The Identity Blindspot
One of the weirdest things that happen as you get older is that you begin to realize that your self-perception isn't quite correct. Depending on your self-awareness, this ranges from having to accept unpleasant truths to having a full-on identity crisis as you begin to unpack how little you know yourself.
I suppose if I were a more dedicated memoirist, I would spend some time excoriating myself and exploring my personal failings. The original draft was about a hundred words of that, and it bored me to tears. So I'm sparing us both the embarrassment. However, the initial idea sticks with me as something worth exploring.
In the current moment of Epistemological schizophrenia, the already tenuous link between reality and our perception stretches to its thinnest point. People spend their lives creating illusions, measuring themselves against those illusions, and all the while avoiding asking hard questions about who they really are. Before this veers off into disaffected emo lyrics, this isn't about castigating people about their entertainment choices.
Almost every aspect of our culture is under some arm of marketing or advertising; it isn't surprising that people's identities are bleeding into the profiles created for them. Your tastes aren't challenged, they're reinforced. If they are challenged, it's done in a way to make you angry. The entire algorithm economy wants to wrap you in warm comforts of the familiar, and social media ensures the only content you see that isn't comfort makes you feel anyone not like you is probably a gibbering dipshit.
I'm not blaming any of these companies; most people were already trained to accept the warm glow of the monoculture decades ago, we've just created millions of little monocultures. Everything you like and more, and the soft assurance anyone not like you gets eaten by the filter.
When you're able to build a picture of yourself reinforced over and over again, it can be hard to hear that it isn't true. Spend an afternoon on a subReddit for some particular subculture, and you'll see people who think they dominate a planet that doesn't know they exist. Even the monoculture doesn't matter all that much, and weird game streamers are getting more views than the so-called golden age of television. These fandoms turn rabid when their internal consensus is challenged, assuming everyone who disagrees is a shill or a bot.
It never hurts to assume you're probably less cool thank you think you are. Less smart, less popular, and less interesting too. Just by the math, you're probably wholly unremarkable, but then again, so are most people.
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