Social Media, Celebrity Culture, and Knowing

“I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!”
― Emily Dickinson

“Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored. There are games to be won.
And the magical things you can do with that ball
will make you the winning-est winner of all.
Fame! You'll be as famous as famous can be,
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don't
Because, sometimes they won't.

I'm afraid that some times
you'll play lonely games too.
Games you can't win
'cause you'll play against you.”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!

The whole aim of the world is to be known, to be seen. We all want to be held in another’s gaze, recognized, considered, affirmed, acknowledged. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Myspace. All the likes, the status updates, the comments, the notifications, all a means to see and be seen. This human need is taken to a pathological degree in our celebrity culture where people will do just about anything to be seen, to be acknowledged, no matter what the reason, whether notorious or ignoble. In 2014 the individual, which once was at the forefront of American ideals, has been overwhelmed. The individual, that fundamental building block of democracy, has been silenced, ignored by the corporate-owned media, kept in poverty by corporations in league with our corrupt politicians, robbed by insurance companies, and bankrupted by the higher education system and the health care industry. The rise of “reality” television has charted the disenfranchisement of the individual. The very name “reality” show is an attempt to further undermine the everyday lives of people, who begin to think that if they are not the star of their own petty show, feel they may be doing something wrong. Why are they not rich? Why are they not living in a mansion? Or in the words of the Talking Heads, “Where is that large automobile? You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house. You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife…” If we are not rich and famous we must be failures. The last refuge of the self in the midst of all this denial of self is to flail, to whimper, to cry out on some tasteless reality television show either competing against other contestants for a husband or eating cow testicles from a glass tank. This is what we have been reduced to: sad and empty beings devoid of higher values, our humanity reduced, commodified, sold to the lowest bidder, often given away for free. We live in a society where corporations are made people and people are made numbers. Where what once was a virtue is now made vice. In our heightened obscurity, we grow desperate. We grow needy. We want to be seen. We want to be known. We want to be famous. How else will our individuality be known in the cacophony of voices vying for prime time? It is not enough to be known by our families, our loved ones, our friends. In a culture where excess is the norm, escalation is the rule. We want to be stars.

Our present state of affairs is scandalous. Everyday people are famous. Largely unjustified—Andy Warhol’s prediction come true. We fight, scrape, scramble our way to the top of the trash heap for 15 minutes of fame in an ephemeral culture that is incapable of long-term memory, a culture that values escapism, frivolity, and distraction. But reality television is not the only phenomenon to chronicle the de-valuing of the individual—the rise of spectator sports also provides keen testimony. Noam Chomsky writes, "And what all these things look like is that people just want to use their intelligence somehow, and if you don't have a lot of technology and so on, you do other things. Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way -- so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they're in the hands of the rich folks. So what's left? Well, one thing that's left is sports -- so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter." We are cogs in a corporate wheel—expendable. Numbers on a ledger. Kant’s nightmare come true: we are merely a means to an end. Tools. Tools in the hands of immoral or amoral monsters. What is left to do? Become famous or infamous, retreat obsessively into social media, or abandon the culture altogether, or perhaps the healthiest option of all: Temet nosce, or know thyself.

It seems to me the kind of knowing that social media and celebrity culture often offer is a poor sort of knowing. All surface, no depth. Is it being seen? Is it seeing? Is it truly holding others in our gaze? There are certainly ways to authentically connect with social media. I’m not sure the same can be said for celebrity culture. But we can certainly be skillful about the ways in which we connect online. But more importantly what I see as in our current culture is that with all the fame and celebrity what it always brings me back to is myself. I’m brought into relief more clearly the more I see the extravagance of celebrity culture and the demi-gods of social media. I do not see them clearly and they do not see me. Shows like Catfish are popular because who really knows who it is behind a face, an image, a profile? It is always uncertain. We all are a little uneasy about who we connect with virtually. But one thing we can be certain of, and one thing that our culture seems to be preventing is knowledge of self. Instead, we retreat into fantasy both of our own making and that of others’ making.

