Ten Years


Dear Eugene,

Selfies, ways we look at ourselves to dictate how others should look at us, the propaganda of one.

There is a "Ten Year Challenge" going on encouraging people to post two of their own pictures side-by-side, one from 2009 and one this year.  Anyone who can hand in a good report card of course is overjoyed.  No one needs a reason to be vain but it's good to have one and make it legit.

Much has been said about the relationship between social media and self worth, but we don't really need studies to tell us anyway.  What good is more naysaying going to do us if we can't even tell there really is no "challenge" to speak of just for posting propaganda ten years apart?  That living through ten years is always a challenge and if we think two dressed-up images of ourselves would suffice to speak about it we are doing injury, inanity, injustice to our mind, body, and soul?

There was a time when traveling is a dream, getting out of the backwater from where we came a collective fantasy, the ticket usually a coalition of some sort, handing ourselves over to the hand of a trusted one, friend or lover, and onward together we move.  One day we'll live in Paris.  But that day is not today.  Not yet.  Hang tight and hang on to each other, and one day we might make it there.

So there is a language of yearning and envisioning, and if there was "social media" back then, that's the sort of language one would cultivate as one cultivates life itself.

But now there is a way for us to have it all before living enough or even any.  "Travel Bug."  "Foodie."  These are some of the descriptions we give ourselves.  What first captivated us captures our way of living and speaking and finally encapsulates our self-imagination into a reductive presence.

A couple ate all they can, traveled all they wanted, exhausted all the possibilities of happiness and with that extinguished all obscenity (so they thought) of longing, before calling themselves officially husband-and-wife, what a nightmare they are going to live into.  Ten months of marriage is going to be a challenge.

Let alone ten years.

Yours, Alex

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