This is a strong diagnosis of identity fragmentation at the individual level.
The deeper implication is institutional: systems built for stable selves are now governing populations with split agency, phantom incentives, and outsourced will.
That mismatch, not despair alone is what’s driving volatility across markets, politics, and organizations.
I’m a musician/performance artist by vocation, and I’ve always been weirdly bad at recording, archiving, and sharing my work in non-real time. I have colleagues, friends, and teachers who record, archive, and distribute obsessively, but it’s just not something I think about. I have struggled to pinpoint why it’s not a natural or intrinsic priority for me, and I think you nailed it in this piece. Internally I am inherently more impelled toward the connection that can only come from the “high friction” of real-time, ritual/ritualistic performance.
Recordings are great, but I live for a good ol’ fashioned “ya had to be there” kind of experience.
Years ago, years upon years ago, I had a tape recorder, one of those old flat things that were even then obsolete. I remember recording myself either singing or playing the bass, and feeling a strong internal sense of blasphemy, as if I were violating a natural injunction against folding time on itself or injecting the immediate past onto and into the present. It was a really weird feeling, but it passed, and I'm glad my mind has gotten more used to living in-between centuries.
I have always felt the same way about photography. I am older, so I remember the first time a friend of mine showed me a digital photograph he had taken, printed and framed. It was of a white horse in a beautiful green field. He then went on to explain how he had photoshopped out the power lines and power pole from the shot. I was appalled. The only thing I could think of was "That's a cheat! That's not what it looked like!" It felt as though he had robbed the truth of the beauty of the real world by trying to create a more "perfect" fake one - but what he created was still fake. You can imagine my horror at the world we live in today. I am 57 years old. The camera on my phone is set to "auto". I have no idea how to use a filter. I do not want to know. If someone has wrinkles (ahem, me) in real life, they have wrinkles in my pictures. If there is a telephone pole in real life, there is a telephone pole in my photo.
I’ve been experiencing the despair of weakness much of my adult life. I found myself comparing myself to just about every concocted identity I could, fictional ones, perceived inner lives of others, historical figures I conjured in my imagination, hero’s I imagined meeting in an elevator. I did this both before the internet and in the long years afterward (and I haven’t even used social media for at least 10 years). I checked almost every thought against a my “identity,” or weighed the thought to understand what the resulting identity would be. I only recently realized that emotions are constructed and are probably experienced differently by each individual, and they are arbitrarily named, so actually just more like information than defining in any actual way. Somehow this insight helped free me from a portion of this condition. It’s been a process.
Ain't nobody reading Kierkegaard to heal the phantom self. What are there, something like 40 volumes of Kierkegaard being Kierkegaard? Who's got time for that?
Also, on a sidenote: As is true of Shakespeare, you haven't read Kierkegaard until you've read him in the original Klingon.
"...the collapsing engagement of the workforce."; are you perhaps putting the cart before the horse? Look at the working environments and economic systems they inhabit and wonder why they create these fantasies. When the fantasies fail as substitutes, the reckoning will be paid. It's not rocket science.
What “Zoomed In” Real Self would you predict arriving? Nondigital events, experiences, exposure as “flesh time” over “face time”? In other words, the human appearing, speaking, connecting beyond presenting the digital online, and reacquainting in human expression in real time? The collapse of time and space has connected us, but the collapse of subtleties noted has estranged us. To plan a “pivot day” seems the key, unlocking screen focus and finding time to include in person expression as a balance.
This is a strong diagnosis of identity fragmentation at the individual level.
The deeper implication is institutional: systems built for stable selves are now governing populations with split agency, phantom incentives, and outsourced will.
That mismatch, not despair alone is what’s driving volatility across markets, politics, and organizations.
I’m a musician/performance artist by vocation, and I’ve always been weirdly bad at recording, archiving, and sharing my work in non-real time. I have colleagues, friends, and teachers who record, archive, and distribute obsessively, but it’s just not something I think about. I have struggled to pinpoint why it’s not a natural or intrinsic priority for me, and I think you nailed it in this piece. Internally I am inherently more impelled toward the connection that can only come from the “high friction” of real-time, ritual/ritualistic performance.
Recordings are great, but I live for a good ol’ fashioned “ya had to be there” kind of experience.
Years ago, years upon years ago, I had a tape recorder, one of those old flat things that were even then obsolete. I remember recording myself either singing or playing the bass, and feeling a strong internal sense of blasphemy, as if I were violating a natural injunction against folding time on itself or injecting the immediate past onto and into the present. It was a really weird feeling, but it passed, and I'm glad my mind has gotten more used to living in-between centuries.
I have always felt the same way about photography. I am older, so I remember the first time a friend of mine showed me a digital photograph he had taken, printed and framed. It was of a white horse in a beautiful green field. He then went on to explain how he had photoshopped out the power lines and power pole from the shot. I was appalled. The only thing I could think of was "That's a cheat! That's not what it looked like!" It felt as though he had robbed the truth of the beauty of the real world by trying to create a more "perfect" fake one - but what he created was still fake. You can imagine my horror at the world we live in today. I am 57 years old. The camera on my phone is set to "auto". I have no idea how to use a filter. I do not want to know. If someone has wrinkles (ahem, me) in real life, they have wrinkles in my pictures. If there is a telephone pole in real life, there is a telephone pole in my photo.
Am I just getting dense, or are some of those charts basically uninterpretable?
I’ve been experiencing the despair of weakness much of my adult life. I found myself comparing myself to just about every concocted identity I could, fictional ones, perceived inner lives of others, historical figures I conjured in my imagination, hero’s I imagined meeting in an elevator. I did this both before the internet and in the long years afterward (and I haven’t even used social media for at least 10 years). I checked almost every thought against a my “identity,” or weighed the thought to understand what the resulting identity would be. I only recently realized that emotions are constructed and are probably experienced differently by each individual, and they are arbitrarily named, so actually just more like information than defining in any actual way. Somehow this insight helped free me from a portion of this condition. It’s been a process.
Ain't nobody reading Kierkegaard to heal the phantom self. What are there, something like 40 volumes of Kierkegaard being Kierkegaard? Who's got time for that?
Also, on a sidenote: As is true of Shakespeare, you haven't read Kierkegaard until you've read him in the original Klingon.
"...the collapsing engagement of the workforce."; are you perhaps putting the cart before the horse? Look at the working environments and economic systems they inhabit and wonder why they create these fantasies. When the fantasies fail as substitutes, the reckoning will be paid. It's not rocket science.
Stop complaining, and evolve.
What “Zoomed In” Real Self would you predict arriving? Nondigital events, experiences, exposure as “flesh time” over “face time”? In other words, the human appearing, speaking, connecting beyond presenting the digital online, and reacquainting in human expression in real time? The collapse of time and space has connected us, but the collapse of subtleties noted has estranged us. To plan a “pivot day” seems the key, unlocking screen focus and finding time to include in person expression as a balance.