The serial killer. The socialite. The celebrity. Those famous for being famous. All placed on the same altar of fame. Ours is a culture turned upside down. As Howard Zinn writes, “I start from the supposition that the world is topsy turvy. That things are all wrong…I start with the supposition that we don’t have to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that things are all upside down.” Our culture is dis-eased. We are diseased from the inside out, and the outside in. We are bombarded from all fronts. Merit starves while mania prospers. Infamy is equated with achievement. It doesn’t matter how or why we are famous, so long as we are. Jiddu Krishnamurti reminds us, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." We are sick.

Exhausted by celebrity culture and social media, I have opted to minimize my time spent on social media. I no longer have cable, so celebrity culture is less of an influence and I ignore most news reports about the life of stars. How does knowing that Robin Thicke and his wife are separated add meaning to my life? It doesn’t. I don’t need that kind of distraction. The more time I spend consuming information like that the less time I spend living and experiencing my own life in a constructive and meaningful way. Philip Seymour Hoffman recently died, an actor whose body of work I followed from the very beginning. I loved his acting and his ability to create a character that both repelled and attracted the viewer. His commitment to a character was workman like, and yet, at time transcendent. But as much as I love his work, his tragic death really does not affect my life. Will I miss his films? Yes. Will I lament in some fleeting moment in the future, perhaps over a glass of wine with friends, the films and characters he might have created? Undoubtedly. But I didn’t know Philip Seymour Hoffman. And he didn’t know me. And this is crux of the matter: knowing. I would much rather know myself intimately for one single moment than be distracted or entertained by the lives of other people for ten thousand years. My life is inherently valuable to me. So is yours. Being known and knowing others is beautiful and one of the most wonderful parts of being alive. But knowing ourselves is the whole point of living. If we do not engage in knowing ourselves, we risk missing the whole journey of life, which is essentially becoming who you are. In the poem, “In the End,” Tara Sophia Mohr writes:
“In the end
you won’t be known
for the things you did
or what you built,
or what you said.
You won’t even be known
for the love given
or the hearts saved,
because in the end you won’t be known.
You won’t be asked, by a vast creator full of light:
What did you do to be known?
You will be asked: Did you know it,
this place, this journey…”

Do you know your life? Do you know your place in the world? Are you alive to every step of your miraculous human journey?
Do you know yourself?

On Batman

Batman has always been the touchstone to renew myself. He is one of the greatest characters in literary history. His own mythology awakes in us our own human potential. Sure, you might say he’s just a character, and you’d be right. But characters have power. They inspire. They create a space for us to imagine our selves better, finer, stronger, wiser. They remind us of our highest natures. We can always make ourselves over. It's never too late to change your life.

Batman is my Sisyphus, my Prometheus, eternally prowling the night on his impossible quest to rid Gotham city of crime. And we all have our impossible quests. But even though it is impossible, even though one day we will die, we have to commit to this world, this time, this moment, and make a difference wherever we are. Batman is my Buddha. He was my Buddha even before I knew who Buddha was. And I suspect he’ll be along for the ride throughout my life time. I can’t imagine my life without him as strange as that sounds. As a symbol, Batman is an organizing point for me. It may sound silly to some, and I admit it sometimes does to me too, but I think we all have one character or some token of our childhood that reminds us of that liminal moment, that threshold moment, when one world ended and another began. When we lost some of our innocence, or all of it. For me, Batman was waiting in between those worlds and guided me into the next one. It was a darker world, sure, but it was the real one.

God made us and we made God,
and neither the fisherman nor the river
know why.

Man is a being stitched together by Time and Eternity, neither fixed or immutable--Time remembering itself as Eternity--a monumental crisis of consciousness.

The best kept secret of American superhero comics has always been the aspirational and inspirational ideals of superheroes to readers. In the same way Bruce Wayne uses Batman to push the limits of the expression of his humanity, readers have used Batman for the same purposes. Superheroes are the repositories of extraordinary examples of moral and evolutionary volition. This is why they endure.

Sometimes a thing exists that is so strong you must strive against it without even knowing why or how. Some things attract annihilation like the earth attracts falling stars.

