Sartre once noted that in order for the most banal incident to turn into an adventure, it is enough to tell about it. These seemingly simple words contain the key to explaining the endless variety of human actions and life decisions, forms of culture and somersaults of psychology. Man is an instinctive storyteller: from the bonfires of cavemen to modern social networks, every point of our universe is permeated with plots and narratives of all genres and varieties, and there is not a single culture on earth where this would not be the case. Traditionally, this inherent feature of human nature has been explained from a threefold need: in the exchange and preservation of information; explanation and interpretation of the unknown; in entertainment and what is called the ugly word "phatic communication". At the same time, that transforming force is unforgivably ignored,with which the story of an event fundamentally transforms both personal and group memory of it and the human need to create and embellish stories about ourselves and about our world. The story is that irreplaceable means by which we retroactively create and correct our own history and therefore it contains in itself countless possibilities of psychological self-affirmation both for the individual and for the whole people, and it is this psychological need that is its main driving force among civilized peoples.which we retroactively create and correct our own history and therefore it contains in itself countless possibilities of psychological self-assertion both for the individual and for the whole people, and it is this psychological need that is its main driving force among civilized peoples.which we retroactively create and correct our own history and therefore it contains in itself countless possibilities of psychological self-assertion both for the individual and for the whole people, and it is this psychological need that is its main driving force among civilized peoples.
More and more often I pay attention to how the most ordinary events of life take on new guises, if you describe them, if you capture them in any form, written or photographic. Placed as if under a colored magnifying glass, they acquire a different and fuller life, magic, colors and facets that they did not have outside of this newly created narrative are revealed in them. This is because, pulling them out of the depths of memory and the indifferent homogeneity of most of the incidents contained in it, we proceed not at all to an objective narrative, but to create a new and fictitious story based on original events. No matter how boring and prosaic this initial event may be, if you put it on paper with minimal literary talent and do not forget to include in this description a handful of random thoughts and associations,observations and experiences, they will immediately appear before us completely different, their relative importance will soar to heaven. I can easily imagine a fascinating reading from a detailed story about the nausea of everyday life, it even seems to me that this genre contains still unexplored possibilities of a literary genius.
Think of some prosaic event, for example, your hasty consumption of breakfast and a ball of thoughts wriggling in your mind; take on its creative reconstruction, present it in detail, flexing all your literary muscles. This scene, having been described, divorced from hundreds of others and unfairly singled out among them, immediately becomes special. You will remember this breakfast much better than others, so be sure. I will allow myself to invent another term and call it "the effect of narrative" - a creative transformation and a sharp increase in the significance of an event under the influence of its description. Further, it will be very good if after this breakfast there is a beautiful photo and you have an audience to whom you can present this story along with a visual report on it. The status of this nondescript and completely empty episode was raised to the tenth degree both by your attention and creative work on it, and by the glances of strangers studying it.
This is where the deceptively simple appeal of Instagram, YouTube and other social media platforms in today's world lies. Millions of people around the globe, combining the complexity of human nature in themselves extreme stupidity with cold instinctive ingenuity, with unerring accuracy have identified them as a powerful tool for working on their inner space, on the perception of their own life. Instagram is a good illustration of the fact that in order for our life to become more interesting and complete, it does not have to be a different set of events. We just have to place the narrative we already have at our disposal under the magnifying glass and, often, multiply it by the audience. Moreover, the storytelling, perception and interpretation of the raw data of our existence always play a much larger role than the data itself. For this reason, a primitive and undeveloped person, moving along the canvas of the most fascinating stories and adventures, can be bored, jaded and actually live a very poor life. Meanwhile, an individual leading an outwardly inconspicuous existence can have an unimaginable fullness and intensity of his living of reality, since the magnifying glasses and kaleidoscopes of the spirit at his disposal are capable of enriching, exalting and transforming anything. This is precisely what Camus had in mind in his famous lines: “It is a mistake to think that the amount of experience depends on the circumstances of life. It depends only on ourselves. "Meanwhile, an individual leading an outwardly inconspicuous existence may have an unimaginable fullness and intensity of his living of reality, since the magnifying glasses and kaleidoscopes of the spirit at his disposal are capable of enriching, exalting and transforming anything. This is precisely what Camus had in mind in his famous lines: “It is a mistake to think that the amount of experience depends on the circumstances of life. It depends only on ourselves. "Meanwhile, an individual leading an outwardly inconspicuous existence can have an unimaginable fullness and intensity of his living of reality, since the magnifying glasses and kaleidoscopes of the spirit at his disposal are capable of enriching, exalting and transforming anything. This is precisely what Camus had in mind in his famous lines: “It is a mistake to think that the amount of experience depends on the circumstances of life. It depends only on ourselves."
