutive jolts would happen that I would give up on sleep entirely. I tried various medications which didn’t help at all. In the end it was only when I ventured to try to open a dialogue with myself using Carl Jung’s method of active imagination (though the practice stretches back much further than him under other names) that the symptoms improved. The problem has not entirely gone away, but the improvement has been drastic – not only as regards the night-jolts, but also in the way that I conceive of myself and my behaviour day-to-day.
But there are, of course, still plenty of things to be worked on. Getting to know yourself is learning that the self is a growing thing. When in the grips of social anxiety, as I was for much of my teenage and young adult life, it can seem as if the impression that others have of you is the final say, the ultimate judgement cast upon you, condemning every aspect of your being. But not even we know every aspect of ourselves.
Learning to know and to love yourself is accepting the project of life as something to be embarked upon and not shirked away from. It is learning not to hide behind falsified self-images. The image of the self is multiform. ‘I contain multitudes’ Bob Dylan sang, at the age of 79. Even at such an age, the great songwriter refuses to position himself beneath the flag of a single self-image, he understands that each image we hold of ourselves is an illusion, because none of those images are complete – we are the sum of our parts, and the more familiar we become with them, the more we exceed that sum.
A particularly metal variation on this theme is the German philosopher Philipp Mainländer’s claim that the act of this splitting is synonymous with the death of God; God in this case being the singularity, the being in which all is unified – ‘God has died, and his death was the life of the world.’ - Die Philosophie der Erlösung.
Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation.
Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.