Identity in the Time of a Modern Pandemic 🎥
Hello, I’m a 29-year-old who currently lives in Mumbai, India. Today is Quarantine Day 440, and I am thinking about God.
I do not see myself in a good light. I am told that this is a common phenomenon, but I have no way of verifying if that is true. A single thought keeps going off in my head: how can humans be so sure of the intentions of the outside world?
Like many individuals who’ve grown up with the internet while also having to fight an older generation who were actively anti-internet for most of our young adult lives, my social skills consist of a weird combination of IRL and online strategies. Think back to how from 2007–2013, Readers Digest would publish at least one article every month on the dangers of letting your child go unsupervised online and a list of internet slang in vogue at the time so parents could acquaint themselves with the “codes” invented by their young’uns. My way of coping with this dichotomy was to ignore reality and pursue my interests online.
This brings us to the question of how one maintains a public persona that doesn’t come under constant attack, while also leaving enough room for personal expression and exploration?
Essentially, when do you stop LARP-ing and actually start participating?!
Machiavelli! Gib me back my puzzle piece!
Niccolo Machiavelli is known in pseudo-phycology circles for his namesake “tendencies,” a series of maladaptive practices that lie on the foundation of cynical views on power.
We often forget an indispensable aspect of his observations that we all enact daily while online, essentially that Public and Private lives are guided by two separate and distinct moralities. Moralities we get to define for ourselves.
While dealing with an online community, these subjective ideas create a whole world of pain to those trying to discover an identity for themselves while also trying to maintain some modicum of power in the social sphere.
Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are. — Machiavelli
Questions about identity in the internet era are always closely tied to the concept of gate-keeping-free self-expression. While maintaining such an environment was tricky but possible IRL, the idea of developing an online personality for oneself during a pandemic is a ballgame; not many introverts and ambiverts have hopes of winning this season without a lot of internal conflicts!
Especially in a digital landscape where certain types of accounts get a disproportionate amount of exposure and social currency. Something they would never have in such abundance as individuals offline.
(The sheer amount of personal will power it takes to have to put yourself in front of a camera and pretend to care about dance moves in order to gain more followers… I balk at the thought.)
Cabin Fever and the Fate of the Jungle Orient
The past few days have been particularly traumatic. Watching the country’s state deteriorate day by day makes me hyper-aware of the importance of relationships we maintain in society. But remember, the more often you put yourself on display, the easier it gets to get people to listen!
How much we give of ourselves seems to dictate how often we reap the rewards from “the forces that be!”
As a millennial hitting adulthood in the face, my public image already evokes in me a feeling that is a shame-anxiety-hope cocktail. A peculiar mixture that forces me to confront the stupidity of my past with my present hopes of redemption through genuine attempts at self-regulatory behavior. This essentially means I’m currently in the process of maintaining a series of habits that keep me healthy and cheerful while being stuck indoors for well over a year.
As you might have guessed, or if you’re in a similar position as me, you would agree that keeping up our appearances online not only takes an exorbitant toll on our psyches but is also starting to seem ridiculously pointless and fruitless.
When I moved to Mumbai a year ago, the pandemic had not yet reared its ugly head in India. My friends and I held a whole series of heartfelt goodbyes as I left Bangalore and made my way back home. A year later, the general consensus was that I moved at the perfect time — being alone during the lockdowns would have definitely pushed me over the edge.
I agree.
The thing about being a petit bourgeoisie Indian child born in the 90s is that a lot of us turn into adults without the guidance and support of the family and extended family unit. In my case, my upper-middle-class parents were more than happy to let me out of their hands as long as I did not threaten to harm myself. And being a teenager in 2006 with an ego the size of a mountain and no interest in anything outside of the internet, I took more than my fair share of rebellion from the dinner table.
When I moved out in July 2009 as a 17-year-old, I was confident I would never move back home. And as the years went on, my family and I settled for comfortable distance and noninterference. What I didn’t recognize till early 2020 was that distance also manages to erode any feelings of trust you should be able to build with your most intimate circle. It was time I got off my high horse and found a way to say thank you.
You see, trust within the family unit tends to lay the foundation for how easily one actualizes in society; it took me 28 years to figure that little tidbit out. It got particularly easy to forget over the years, especially in this Tron-Esque Wanna-be Mad Max online space we all consider a natural extension of our reality. Here's the kind of impact it has on the human psyche. Here's some hopeful news.
The fundamental questions of Public Persona building
2020 threw all my posturing strategies out the window.
Whether there was a baby in the bathwater is yet to be uncovered, but I can assuredly tell you one thing: the time of the false reclusive has come to a screeching halt.
Being indoors as an extrovert with the only window to the outside being through a device can raise quite a few interesting philosophical questions about identity.
Who am I? What do I show the people I know about myself? Will people see through my act? Am I even putting on an act, or is this really who I am!? Am I even being heard? How can I increase my presence online? If not “enough” people engage with my content, does that make me boring, or is that a reflection of how people actually feel about me?!
These questions were not really of much importance to me for the most part of my life — I picked the cool, sassy girl trend of the time and went with the flow. My personality and identity were pretty much a reflection of how much snark was socially acceptable while also keeping a group of people around me at all times. Mostly funny, sometimes obnoxious.
But I guess things have to change at some point. So I made up some rules and mindsets I had to incorporate into my life to ensure I getting incrementally better every week. ✨
Reaffirming thoughts for internet obsessed millennials:
- My callously exploratory years are over, and now I have to come face to face with the fact that I am an adult who needs to become a productive element in the global marketplace.
- I cannot let myself get lulled into the comfortable half-truths of the social landscape and let my actions become a consequence of the popular vote (no matter how much a particularly orange leader would like to show us.)
- The internet and all its turbulence is a mirthless distraction to be scoffed at, not taken seriously!
BUT HOW DO YOU STOP?!
Stop defending meaningless public banter as "harmless" public banter.
It’s taken me a good five years to go from rebellion to understanding. Therapists will tell you that the process of actualising your identity while undergoing an ego-death brings in all kinds of traumatic realizations and discomforts into your life — but such disturbances hold the key to recovery.
The mid-millennial experience of having to go through this phase of abnormal personal awkwardness while maintaining a public persona brought me to certain awful realizations:
- Actors are all alone on their lofty stages
- Life experiences lead us all to read the same situation in a thousand different lights
- One can try to force things, people, feelings, and outcomes, but little will come of it except anxiety and stress
- You can never control what someone will say about you
And that’s the thing every existentialist philosopher from Nietzsche to Sartre tried to tell us. It does not matter what THEY do. What matters is how YOU navigate the world.
Do not fall for the traps of the temporary spectacles of today. Though the world of the present is a lot louder and more chaotic than in the time of this quote, I think C.S. Lewis got it right when he said in Mere Christianity:
“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.”
So if you’re like me and are looking for a sturdy footing, be it in career or identity, there is something seminally important I would like to share with you.
The answer to how I can be sure of the intentions of the outside world is this: I don’t have to be sure. I just need to keep doing a good job and stay away from folk who try too hard to get me down.
Having faith in humanity does not make you weak, no matter how many macho hustlemen online tell you otherwise. In the words of Kierkegaard:
Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further. — Søren Aabye Kierkegaard