The Memeing of Life

Today's musing is on memes. Not the funny ones that have a cat picture with text that reads "me, when <insert experience that looks funny with cat picture>;" just the simple ones consisting of a quote, sometimes paired with a picture and aimed to share a deep truth or insight. 

I've been contemplating this online phenomenon for many years with mixed emotions. On the one hand, as an open and impressionable truth seeker, I've been attracted to the ready-served sound-bite wisdom found on social media. If nothing else, they'd wake up my brain to see things in a new way.  At the same time, my inner silly philosopher comic couldn't help but parody the prevalence of quotes everywhere. Below are two from 2013 and 2016, which I recently redrew in my new comic style.​

Needless to say, I had conflicting feelings about memes, struggling to reconcile the two parts of me - one that felt like I was really finding new information in heart felt sharing online, and another that saw, for one, the irony of looking outside myself for answers.

So finally, this past month I decided to take a stab at writing down something coherent about memes when, for the umpteenth time, I stumbled on a quote that gave me the knee-jerk response: "this is a perfect example of how a momentary personal truth without context is often just a half-truth, no better and sometimes worse than a lie." It read:

Surround yourself with people who talk about their visions, ideas and dreams, not those who talk about other people.
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You've probably heard some variation of this. The one I was most familiar with was: great mind discuss ideas, good minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. And as an abstract thinker who has spent a lot of time isolated away from human connection, it was easy for me to jump on board. Not only did it sound true, but it meant I fell into the “great” category most of the time. I’ve never been a big talker of people - partly out of a deep respect for privacy, but also due to my natural inclination to focus on ideas and abstractions, quite a novice at intimacy. 

But recently, as I've been healing some developmental traumas with somatic therapy, I've started admiring those who talk about people because I see in them a prioritization in their hearts towards relationships with others, arguably the most important ingredient for a fulfilling life, and a stark contrast to my own existential pursuit of making sense of things in the abstract with hyper-focus on goals, often at the expense of connection and intimacy. In other words, for someone like me, that quote was potentially bad advice.

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I see in those who talk a lot about other people a prioritization in their hearts towards relationships, towards intimacy and connection with others.

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Of course this doesn't mean I think gossip-like talking about people is good, which is likely one of the points the quotes above are trying to make. Or that I believe we shouldn't talk about ideas or dreams or surround ourselves with those that do. It's about balance, and depending on which extreme you reside, different kinds of encouragements are required to bring you to equilibrium. You don't give everyone the same medication, why would you give everyone the same advice? 

So when I stumbled upon the meme above I was actually offended at what a trite and gross oversimplification the post was, as I had recently been learning so much about social intelligence from a friend that talked a lot about people and relationships, something I vitally needed more of in my life. I saw how this meme was a clear demonstration of what so many personal epiphanies and insights become when reduced to a meme or quote floating around social media: without context, they can be quite meaningless, and potentially harmful because we are likely going to just make them mean what we want them to mean, while mistakenly assuming we've found some sort of hard and fast truth.

This experience also speaks to a broader issue around social media, specifically how the algorithms, programmed to give you "more of what you want," also result in keeping you in a tunnel vision of thoughts and ideas that reinforce and strengthen your own beliefs, beliefs that might actually benefit from being challenged and shaken up from time to time.

Of course, this is an age old phenomenon that's existed long before social media or even the internet. Our tendency to blind ourselves to contradicting evidence, to hang around likeminded folks that support our beliefs, to attract more of what we focus on, is not new. The problem with social media is that it exaggerates this already existing dynamic. It's the law of attraction on steroids with unintended side effects that, without awareness, can polarize people and keep them in delusion.

It's not that being attracted to likeminded ideas and people is bad, or that social media, in and of itself, is bad (well, it's a mixed bag given the people behind the companies running it). It's just that when we aren't aware of the larger landscape and machinations at work in the background, we can jump to conclusions that may not be grounded in reality, or in our best interest in terms of growth.

Nor do I think enjoying quotes that resonate online is a bad thing - I know I have learned a lot. But it's been at a cost when the motivation behind the searching was an insatiable emptiness; when I would walk away with the impression of just having learned new wisdom, or connected with others, when in reality I just spent hours glued to a curtailed feed aimed to keep me there and make money off my attention.

How much more embodied wisdom I might have if I just spend time in stillness, present to my body and that quiet voice of intuition,  rather than consuming the truths and thoughts of others. How much more real connection I would have if I let myself open up to people in real life. Again, it's a balance; the actions differ depending on where you are.

The take away from this isn't a profound new truth, but a call to re-empower our own inner authority and wisdom, a reminder that every wise sounding quote was simply a truth for a particular person at a particular moment in time in a particular context, and that no matter how much something resonates, it's still just a truth in the moment, not necessarily some objective reality about the world and how it works. Truth is relative and always changing, and giving any one thing too much meaning or importance may be just another distraction away from the truth in THIS totally new moment.

Ironically enough, this email is another example of this - it's my truth at this moment in time as I go through a long-needed transition of being more mindful about what's going on in my own body and less outwardly seeking some truth I think will fix me. It's an expression of my own need to spend more time connecting with others, and less in my own mind's worlds of ideas and abstractions. You may be on a different part of the spectrum, so if this doesn't resonate, trust that. Or maybe it will inspire new thoughts for you on the concept of truth, or help to remember that we don't always have to polarize in one direction or another in order to find it. Maybe it's just always here, in this new moment.

So here's to a life filled with "ANDs." To conversations about ideas AND people AND events as the situation calls for. Here's to being more present in our bodies to find our own truth, one that's evolving moment by moment. ​

Here's to accessing the present where the truth is always evolving and shifting, moment by moment by moment.