Identity in the land of validation

Identity in the land of validation

The casting director yelled my name from across the hall and suddenly, my vision got blurry, I had to pee, throw up, and my legs fell asleep, all at once. This was the worst part of being an artist: the constant need of validation. It didn’t come from an egocentric place or from a highly engrained insecurity, it was just part of the job.

I wasn’t particularly ready for this casting call. I had been told about it two hours before and since I was close, I decided to go. At this point in my life, I wasn’t auditioning regularly anymore, I was slowly easing out of the small moment I managed to have of showbiz.

While standing in front of the camera and three casting directors (who barely looked up from their phones), I was told to say three lines about cookies that I can’t remember. In fact, I can’t remember any of the details because halfway through my read, I realized how insignificant I felt.

The daily need to be validated sucked all of my energy out and left me tired, too tired to want to continue. What was worse: like a true addict, I was so addicted to attention that even a modicum of it wasn’t enough anymore, I needed more.

As I walked out of the failed casting call and scrolled through my Instagram feed, an urge swelled up and down my body in hot smoke. It was a feeling that I didn’t have before, of realizing how dull my life was in comparison to the current girl who was posing in a bikini in front of the sea or the other girl who was being paid to travel the world and take pictures with her boyfriend.

But my life is great. I’m supposed to feel happy. I’m supposed to feel fulfilled. I’m supposed to feel valuable, significant and… relevant.

Relevance.

Is that a precursor to true happiness?

As humans, we long to feel wanted, needed and important. Perhaps the problem is that we want everyone around us to make us feel that way. It isn’t just about finding that one person who will love us for the rest of our days, it’s about everyone else loving us too, even those strangers that feverishly follow our every move on social media.

Relevance is a big part of happiness. And if social media has taught us something, it’s that you’re either astoundingly relevant or you’re dead.

In a study that focused on how happiness shapes our identity, Jessica A. Leveto, a sociologist at Kent State University suggested that identity salience and identity commitment are key to understanding happiness.

A salient identity is the identity that arises in a specific situation. My identity in a casting room is different to my identity when I’m with my family or when I’m alone at a bar. Our salient identity changes depending on a given situation and our commitment to certain identities tend to be higher when we share that identity with a greater number of people.

So, to understand happiness, we must understand our identity.

Much of our identities are constructed in relation to others and social media has heightened these relationships, allowing us to construct and deconstruct our identities almost daily. Even when we’re not on social media, we live in a world that is built by individuals whose identities have been assembled by the validation of swipes, likes, and comments.

A person who isn’t on social media at all (yes, those people still exist), will consume news that has been acquired through social media or about social media, will buy products that have been altered according to what social media has made popular, they will go to places that have been built through the social media lens like restaurants, museums, book stores, and virtually any public space that depends on visitors or customers.

By extension, those who feel like they don’t play by the social media rules, still do, still have to, if even for survival.

Survival means something else now. Survival is not just about existing in the real physical world but also about existing in the virtual world and succeeding. And in the virtual world of the internet, “no one cares if you’re happy, just as long as you claim it … no one cares if you have it, just as long as they think you do,” as Jon Bellion so eloquently sang in “Internet.”

It doesn’t matter who we really are because our identities revolve around what is seen and what’s part of the conversation. Our main goals have to do with traveling, documenting our daily lives and finding a way to make the most money while doing the least. Everyone tries, hoping that by sheer will, they’ll get to be somebody astoundingly relevant.

We’ve been conditioned since pre-school that in order for someone to be crowned with first place, it means a group of others need to be in last place or not even in the running.

The problem is when we all vie for the same crown that most of us think we deserve.

Granted, social media has given us the possibility of creating our own versions of crowns with specific fittings. But the internet has also made us feel like all of our thoughts are valid because others have been able to monetize their unfiltered and, often, under formulated statements.

Our President has shown us that these statements don’t have to be facts or even adequately formulated opinions (even inadequately for that matter). They can simply be a stream of thoughts masking a false sense of belief and identity that have been created through public validation.

Validation doesn’t have to be overtly expressed; it’s communicated simply by listening, by clicking, by watching and by following. We are ripped from the opportunity to find our true selves within this hyperaware environment because we can no longer discern what is our own decision from that of the filtered world. Even in private we live by the rules that have been created by our virtual environments.

