Last night, my wife and I started watching a story on Netflix called, the Remarkable life of Ibelin, which is both an uplifting and sad look at society today, told through the life of a Norwegian guy with a degenerative muscular disease, who while he lost his body and his social world, built a new one through World of Warcraft. We are only halfway through, but it might be worth a watch. However, while my friend who recommended it said that it changed her view of the value of gaming, I think that for me, it has doubled-down on the risks, making me more critical of over-usage and the critical effect it is having on humanity.
Today, I decided to get out of the house for a change of scenery to write, and it has given me a chance to just wander a bit through a shopping centre at a quiet time of the day and reflect. However, what I was reflecting on was a relatively nonsense article that was titled - "We've forgotten what women look like" - in reference to judgement a tennis player has received on her body. However, it isn't the article itself as I probably disagree with much of it and the tone, but the title, because I agree with it. We have forgotten what women look like. And men.
Just type in to your search "healthy female body" and have a short scroll. Then type in "healthy male body" and have a scroll. At least in my search results, there was quite an asymmetry in results, with the women in the pictures tending to be relatively "normal" with plenty that would be considered "very soft", whereas the men tended to be quite "athletic", if not very much so, and pretty much all the men had a sixpack.
But, this isn't an article about what is a healthy body, but rather, what is a terrible approach to health. Because in the Ibelin film, Mats Steem started gaming as a child and the more his body collapsed, the more immersed he became. And as he said clearly, it was his escape, a place he was free to run and move. That is fantastic for him, right? But the thing is, the majority of us aren't suffering from a degenerative muscular disease, and have the ability to interact in the physical world.
Mats died in 2014. And since then, society has become more disconnected, impersonal, and technology has advanced dramatically. The characters are lifelike, and the artificial intelligence interactions are also lifelike, especially for those who haven't a lot of experience with actual people. If a lot of a child's life is lived digitally, with digital representations of the world, they are going to be primed to see that world as normal, as reality. And what this does, is set up a disconnection between how an individual sees themselves, and cares for themselves.
In that virtual world, the players get to be "who they want to be" and can live out fantasies where they are powerful heroes and skilled magicians. They get to upgrade themselves, to be who they can't be in real life. Fantasy and imagination is good - but not when it becomes the accepted reality.
When I was a teen, there was a lot of discourse on the unrealistic portrayal of women in the media, with the airbrushed skin of supermodels adorning magazine covers. Yet, for the most part, they were real women. As are those very thin models walking down catwalks. It wasn't unreal, they are just outliers in society, just like Arnold Schwarznegger is a physical outlier compared to the vast majority of men, but still real. And when it comes to expectation, it really didn't exist for most people unless they were looking to walk a catwalk as a model, or get up on stage and flex at Mr Olympia competitions. The average person, was just the average person.
That is no longer the case.
Now, rather than all those normal people who talked about not being represented in the media, are not representing themselves in the media. Yes, there are still professional models, but the vast majority of social content we consume is not coming from those professional models, it is user generated. And I say "generated" with a double-meaning, as not only is it created by users, but the content is also put through the various manipulation programs to create an unrealistic reality. And, this is verifiable, because unlike a person comparing themselves to a top athlete or model and feeling inferior, the denominator is the same, they are comparing themselves to themselves, one for one.
As we age, both men and women can struggle with the changes to our looks and capabilities, as bodies droop, skin weathers, memories fade. We can look at those old pictures of ourselves and compare them to the mirror of today, and feel the sense of loss. But, these apps are doing it in real-time, changing photos and videos to tweak an individual until they are no longer representative of reality. It isn't just clearing skin, or removing a roll of fat, it adjusting eye shape, jaw shape, eye colour... And it is self-imposed. We are catfishing our own identity, making ourselves believe we are what we are not.
And then there is the artificial intelligence generation machines. People used to complain about the unrealistic expectations the media placed on (especially) women, where they felt men expected them to be supermodels. But now, people aren't skewed toward the supermodels, they are taking it to an even further extreme, so that even the most super of the supermodels look ordinary, look plain. If the 0.1% look plain, how does that make the rest of us look?
And when children are immersed in these kinds of environments from a young age, with hyper-realistic characters, built to the most unrealistic specifications, supported with natural speech conversations designed to give them just what they want at that moment, how do they build healthy, real relationships. Not just romantic relationships of the kind that lead to children, but everyday, normal friendships, that provide the healthy support and acceptance a person needs to be well-rounded, caring, and compassionate?
Mats Steen was an outlier, an extreme of the population, with a disease that is very rare. But, the normal distribution is narrowing, where more and more people are looking to escape reality and live in worlds where they can live as someone else entirely. And, it is a self-feeding loop, because the more this happens, the more volatile society becomes, the more emotionally broken we become as a society, and the more we will look to escape from who we are.
It isn't just our looks, it is our skills, and our sense of identity. It has gone beyond connecting with like minds that has led to all kinds of social perversions, and has pushed us into an environment where we come abusive of ourselves, unaccepting of who we are, looking to escape. And because there is a place to run to, a world where we can live a fantasy, we will increasingly spend our time there, and spend less time on actually making a change in who we are.
While our digital lives becomes richer, our reality withers into poverty and neglect.
People will say that this is the way it is going, the way it is, accept it. But, why is the "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude so acceptable? I would like to think that I wouldn't have supported a holocaust, just because that was the way it was going anyway. The future of humanity isn't written in stone, yet we seem to be rushing toward our own demise in so many ways. But, it is convenient to go with the flow, it takes less effort to jump off the cliff, than climb up.
It also takes far less time.
Humanity used to be about celebrating achievement and getting inspired by greatness. It was about exploring the unknown depths of the oceans and climbing the highest mountains. Now, it is all about finding ways to get the same kinds of feelings, without putting in the effort, or risking ourselves in the process. We are emotional junkies, looking to feel good now, even if we are stealing from those we love and our future possibilities.
Maybe, I am wrong. Maybe in the future the idea of being human will be so different than it is today that living this way makes sense. But then, are we still human, if there is no reality to what we do, if everything is conceptual, intangible.
Design the life we want.
And become the architects of our own destruction.
Feels good.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
