Why do I feel distressed? Why is it that I’m constantly worried about situations that normally don’t bother me? Am I projecting the right image?”
If you have ever asked yourself these questions, you are not the only one. As per statistics, the level of anxiety has become an epidemic in our society in the past few decades.
THE BRAVE NEW WORLD
Our way of life has changed dramatically in recent years and the pace at which we must live has picked up so fast that our abilities to adapt can no longer keep up. Sometimes it feels like we are all living our lives in a fast-forwarded TV show! We are always rushing through the moments of our lives toward an unknown; never taking a pause, out of fear of being left out. We are living in the “brave new world,” where news is more easily broadcast and where information equals money and intelligence equals success. Not only can this be seen in a wide demographic, but also, on an individual level. We have to know, we want to know, everything, all at once.
SOCIAL VULNERABILITY
I used to believe that this feeling of social vulnerable and isolation was unique to celebrities and people of power. However, now this vulnerability has become part of society at-large. We have entered an age where we enjoy being seen; we are all, in some way, content producers and the guardians of our own personal brand! We see ourselves through the lens of a camera and we experience the world through the frame of an app. We all desperately aim for the perfect image of ourselves and we measure this perfection by the number of likes and followers we get. However, how does this need for acceptance affect the perception of ourselves?
THE NEW YORKER GOT IT RIGHT
There was a very interesting cartoon in the New Yorker published on November 9, 2017, in which a woman just finished a marathon in a forest and the caption reads, “If you run a marathon in a forest, but there’s no one around to social media about it, did you really run a marathon?”
Farley Katz, the creator of the cartoon, uses comedy to pose a very important question about the state of our world today in which people do not feel self-achievement unless they know that others have seen it.
MAMMON
I have always believed that Greek mythology has an interesting perspective about looking at world and analyzing human nature through a set of beautifully crafted stories. Mammon, coming from Greek roots, is the term used to represent “money” and material wealth, but more importantly, it is associated with the greed-driven pursuit to “gain.” Here, I draw on a contemporary parallel to gain a following.