Hanging by a (Narrative) Thread: Friendship in Post-Truth ‘Murica
I have this childhood friend, who I’ll call “C” from here on out for the sake of expediency. Growing up, she was intelligent, popular, and ridiculously attractive. Her parents were wealthy. C had a buoyant personality and more friends in high school than I have had in my entire life, total. Some people really do have everything (I’m not jealous. Really.). Somehow, she has ended up being my oldest friend; we have known each other since elementary school, which puts her rectangularly in a category of one. Note: this is something I never expected to happen, as throughout our childhoods, we didn’t speak and weren’t close. The situation is akin to the prom queen deciding that she’s cool with some random dude in her Spanish class and wants to be friends for 20+ years. Life is weird.
We text every so often, with multi-month breaks here and there. Mostly, we talk about politics and our respective personal lives. One of the things I love most about C remains her irrepressible curiosity and openness. In spite of our differences, C and I have almost always retained a mutual respect for one another, and in some ways have grown closer because of those differences. This, I feel, is rarefied ground these days.
Recently, though, we haven’t been speaking much.
If the Washington Post is still to be believed, our esteemed President Donald J. Trump lied 8,158 times during his first two years in office. Much has been made of this number and the fact we do indeed live in the worst timeline, so I won’t dive into its significance. Equally, media members have made much fuss about our so-called “post-truth” world and how this breakdown in agreement on the importance of facts, and what facts even are, is a sign of the coming zombie apocalypse / nuclear war / devastating famine.
To add to the confusion, there’s the “filter bubble” phenomenon, in which people are increasingly participating solely in stratified groups based on interest, personal opinion, or other subjective criteria. Their downsides include an unwillingness to engage with those who disagree with one’s personal perspective, and (I think) an increasing sense of loneliness and emptiness driven by the hands-off nature of these platforms.
We type, text, snap, and insta more than we speak, listen, see, and connect. At its core, social media creates a paradigm where we are all about the projections we put forth — now more than ever. Human beings have been trying to convince other human beings of their importance, validity, and worthiness since the beginning of time. Cruel irony that mastering the skill of projection has left us all less convinced than ever that any of it is real.
However, these bubbles also provide people a certain sense of righteousness and solidarity, and in general have been implicitly deemed worth-it by society in our acceptance of them. We have an incredible wealth of information and the ability to communicate like never before in human history, which is pretty fucking dope if you stop to think about it. We have just unfortunately done so at the price of our empathy and personal connection. Alone as human beings are becoming as they hide behind screens and engage with others through the relative safety of technology, Facebook and Instagram well and truly have murdered traditional social networks. Go figure.
All of which is to say: real or not, our subjective opinions matter more now than they ever have. This isn’t news, or really even that controversial in our post-Trump world. Where it becomes a problem, then, is once we stop constructing these bubbles, and when they start constructing us.
The dirty secret of human life on this planet is that no one really knows anything. Sure, we have plenty of scientists, philosophers, politicians, and executives who will scream that they do, to anyone that will listen (and sell you a book while they’re at it). But at the end of the day, even the Scientific Method and the mathematics that underpin most of our understanding of our universe and world are based on models— which are quite different from facts. These are tools we have invented to help us understand our broader world, and while our collective knowledge has certainly held true thus far, but that doesn’t mean it always will.
This isn’t an ontological question; more of an existential one. The more we learn, particularly in fields such as Physics and Psychology, the more reason we have to believe that we construct our perception of the world; it is not there inherently. As human beings, we are creatures of meaning. We write songs, conduct research, go looking for answers in endless space filled with billions of galaxies. It’s at the very core of what we are.
We are, surely, desperate for answers.
Filter bubbles provide this meaning for a great many people today. Whether you value the latest political goings-on, or Cardi B’s most recent twerking video, or the latest technological developments, you will inevitably run up against the classic human problem: how are you spending your limited time? If you spend the majority of your time in a given community, that will become what you know, to the degree that members of most online subcultures share largely predictable traits. If you’re into the Silicon Valley tech scene, I can guess fairly accurately what you’re into. Ditto if you’re a Republican. Or an artist. I can likely guess much about who you admire, what side of any given social issue you are on, and what you spend your money on. You are, truly, what you eat, and the subcultures you spend time with end up forming you.
