002. UNDER THE INFLUENCE(R)

living in a world of squares

Mar 01, 2024

“Were I able to see myself in medias res, my critical faculties might never shut down, and I would barely be able to lift a finger without crippling self-consciousness.” – Siri Hustvedt

Everyday I’m looking at a screen. Phone. Three computer screens. Car navigation systems. Digital billboards. It’s a world one can’t avoid and even whilst writing this, I’m watching SVU propped up on a phone holder. Everyday I feel like I’m forever resisting the urge to throw the gauntlet at the ever-changing views of technological vagaries and this discourse of surveillance that exists. Sometimes I find myself taking a step back in pretense of what it may be like to be the observer; a cogent reflection on the seemingly minute observations of everyday life – aka this reconfigured desire to just curl up with a book and not be so present online. Bury myself into that couch ditch I love so much. Here she is, a Bookstagrammer and a Virgo with an obsession for lists and this so-called unmistakable need to post every week to weakly seem relevant alongside the Gen Z’s. No one else would probably admit this but hey, I said I would get unhinged right?

At what cost am I turning into this human under the influence(r)? The cost of a romantic dinner with my boyfriend? Imagine sitting there and having my response be ‘oh wait I have to post something ok?’. I sound horrible, I know, but this wave of perfectionism and relevancy seems to hit me every now and then and I’m at the mercy of a square versus real life and yet even this very premise sounds ridiculous. I shouldn’t be feeling this way at all.This reminds me of a conversation I had the other week where the topic of discussion was this very idea of self-consciousness and the urge to cut into the terrain of perception and consciousness with consistency. But what is consistency? This area in our critical domain where we are made to reconfigure and reframe ourselves into the ongoing narratives of the American mythos?

**Image source: Pinterest / The Truman Show, 1998**

We’re clinging to this idea of individualism, the propagation of new identities shaped out of our ‘best selves’ but what if this has really been the false belief all along? Is there really a ‘best self’? Are we really these rational creatures with an endless fascination for the unattainable? Driven by an obsession for anything bigger and better. The ploys of liberal democracy versus the weight of our bodily selves dipped in hope and fear. There are times where I sit back and marvel at the peace around me: the muffled shuffling of apartment furniture being moved next door, doors closing and the sighs felt from behind doors as the workday finally comes to an end, sharp flakes of light flickering through a private carpark. Concrete staircases. Monolithic tenements mimicking this exciting uncertainty within its zig-zagged construction – hidden lives sealed away within concrete walls, a hardened monument of inanimate silence. In all its quietened obsolescence, these homes, these safe havens, seem to lie dormant, conveniently hidden but never completely – a sanctuary embodying safety from the outside world only to be a direct by-product of fear itself.

Lives illuminated online; objects of study to be dissected, raised in this sort of mock reality. Take for instance The Truman Show where Truman Burbank is born in just that – is this a somewhat cry from the crystallized versions of ourselves living partially through our pixeled devices? Neighborhoods adorned with glittering screens, wrought iron frames embodying these notions of this sort of desperation to live outside the ‘screen’. A calcification of social personalities squeezed into a myriad of urgency and notions of judgment. I sometimes have these quiet moments where I envy that freedom of passers-by tending to their gardens, stacking chairs of a social party bygone, families packing up the car for a holiday, the planting of seedlings in a herb garden– is this just a sign that I’ve just barred off these acts of domestication because the fear of surveillance has pulled me into a blue-washed cove? Life and emotions attempting to strain through the complexities of perception.

Maybe I just keep searching for this holy grail, maybe we all are. The life that society has somewhat governed and instilled in us as the ideal. Is this what makes us loathe the very idea of ‘society’ and its role that it plays in each of our lives? Perhaps we’re all just decorating our lives with a bit of icing until it amalgamates with the sponge of the emotional abyss.

What were to happen if the blue-washed frames were taken away – would I be able to hold my identity? What would it be like to not have to have everyone pry into your life forensically or for me to not apologize for a view that didn’t match that of others? A white noise where the unspeakable is released. The filters turned off. A willingness to exist outside the screen. A world where social media possesses no capital, where the shards of an identity collapsing plays no purpose within this fresh new soil.

As humans, we are all but broken. Frail. Scared. A reminder that this myriad of amorphous possibilities sometimes devoured by this rationalized world can still exist behind these concrete walls.

I have my body. I have my words.