The outer life

I daydreamed once that Socrates was back and he was in a café in BGC marveling at how interesting a cup of designer coffee was and how much reflection people around him seemed to be doing. He assumed that people were reflecting since they all looked like they were in deep thought, holding before them what appeared to Socrates as “mirrors”. Never before in human history, he figured, has “holding up a mirror to oneself” been in this massive, minute-to minute scale. He muttered to himself as stereotypical philosophers do, “Whoa! People finally got it – the whole idea about the unexamined life being worthless.”

But then, it was just a matter of time before a group of friends walked up to where he was to hold up the “mirror” to him with the group by his side. And in an instant, an image of Socrates and the group appeared in it. They did not know who he was. Or they probably did, but what they desperately wanted was just a visual moment with this man in what they assessed to be 100% cotton Muji style shift garment, who was famous for something in the history of ideas.

When thinkers from eons back used “holding a mirror to yourself” to mean confronting yourself so you could cultivate an inner life, they obviously did not foresee the selfie.

While the inner life is that pressurized mass of meaning you build within yourself across many sun-filled days, moony nights and gray seasons, there is also the outer life – the collage of selfies that are mainly shot and oriented toward the public gaze. And as far as your brain processes these, outer is outer and inner is inner and the twain don’t necessarily meet.  

This is because taking pictures is not necessarily memory-making as a study has shown. Snapping a camera at something does not necessarily capture it with your mind’s eye because often, selfies are taken without really attending to the experience of the moment. It is most often solely about you having a shot worthy of a post to solicit positive feedback from social media while being oblivious to the fact that there is wonder going on in the scene, other than you or your outfit. And a study that looked at Facebook users indeed found that Profile pictures – in terms of how one rates their own attractiveness in them and the rate in which they change these profile photos- are good predictors of how self-absorbed (the clinical term for this is “narcissism”) people are.

A few months ago,  a New York Times article featured the Snap Pack – a bunch of rich young New Yorkers whose group and individual virtue is hooked on the virtual. They Instagram everything and their everything is Instagram. That is the group I imagined would take a selfie with Socrates, probably after dolling him up in Dolce and Gabbana. But what invisible meaningful memory would have been traded off with the selfie with Socrates?

A few weeks ago, I was in a forum with young people who were supposedly chosen from across Asia for being able to identify world problems, beyond the obvious, and coming up with innovative solutions for them. None of that happened, at least in my group. Most of them (80%) told me that they joined the forum because the selfies would look good in their social media posts and their CVs. I tried with all my might to extract from them what I had hoped was just lying dormant within their overflowing cups. But they all just wanted selfies most of the time and in the bathroom, the sink counter would be filled with young girls with make-up that would rival the first floor of any department store. Gotta look their best for those selfies.

I work with young people on a daily basis and take deep pride and joy in experiencing their minds and their creative, passionate work, so I was very surprised at what I experienced since these kids in the forum I mentioned were supposed to have already been “filtered”. But apparently, some polls on what millennials value reflect the behavior I have observed.

In other surveys of what millennials want most in life – 80% of them say they want to be rich and 50% of them want to be famous.  This was cited by Robert Waldinger in his TED Talk on what an inner life mainly means and how it affects how your life turns out. Waldinger, is the current director of the famous Harvard Study (formally called the Grant Study) where they have been tracking adults since 1938 to see what really makes for happiness and a long life. This is the only study with this record.

And this is the big reveal of the study: your life will count, both in longevity and meaning, ONLY if you have good relationships. Good relationships are cultivated and not captured. Inner lives grow from good relationships where you and your family and friends can mirror each other’s presence in the world to help you all refine each other’s focus and purpose. You cannot have an inner life if everything and everyone are mere backgrounds to your face or outfit. That is the outer life and there is no study on the positive link between this outer life and happiness because I can only suspect that the power of its inner version to inspire great, meaningful lives is so darn compelling.

Waldinger says the study found that it does not even matter if you only have a few friends or family members but as long as you can count on them for both the rough and smooth runs of your life, they shield you from that which is now known to literally end lives – loneliness. What makes it even sadder is that with selfies (photos or videos), we are, as MIT Clinical psychologist and founder of the MIT Initiative on technology and Self, Sherry Turkle said, “alone together.”

Even when Google, with all its resources tried to study what makes for a perfect team – it centered on social sensitivity – when people do not feel that they have to “put on a work face” when they get to work. The perfect team, as has been found by the study, is where diverse team members can give it their all in fair exchanges within their team at work and/or at play or all other parts of their complex lives. They are friends ALL the time and not only when they are at work. We spend an inordinate amount of time at work (and in traffic) so it makes sense that we find genuine meaning in the work that we do and with whom we do it so we don’t split our inner lives between what is “work” and “real life.”

I like the part where Waldinger acknowledges that human relationships are messy and that is why it is hard work to cultivate good relationships. Maybe this messiness is what keeps our minds alert and tricks our body to thinking the end time is not yet due.

And of course, taking selfies is not the issue. It is taking selfies at the expense of being present in your own life that we had to call on Socrates to fumble around in BGC in my daydream. When you do it at the expense of living, you rob yourself of unique chances to mine your own experience, your own life, with mind-moving range and depth. If that is your goal and you can genuinely say that it is what you have always wanted, then congratulations on your arrival. Click, click, snap, snap… – Rappler.com