This isn’t necessarily a “bad” thing. It can be enlightening to encounter new perspectives, to share pieces of yourself and your life with others who identify and understand you. There is tremendous comfort in this. Forgive me for engaging in so many generalities, but humans are also tribal animals. We need to feel understood, to belong as a unique member of a larger group, to use our gifts in service of a transpersonal whole. The only difference between now and most of human history is that we have since abandoned rock-throwing and cave-painting, and have taken our tribes online, to spread them across the world like a healing salve for the wounded. Or perhaps more like a virus, for the vulnerable.
Many of these groups and communities rely on an enemy to keep the whole charade going: Christians vs. the War on Christmas, liberals vs. conservatives, religion vs. science…and in each of them, an overwhelming desire to simplify and devalue the human beings on the “other team.” It’s a tribalism based on mass categorization, on preexisting prejudices, on reducing your fellow (hu)man to a series of worst-case scenarios they may inflict on you. This gets you motivated to fight, to battle, to both declare war and conveniently fund it for someone else who can benefit from the conflict regardless of who “wins.” You’re either in, or you’re out — and most will do anything to stay in the community of their choice. Including what they think, what actions they take, and the reasons; in summary, who they are. The entire world in 2019 seems a litany of competing puppet shows, with innumerable participants clamoring to tie strings to their own limbs and be moved at will.
C and I had a brief conversation a few weeks ago, and throughout I was confronted with various current events, seen from a perspective that was certainly not my own. I listened to her defensive arguments about now-Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh, her complaints about “the vilification of men in #MeToo culture,” and her insistence that women “often” lie about rape. It was hard, and not just because I firmly don’t agree with any of the above. It was also hard because I’ve watched C transform through the last several years in ways I find tragic and sad (but which she is fiercely proud of).
There are surely good reasons for some of her changes. She became a mother, she moved to a more-conservative suburb in a more-conservative state, and she surrounds herself in real life and online with people that reinforce her own opinions. This provides her with security, love, and acceptance — things that everyone both desires and deserves. Unfortunately (to me), she has also become more self-centered, more concerned with morally policing the behavior of other people, and less open-minded when confronted with a differing opinion. The discourse has slowly developed into a less-respectful bashing of heads between us, where it used to be a genuine look into the “other side” of life underpinned by a long friendship that supported the various disagreements.
It’s not just that we can’t agree. In a lot of ways, we never did. It’s that I have felt her slowly and methodically withdraw from my awareness, and my life. As we both grow and change in life, I have watched this fierce and intelligent girl turn into a defensive, angry woman. I suppose this happens to a great many people, especially in the current polarized environment we find ourselves in.
But to me, this is a true loss. C was nothing else if not unique and someone I highly valued having in my life. I now recognize that person has been destroyed, by a willingness to belong and an online community that is enthusiastic to take her (and many other alienated and disillusioned people) in.
The deterioration of truth, and the idea that if nothing else, we can all agree on the objective “facts” of our collective situation has left us blind and screaming into the dark with nothing concrete to solve this most basic and human of problems. What’s worse, we can no longer hold hands to chase away the shadows of our mortality, of uncertainty, of fear. Instead, we tell ourselves that everything is fine, and the people we place around us nod their heads. We cast off our friends for not being willing to shout the same words as us, and for not sharing our convictions. We demand conformity in both body and mind, and spend our remaining years wondering why nothing gets better and why everything seems so…rote. We create a billion different realities and project them onto others, desperate for others to join us and agree that we aren’t, in fact, frightened and clueless. Same as we’ve always done, really, except now, we’re even more alone than ever. Hiding behind a screen, tapping away in the glowing reverie of all our self-importance.
If only we had a friend to help.