Naturally, it would make sense that our virtual self would be created by our real self. In 2000, when The Sims video game launched, it helped us create a different version of ourselves within another version of the world. Similarly, playing any video game can easily become an addiction, enough for the World Health Organization (WHO) to add “gaming disorder” in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).

WHO describes gaming disorder as “a pattern of gaming behavior characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities.”

The disorder is based on the addiction of living in a separate reality.

Given the increase in social media use and the way our world has become interconnected and weaved together via the great wide internet, it seems that this very addiction is what has led our real selves to be strongly motivated by our virtual selves.

The virtual self is easier to control and can be known as the self we wish for the world to think we are and the one we know we are actually not. Or at least not completely.

The ways in which we chose for the world to perceive us, can predominate the ways in which we see ourselves.

What happens when the Instagram and Facebook version of ourselves, beats out the real one? Do we risk becoming alike? Are we meant to keep moving along the same straight, basic plane and somehow trying to mold ourselves enough to get the approval we long for?

Our identity comes from a sense of validation that can mostly be achieved through short limited moments when we remain in the cycle of relevance, or the frequency with which we receive validation.

It can be through still images that pass rapidly through our feed, limiting our actual attention to the details. It can be words that are limited in characters, playing into our need for speed and our dependence on immediate gratification. Or there’s also short, limited (there’s that word again) snaps of videos that capture just enough of our attention and then make us forget something once we click “next.”

Social media is a direct form of commentary on who we’ve become as a society. Our fates have been decided by numbers, algorithms, and robots and this has blinded us to perceive the world as a reflection of who we are.

Things matter based on our supply of importance. Trump seated in the Oval Office happened because we validated his opinions simply by giving them importance; by looking for his name, by drafting opinions and spreading our reactions to his words. Be it good or bad, we now think we have to respond to what is happening around us in public. Even in writing this, I know that I’ve become part of this cycle; I’m accepting my part within the well-oiled machine.

I know that my writing, or anything, has to be accessible to others, or else, it’s not real.

There’s an obsession with giving form to everything that is made public and with adding our virtual, and yet very necessary, “mark” on the internet. We have come to identify ourselves based on how we perceive what is handed to us and forget that we have power to control our reactions because we’re too busy reacting in the first place.

Not reacting can be a risk: though we can choose isolation it may cost misidentification.

According to Erik Erikson’s Stages of Phycological Development, our personalities are developed in a predetermined order through eight stages of psychosocial development. The important stage to look at, for this article’s purpose, is stage five: “Identity vs. Confusion.”

When we consider “Identity vs. Confusion,” following Erikson’s theory, it is a stage in life, between the ages of 12 to 18, when we ask ourselves: “Who am I?” Successfully completing this stage means that by our 18th birthday, we should have a strong sense of self for the rest of our lives. It’s troubling to consider this theory within the context of our constantly visible virtual self: one that we feel needs to change in order to feed our ongoing addiction of staying relevant.

Teenagers now have to decide who they are, based on who everyone thinks they should be and based on the highest number of likes and level of engagement. These metrics matter in a world where teenagers and adults have been able to monetize their virtual identities and turn them into their “profession” and livelihood.

It’s no longer possible to move forward without existing in the same place where everyone else exists. Think to all the times you have chosen one restaurant over another simply because one was on Instagram and the other was not. Or all the times you decided to buy from one brand because it seemed to be carefully crafted for you (if this were true, why do half a million other people buy that same product?).

We are left powerless in a world that doesn’t let us avoid each other.

And then what happens next? What will happen when we can no longer look deeper into someone’s life? When there’s nowhere to hide à la 1984?

Eventually we will tire and that might be the day we crumble.

Or there’s a slightly positive alternative to think about.

This virtual change won’t matter to younger generations because they won’t know the difference between growing up in a world with or without social media. Like us, they will create their new norms, they will create something different with new ways to cope while learning to survive within the new world order.

As a future parent, I worry all the time. I worry about how I will raise my kids and how they will develop a self-esteem. I also know that not having kids is my strongest possibility. Though I want to keep thinking that the current state of the world will get better, more often than not, I find it hard to believe.

Our eyes and minds are being oversaturated. We live in a world where every person, child, grandmother, teacher, you name it, every single person, even a fetus, because yes, those have Instagrams too, think they have the right to share every instance of their lives and that we will be interested.

And we are. Keep it coming.

The world is now literally our stage. All of it. Every single corner.

We’ll be fine … as long as we keep being astoundingly relevant.