popular wisdom in social media today

At the start of the pandemic I found myself glued to my phone an unusual amount and I found myself unhappy. Whenever I scrolled through Instagram or Reddit I often got sad because I started comparing myself with what I’m not. That hot instagram dude or the hero who’s helping with the pandemic, yeah that’s not me. Rather, I was a couch potato trying my best to navigate everyday life.

Instagram, Reddit and other sources of media champion heroes and villains and reiterates the image of man that you should be. I often felt the pressure of what I could be and felt ashamed as I couldn’t live up to this image. I became pessimist and I soon realize that the source of my misery was social media. So I unplugged it.

Reflecting upon this time I realized that I was in despair of who I was not and was wallowing in the pessimism generated by social media. But it’s not as if this idea of living or conforming to someone else’s ideal life sprouted overnight–this is a tale as old as time and there have been solutions to deal with this despair. Existentialism.

Now that I’ve said the “word,” please don’t be scared. Don’t run away. Here I’ll treat you to this gif of a hedgehog.

Hopefully you stayed. Now let me explain. It’s not a doctrine that says that there’s no meaning in the world and that we’re only subject our misery. Quite the contrary, existentialism allows us to escape the disappointments of not living someone else’s ideal life and suggest man to live authentically. Social media projects an image of man that we perhaps feel pressured into conforming into. Yeah so you don’t have rock hard abs? SHAME ON YOU. Not saving the world? SHAME ON YOU.

This misconception that existentialism and the idea of not conforming to other images of what man should be is something Simone de Beauvoir explores in Existentialism and Popular Wisdom. Even though her writings are a bit old, her points still stand today that we can see appear in our era of social media and mass information. These forms of information are still public opinion and we can see similarities today.

In particular, public opinion today often purports the idea of determinism of man. It is futile to fight against the forces of masculine lust and self-interest as it intrinsically human nature and these ideas are often implicitly echoed through public opinion and wisdom told by our elders today. Even today there’s a concept of man that he needs to be the stoic and emotionless figure and that showing emotion is weakness. We see this idea of man perpetrated through movies where we see men such as the Rock as perhaps the ideal. Of course, various depiction of men vary across cultures but they still reinforce what you should be. For example, anime in Japan culture often reinforces men to be the breadwinner for the family and depicts men working 80 long hours. When we have anime that deviate from these depictions, we have fantasy anime that allow for people to escape this harsh reality.

As public opinion reiterates what we should be, de Beauvoir argues that existentialism doesn’t reiterates this and requires people to be faced with their misery. Rather this misery has awakened long before one encounters existentialism. She even casually roasts Albert Camus by saying that men “didn’t wait for the Myth of Sisyphus to think that life was, as Shakespeare said, ‘a tale told by an idiot.'”

We indeed live in a meaningless world but existentialism doesn’t necessarily awaken us to that. We find it through going through the world ourselves. Beauvoir also argues that people who attack existentialism are those who find this system coherent and upon being faced with this coherent system flee with fear. For these folks, “they fear burdening themselves with responsibilities that are too heavy.” Indeed, the project to throwing yourself into the world and discovering who you are leaves no level of comfort. You are what you are not but you cannot references yourself to something tangible. You are an ongoing project and an unknown and without a reference, how are you to find any security.

I believe that we must relish in this feeling of fear. The feeling of freedom can only provide us with fear but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. We don’t have any project we need to conform to but through our own agency we may develop what we can be. Let us reject the notion of determinism caused by the forces of lust and self-interest as media perpetuates and let us be free, as freedom should be the end we should strive towards to as Beauvoir says.