Karmageddon or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Calm

Most people have at one time in their lives been blindsided, perhaps in the middle of a mundane Thursday afternoon, by a life’s culmination of poor and unskillful decisions most of which were made unconsciously. It seems in that moment that the dark part of the universe, which had been minding its own business torturing other poor souls, saw you out of the corner of its eye and fixed its terrible gaze on you. It is then that everything you thought you were, the life you had created, the relationships you had cultivated, the career you worked so hard for, all fall away and what’s left is a smoking pile of rubble that resembles more a Jackson Pollack painting than your life. This dark synchronicity of monstrous proportions is of course your very own karmageddon. The one that had been waiting for you for years. And everybody gets one (if you’re lucky). Every bad thing you ever did, every poor choice you ever made all seem to turn around at once and return to where they came from: You.

Karma is a concept that is readily used in American culture today even by Christians, Muslims, and Jews. In some ways it has become a religiously neutral concept despite its Hindu and Buddhist roots. We all employ the concept of “karma” (usually threatening someone by reminding them that “what goes around comes around!”) but despite its popular use it is also one of the least understood concepts in popular culture. Just because you (and here is an extreme example) murdered someone in your past life doesn’t mean you will get murdered in this life or that if you were a thief in a past life you will be robbed blind every other week in this one. Thankfully it doesn’t work that way. Whatever “unfortunate” thing happens to you now is actually a good thing (I know, bear with me a second—this is good news I promise). When you have something “bad” happen to you this means you are finally healthy enough in this life to be able to metabolize the bad karma from your previous lives. You’re finally strong enough to endure the kind of karmic trials that will burn off your bad karma. Basically think of “unfortunate” incidents as rebirth control: an opportunity for you to burn off that bad karma and cease being reborn altogether.

But karma is also not also not punishment, and suffering isn’t necessarily a result of bad karma. As Buddha’s first noble truth reminds us, “All life is sorrowful.” We may suffer, but it doesn’t have to be because of anything we did. Sometimes bad things just happen and as my friend Renea Frey reminds us, “karma is the certainty that you will be presented with opportunities to learn from past mistakes. It is a teaching, it is not punishment… We can't ever *know* all of the strands of karma that converge in any moment (unless we are fully enlightened) so it is impossible to say if what we are experiencing is the result of "good karma" or "bad karma" since we can't see all of the possible ways that things might have turned out otherwise.” All we can do is be mindful of our conditioned minds and attempt to condition them towards more enlightened responses to difficult situations. Pain is inevitable, but our suffering is entirely a choice. We may lose our jobs or our car break down, but it is always our choice to respond with equanimity, letting go of our expectations that things go a certain way. When we are present with things as they are, not as we wish them to be, there is great freedom and clarity. Karma presents that opportunity for us. In every moment it teaches us to choose peace or suffering. No matter which we choose, it is a choice that transforms.

Of course you don’t have to buy into the concept of karma and the whole idea of past lives and futures lives and all the rebirth stuff. In fact, I’m not sure I do either (although there is some tantalizing evidence out there). But one way to think of it that may be helpful is that every moment of your life is a life. Every state of consciousness you inhabit is a single life that you have the opportunity to make more virtuous and more complete. In each of those moments is the chance for you to choose to become more whole, more loving, and more compassionate. For every time you choose fullness over brokenness you train your mind to become that much fuller next time when a similar moment arises that challenges you. The mind is largely a reflexive organ anyway and we all have unskillful tendencies that have been deeply ingrained in us from our childhood we realize must be corrected. The sooner we see our conditioned negative tendencies the sooner we can get about the business of correcting them and showing up in our lives as the wonderfully virtuous and fully awake humans that we naturally are.

So the next time your car breaks down in the middle of the interstate in rush hour traffic, or your boss fires you after ten years of service, or your significant other dumps you, don’t worry and calm down (or try to anyway); you’re looking at an opportunity to meet these challenges with grace, wisdom, and awareness. In doing so you not only create good karma for yourself but you’re no longer adding bad karma that you’ll have to burn off in your next life. So make it easy on yourself in your next life. Don’t be there.

Oh, and the last one out cut off the lights.