“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up”. Oscar Wilde
Have you ever been to a party and managed to be genuinely yourself? Without adjusting your tie or smoothing off your hair. No apprehensions when you walked, no mental counter checking of the words spoken or no suppression of overwhelming desire to laugh? I am sure most of the socially conscious people are able to understand the underlying meaning and will respond in negative. We all try to appear as the most ‘culturally sophisticated’ beings in a social gathering and neglect our ‘real selves’ entirely for a while.
And that’s precisely what happens when we sit in front of our PC and chit chat with a stranger, a colleague or even a friend on a ‘social platform’. Maybe our mental attire alters more than physical one but there are changes nonetheless.
Scientific studies too point out that a person is most comfortable when he is alone, amidst his own self or with people extremely close to him. And his level of ease declines when the number of people in his vicinity increases. Then how can one except his mind to be in a state of tranquility and natural true self in front of virtually a whole wide world??!!
The fact is that our brain automatically starts manipulating itself so as to ‘fit in’ the moment we type in www i.e., World Wide Web.
So much so for the ‘sub conscious’ state of mind.
Now, coming to the ‘conscious’ mortal chatting or putting up ‘updates’ on the various social networking sites.
Majority of us put forward our best foot much similar to how we act in our real lives when going to a marriage or a party, your first day at college or on a newly secured job. We tend to pick out the most apt words and present ourselves as a gentle, liberal friendly guy/girl even though our own genuine self maybe poles apart.
There is another class of people who believe in the mantra that virtual world is a place to crib and so they tend to pile up all their melancholy via various updates and uploads. These people are generally the ones who either suffer from an extremely low self-esteem or aren’t well adapted to the highs and lows of a life in reality.
Then there also exists a group of morons who are a malaise to the ‘virtual world’ identical to the ones we encounter in reality.
The point is that ‘whatever be the class of people, they are neither consciously nor sub-consciously themselves on any part of the World Wide Web’.
Reasons could range from our extreme dependency to easy popularity gained on social platforms. Plus it often happens that when we meet people in bone and flesh , imperfections are bound to appear while on the contrarily virtual media conceals all such human faults so the idea of faking perfect identity is not just more luring but also a sort of necessary gesture.
As Eddie Murphy said “All men are sculptors, constantly chipping away the unwanted parts of their lives, trying to create their idea of a masterpiece”.
The problem is the too much of sculpting can create even greater and more prominent flaws.
Such identity crisis is dismantling the idea of ‘being human’ and relations seem to loose their essential flavours. Unconsciously, sub-consciously and more often consciously we are engaged in preparing a ‘tasteless curry’ without emotions and reality has already taken a back seat.
I began by quoting the great Oscar Wilde, and now I would like to end it by another quote of his:
“One's real life is often the life that one does not lead”.
In the tech savvy era of ours this quote somehow seems to make a lot more sense. Don’t you think so?
PS: this is an old post which couldn't get posted on my blog due to some reasons.
PS: this is an old post which couldn't get posted on my blog due to some reasons.
