Recently I started feeling a little glum about my aging blah hair. I
thought I would just change it up a little. Maybe colour it and trim a little.
But I was very broke and vain and don't like to admit I need help and I'd coloured
my hair in the past and it was okay, so what was the big deal? So I found a box
of colour I thought I could trust (not the cheapest and not the most expensive,
but a brand I'd trusted in the past) and went to work.
Perhaps I should have talked to my husband about this first. Because the
whole choosing to colour issue was largely due to a need to talk about my
self-image and have a real person help me come to terms with what I was
struggling with and come up with a plan that would really help. But no,
straight to the store for a box of instant pick me up. After all, why talk to a
real person or even the professionals about your hair? It would be too
expensive. I've got this.
It was okay. Kind of. But it was
really dark - darker than I wanted. Not ugly, thankfully, but just not quite
what I had envisioned. Did I stop at that point and talk to my husband to see
what he thought? Not really. Do I trust him? Absolutely. So why didn't I?
Vanity. So I decided what would fix it would be a few highlights - just a few
subtle, tasteful highlights. And I've done them before only a few years ago.
What could go wrong? Off to the store again. But remember there's a strict
budget at play. So I found a sachet of highlighting powder and opted to buy a
small bottle of peroxide developer. I'm not a hairdresser. I have no
professional training. But I pay attention and I'm a smart person so I should
be able to work this out. I can go outside the box this time because I don't
need to spend a lot for too much product anyway. There are two options - a 20
volume and a 30 volume solution. I go with the 20 thinking it will be less
harsh and work just fine. I go home congratulating myself on finding an
inexpensive solution to the darker than desirable hair and mix up the product.
It makes quite a bit more than I realised. I probably should have only done
half of it, but it's too late now. I'll just go easy and throw out what I don't
use. It was still less than half the cost of the cheapest box kit.
So the careful parting and sectioning of the hair begins. It's harder
than I remember. It takes a long time too. And I know I need to work quickly or
some of the hair will be really bleached by the time I get done with the last
strands. I have a dumb idea. Isn't ombré a thing? It might look really good.
I've still got lots of length to work with and I can always cut off whatever I
think I need to. So I go for it. I've got curly hair. It's really forgiving.
It'll be fine. (Vanity again) At no point in this process do I remember that my
hair pulls red naturally and that there have been serious wobbles in the past.
I just boldly go where I’ve gone before.
Not fine. So not fine. Turns out the 20 volume is milder but that also
means that it doesn't strip the colour to a true blond the way the 30 probably
would have. I get this really distinctive ginger colour happening. And because
of the whole ombré thing it's really rather bad. I don't know what to do. So I
panic. And trim. And call my husband to go out to a local chemist and find me a
solution to make it go away. So my poor husband has to wander aisles of hair
product looking for something that will work while seeking guidance via the
phone because I'm too embarrassed to leave the house. He ends up with a bottle
of toning shampoo and another box of colour as a last resort. The shampoo helps
slightly but not quite enough. So the decision is made to cut about four inches
at this point. And my husband has to lend a shaking hand to make sure it's even
at that back. No one dies, and it becomes manageable. And the second box of
colour sits on the shelf waiting until it is needed because I suspect if I
colour it again at this point it might all fall out just to round out the
learning experience.
What exactly happened here? I started down an inauthentic path to
validate myself. I'm aging. I'm getting grayer. I haven't been to a hairdresser
in years. Instead of talking to real people about my real insecurity, I tried
to fix it all myself by seeking a way to disguise my reality. And I started
thinking about how easy it is to do that in every aspect of our lives. We
primp, we pose, we purchase. And most of it is to simply disguise our reality.
We want to seem like we know what we're doing, that we belong here with all the
beautiful, talented, smart, funny, athletic, amazing people. And we do belong,
but as ourselves and not in an edited or augmented version.
So I've been thinking about authenticity lately. We tweet; we Instagram;
we hashtag; we blog; we represent ourselves as favourably as we can to be
followed/liked/friended. Our world has created selfie addicts and individuals
that cannot stop checking their phone to see if someone has reacted to their
latest post. Social media presence has replaced the gold star sticker of our
first years at school. This isn’t new. There are passages of the New Testament
that detail how some of the Jewish leaders believed the Saviour but couldn’t
bring themselves to openly follow Him for fear of losing their status within
the circles of power and influence. Our world runs on validation and approval.
We’re wired to seek respect and approval. But we have a new stage and its being
carefully designed to lure.
