Self-Loathing

Surveys have shown again and again that we Americans don’t like ourselves. We just don’t like ourselves at all. There are things we like, people we like, and places we like, but for ourselves, we have little love.

The news of this once made His Holiness the Dalai Lama weep - when he heard that Americans largely don’t like themselves. He didn’t speak further on it at the time, but it seemed that the great well of compassion within him overflowed for this young country of relatively wealthy, well-fed and well-educated people who dislike themselves so intensely.

So of course, when I heard of the Dalai Lama's reaction, I started to think about us and the situation we’re in. And in truth, there is tremendous evidence that we are a culture of self-haters. There are also reasons why we are this way. This is what I’ve come up with.

I plan, like many others, to walk away from social media. I've tired of it. It's boring. It's intruding on my personal space. Content is getting impossibly dumb. Someone is always trying to sell me something. I feel like I'm losing my autonomy. Being online makes me feel vulnerable and exposed. There have been incidents in which people from my and my husband's past have been watching our online feeds. That makes me uncomfortable. But for now, I’m plugged in to the social media matrix with everyone else. And I don’t like it. If you’re an observer of human nature, you'll see there's content in apps like Facebook and Instagram that's hard to miss. Big giveaways: things that exhibit our self-hatred.

The social media selfie – the duck-lipped, breasts up, butt out, come hither, shot-from-above, airbrushed, digitally enhanced images that so many of us – particularly women - publish again and again on Facebook and other social media platforms – has become a sad spectacle. 

It’s made even worse in that it’s not limited to senseless teenagers, but to women and even men - mature adults in their 20s, 30s, and even beyond, who should be way past the point of believing that they need to expose their bodies in provocative ways in order to be likeable, or loveable. What these images exhibit is anything but self-approval – they’re anxious, pitiful, diversionary, and wearisome. So why do we do this to ourselves?

We are all – all of us – provoked by what we see on social media every day. Airbrushed, digitally-enhanced images create fantastical ideas that reality just can’t live up to. Take for example, a woman who is physically beautiful – model Gisele Bundchen. She hit the genetic jackpot. The combination of stature, shape, and face – all wrapped up in one human unit – occurs in one in several million births. She’s pretty much a genetic anomaly. She looks beautiful pushing a grocery cart. She looks amazing taking out the trash.

But that’s not good enough. Published images of Bundchen are digitally enhanced to lengthen her already impossibly long legs. At 36, her face has all the natural lines and wrinkles of age. These are airbrushed away. Extensions are placed in her hair, and digital enhancement further lengthens and thickens and brightens them. Her eyes and teeth are digitally whitened. Her blue eye color is amplified. Her lips are thickened, and her mouth is widened. Her neck is lengthened.

If you think about this for a minute, you’ll realize that the Bundchen we aspire to be is an illusion, and a very smart marketing ploy. The real, unenhanced Bundchen could sell a decent amount of cellulite cream. But the digitally enhanced Bundchen sells a whole lot more.

Thanks to advertisers’ discovery of digital enhancement technology, we live in a world where our expectations exceed reality. Things that are unrealistic seem real. And thanks to content-based algorithms and selection bias, our computer devices can prioritize the most unrealistic images in order to skew and distort our vision to such extremes that when we look in our mirrors, we’re disappointed by what we see. We have come to think of the most artificial images as being normal and average. This plays hard with our imaginations.

Advertisers learned a long time ago that if you can make people hate themselves, you can sell them something. When the imagination can’t be satisfied, we look to buy better lives by trying to emulate the rich, the successful, and the beautiful. And we do that. We all do it.

Deep research has shown that people who use social media daily are haunted by an internal negative commentary. We are on a treadmill, constantly striving to be happy but obviously never quite getting there. We’re always comparing ourselves to others in terms of our looks, our thinness, our wealth, our possessions, our speed, our smarts. And we always come up lacking.

I want to send a loving message to all those duck-lips/ripped abs/toilet selfies/boobs-in-your-face people out there, all those who are revealing too much of themselves in online photos, looking for our attention. You’re not going to find happiness in this. It’s the wrong kind of attention. It speaks to self-loathing, and not self-confidence. And ‘likes’ just don’t mean anything anymore, so stop wasting your time fishing for those. And as for standards of beauty? Who cares? Who. Cares. Don't you know yet that your most valuable currency lives inside you and radiates outward? All your value lies there. Believe it.

Happiness is intertwined with our community, with our loved ones, with the compassion we give others, and with our sense of kindness. It’s in being open to love – both receiving and giving - and not in objectifying our bodies and lives in a futile attempt to be desirable. Desirability has no truck with happiness.

The biggest suffering I meet is people not liking themselves and their lives. It’s a troubling situation. There are right paths to happiness, and there are wrong ones. A right way is to live a life of loving awareness. A wrong way is to project public images of ourselves that are artificial, or that don’t radiate self-respect and self-love.

Happiness is something we always recognize from our own experiences. It’s those moments when we are not wanting to be somewhere else, or someone else. It’s called ‘being in the flow’, or ‘being in the zone’. Our sense of self drops away. We’re not comparing ourselves to others. Our own ideas come to us. Nothing is forced. We don’t care at all if we look as close to perfect as camera angles, beautifying filters, and bare flesh can make us. We’re not posing. We are all in the same space together. All together, and all at once.

I think nature wants to teach us this. But technology and its marriage to corporate interests and aggressive advertisers is pulling us away from the wisdom that nature wants to give us.

So, I came up with an idea, and I’m going to do it this weekend. And I invite you to try it too. It’s just an exercise, an experiment, a way of living outside myself for a couple of days.

Let’s spend two days – Saturday and Sunday -  not looking at ourselves in a mirror at all. Here’s the thing: humans survived without mirrors for eons of time. This is not something that someone hasn’t done before. But we’ve become so obsessed with the way we look and constantly checking ourselves in mirrors that this may seem like an incredibly difficult thing to do.

I think it would be a tremendously freeing thing to try, and I’m going to do it, and report back to you. I’m not suggesting that we put down our phones too. Let’s just start with mirrors. If two days seems excessive, then try one day – 24 hours. I promise your face won’t slide off your skull. You won’t suddenly grow old. And if your significant other recoils at the sight of you without your eyebrows filled in, then set him free. You deserve better than that kind of judgement.

Living with self-hatred is hard. The world is a huge and fascinating place, but social media has reduced our experience of it to a 7-by-4-inch screen churning out images of things that don’t exist in reality. These images exist to get us to buy things we don’t need that will never do for us what we want them to. We will always find ourselves disappointed – even despairing – and we will never know why, unless we change.

Barbie xo