People - most often due to their lack of finer tools - are so passionate about Instagram because it is one of the simplest ways to get the most out of the narrative effect described above. A ride in an elevator, a lunch in a cafe, a meeting with friends, a random thought or landscape, being captured and described, necessarily increase in their status, seem more significant, the person himself and his whole existence begin to seem more important and fuller when he begins to create a story about yourself. On the other hand, events that are already interesting and at least somewhat outstanding rise in their status by another ten steps, their radiance increases. That is why it is safe to say that the mania of social networks will never leave humanity and will only grow,for the latter offer an indispensable means for a simple and efficiently gross satisfaction of the inherent need for psychological self-affirmation.
Undoubtedly, this blissful ability to give joy to a person has many dark sides. The one that interests us here in particular is the cognitive distortion inherent in the mind, which makes us naively identify the perceived story or photograph with the original event. The narrative, however, is composed only "based on" the original event and its face turned to the public is fundamentally different from its insides, how this event was experienced from the inside. Instagram and any other focus of stories (including literature and oral storytelling) generate so much envy, neuroses and psychosis precisely because they intensify the contrast between a person's perceived life from the inside and a fictitious idea of what it could be if the narratives broadcast turned into reality for him. He feels left outwhich leads to another, mostly equally negative, consequence.
Being fascinated by narratives and hooked on the pleasure that their stories bring them, people increasingly subordinate their own life choices not to the intrinsic value of an experience, but to its suitability for being a picture or an object of a story. Existence is built on the basis of the desire for things and situations that, being internally empty or faded, are capable of glossy and convex appearance in retelling and reproduction. Feeling almost nothing, living them, and devoting their lives to living these voids and caverns, they derive all their satisfaction from the effect of the narrative, immeasurably impoverishing their own inner life - that is, life in general, for there is no other than the inner one. Seeming becomes more important than living, comprehending, absorbing; the measure is violated and trampled, and the end and the means are confused. At concerts and other live performances, it often comes to the point that the majority perceive what is happening through the lenses of cameras and phones, in order to then watch everything on a laptop or in their own profile on social networks. Contact with nature or architecture gives way to an attempt to make a history of their own contact with them, empty from the inside, but with an impressive exterior. Finally, this same narrative effect is served by the pursuit of material success, possession of things and their specific brands, physical attractiveness and certain lifestyles, for they allow people to create in-demand narratives. The system of values and goal-setting, the picture of the whole existence turns out to be dictated by the need to create popular stories and drug addiction from the sweet intoxication given by them.
The effect of narrative and social networks as one of the most primitive spaces of its realization are in no way presented here as something bad. On the contrary, their nature outlined above reinforces the need to work on the richness of one's own speech and other means of constructing stories, on the conscious improvement of the tools of description that will be able to reveal and embody the beauty of the moment, for description is ultimately creation. They are tools, but at the same time it must be remembered that any tool, even the most beautiful, in the hands of a fool becomes evil and a weapon of destruction, including self-destruction. In order not to reveal the destructiveness inherent in it, as in any thing, its use should be moderate, conscious and controlled. “Everything is poison and all medicine; both are determined by the dose,”Paracelsus used to say. The art of living, as the great ancient Greeks understood two thousand years before him, is the art of finding a measure.
Promotional video:
© Oleg Tsendrovsky
