We are all narcissists now

IN PERSPECTIVE

Recently, a Facebook friend of mine posted a picture of her mother who passed away after a prolonged illness. The tsunami of response in the form of ‘likes’ (here, it means sympathy and condolence) and ‘comments’ was simply overwhelming. It made me wonder whether most of those who responded to this post really knew him, and for that matter, his mother, personally.

Though the news saddened me, I was still not quite comfortable with the idea of responding, like others, to this post. Would another pavlovian response in the form of ‘RIP’ from me have made any difference to my friend whom I have never met or talked over the phone? It looked as if grief these days, which should remain strictly private, is up for grabs.

Facebook and, for that matter, social media, are increasingly becoming a platform where people are developing an insatiable appetite for visibility by any means. We are drawn to it like a moth to the flame; like a psychotropic magnet. Facebook and Whatsapp have brought people closer, albeit in a superficial way.

It has revealed the hidden warts of our behavioural make-up. What is perhaps missing is the spontaneous warmth. The social media has brought out our narcissistic proclivities as never before, and try as we might, we find it extremely difficult to slough them off. We dread anonymity. We want to be noticed, talked about, not to mention a willingness to get our Warholian 15 minutes of fame by posting news/information of our modest achievements.

The need for ‘likes’ has the potential to metastasize into a craving for attention. There is a desperate desire to leverage our identity by posting photographs of honeymoon, family functions, marriage anniversaries, foreign trips, all with the sole objective of garnering ‘likes’, and be flooded with mushy comments. In other words, people long for a “little tumult” or any “agreeable quickener of sensation’’ and social media provides this in abundance.

At the expense of going out on a limb which might offend many of my social media friends, it won’t be wrong to say that Facebook is tempting us to be self-publicists and attention-seekers. Like serotonin, Facebook is turning into a happiness chemical, however fleeting or superficial it may be. A young lady posts her smiling picture with a rose tucked behind her right ear. It garners more than 90 likes.

A man in his late 40s posts a photograph where his eyes are glued to computer screen with a stack of files on his desk. The text in the post says, “Still busy at work at 8 pm…’’ Overjoyed and overwhelmed by his projected Stakhanovite energy and purported devotion to his work, his Facebook friends click on the ‘like’ button, turning him into an instantly likeable figure.

Then, there is no dearth of Facebook friends posting family selfies in the backdrop of, say, Eiffel Tower or Burj Khalifa which obviously guarantees ‘likes’ you could have never imagined. In the time of pandemic, Facebook is making people more face-conscious like never before. They are sharing pictures of their funny stay-at-home haircut or overgrown beard with sickening regularity, which, predictably, garner innumerable ‘likes’.

In short, there is no stopping people from making the private public on social media platforms. Perhaps this vainglory has become a sort of lubricant to keep the machinery of visibility and acceptability running. The very heady feeling of being ‘liked’ acts like a dopamine making one euphoric. Oscar Wilde rightly said, “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about.”

Profile pictures

However, such narcissistic propensities are not merely limited to Facebook. If one clicks on the ‘status’ of any WhatsApp group, people post their profile pictures at regular intervals to impress their friends and well-wishers. Looking beautiful and attractive is the sine qua non of their online persona.

The social media ecosystem is also characterised by some people’s inveterate tendency to view the world with a jaundiced eye. These opinion-peddlers cultivate an image of Olympian detachment by living in a bubble of self-righteous sanctimony. For them, it’s my way or the highway.

Despite having many Facebook friends, yours truly no longer finds this platform stimulating and worth wasting one’s time on. I have stopped sending and accepting ‘friend request’ long ago. My idea of Facebook is not about sharing family photographs and my profile pictures every week, but watching videos and write ups on animals and music.

I have a couple of journalists and writers as Facebook friends whose writings are often like gold dust and I read them with considerable interest. This comes as a source of great relief on a social media platform which otherwise mostly celebrates inanity and frivolity over the profound and the meaningful.

I have friends who are happier not being on Facebook and on any other social media. But does that diminish their professional worth and their importance as human beings? Not by any stretch of the imagination.

(The writer is an independent journalist in Delhi)