Mauricio Delgado is an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers
University in New Jersey. He poses the following:
“The same brain areas [that are
activated for food and water] are activated for social stimuli. This can be a
smile, someone telling you you’re doing a great job or you’re trustworthy, or
you’re a nice person, or even merely cooperating with somebody. All of these
social ‘reinforcers’ are abstract but show similar activity in the reward
centers of the brain. This suggests that, perhaps, if you’re getting positive
feedback in social media—‘likes’ and shares and retweets—it’s a positive
‘reinforcer’ of using social media, and one that allows you to, a.) get the
positive effects of it, and, b.) return to it seeking out more social
reinforcement… Often, if you have the
earliest predictor of a reward—a sign of a social media alert, like your phone
buzzing—you get a rush of dopamine from that condition stimulus. That might
trigger you to go check out the outcome, to see what it is. That type of
reinforcement is something that you now seek out.”
Delgado, M.R. & Dilmore, J.G. (2008) Social and emotional
influences on decision-making and the brain. Minn.
J.L. Sci & Tech., 9 (2): 899-912.
Marketers are actually increasingly using this strategy to get us to buy
their product or service. They are using our brain's natural inclinations to
motivate us to purchase and promote simultaneously. And the pattern is intentionally
addictive to work effectively to sell product. Here's a pretty good article
written by a psychology PhD named Susan Weinshenk who teaches the psychology
behind these ideas for a living and advises high profile corporations in the
art of manipulating behaviour. She explains our natural addiction to the social
media cycle really well.
I think the saddest thing is recognising this behaviour in me. It happens
when I'm bored or disinterested in what's going on around me, and I find myself
checking my phone. Several weeks ago I forced myself on my morning commute to
not check my phone for the whole trip and simply notice my environment. It was
pretty sobering to realise how difficult it actually was. It took more effort
and physical engagement. It's so much easier to forego that in favour of the
'quick hit' a Facebook scroll can give us. Because my husband will often text
as we head our separate ways in the morning I’m pretty used to waiting for that
text. Not responding to the quiet little 'ding' was much harder than I'd like,
but I was able to check when I got to my destination minutes later and no
feelings were damaged in the process.
The compulsive nature of this interaction is bad enough, but what has
been bothering me lately is the misleading and misrepresentation that we all
engage in quite naturally in the process. We say things on social media that we
would never say face to face to someone we care about. We voice opinions
strongly online that we wouldn't be likely to stand on a crowded street corner
yelling at those who don't agree. We engage in online tantrums and heckling
that are just mean-spirited. We pretend to be something we're not because the
artificial reinforcement of our ideas has become more important than real
meaningful relationships. There are few real consequences for our online
behaviour in most cases. When you can number your 'friends/followers' in the
thousands, what difference does it make it one or two 'unfriend' you?
Conversely, we take great satisfaction in unfriending or unfollowing someone
that posts something we don't like or agree with. This behaviour isn't new.
People have stopped talking to other people ever since time began, and now we get
to do it with a powerful sense of righteous indignation and
justification.
There is an egotism and self-absorption to all of this. We have allowed
ourselves to believe that what we think or say is important to the world at
large. There are 7 billion people on this planet. How many of them will you
really meet in your life? How many of them will you really know personally? If
one of those seven billion who we're never likely to meet finds our online
presence, is it an accurate representation? Or did we go through a whole bunch
of possibilities before selecting the most flattering shot for our profile pic even
if it's a couple of years old and almost doesn’t look like us? And perhaps
sometimes we share links to really amazing articles we may or may not have read
entirely, but do we humbly acknowledge that we don't have the eloquence
ourselves, or just post and wait for the digital pat on the back for finding it
and passing it along?
I'm not entirely sure anyone fully understands how the power of social
media works yet. It seems to be a work in progress even now. While it has a great
deal of marketing power, I'm not convinced it’s very good at changing public
policy or even the world. So many of us think we’re changing the world by
liking or sharing or daring our ‘friends’ to copy and paste this statement into
their status. We won’t cure cancer, eliminate homelessness, house refugees,
defeat domestic violence, end abortions or achieve world peace via social media
no matter how much we want to believe it. These are human problems and must be
solved by humans. And until our social presence is more honestly human, nothing
will change substantially. The truth is that social media is now largely 21st
century junk mail and opinion vomit. What I suspect was meant to be an arena to
connect and share philosophies, ideas and experiences in a safe,
non-judgemental way has become something very different. Too often what we choose
to share is intended to polarise and distance instead of educate and inform in
a respectful manner. We’re looking for a reaction and the stronger the better
because that creates more buzz. But it’s not good buzz. It’s contentious and
often misinformed and doesn’t foster understanding. Often we post so others can
see how amazing our life is. We post to prove we’re right or smarter than
someone else. We post to be seen. We post to belong in an artificial world. And
our artificial world sifts it all and then feeds us back information it thinks
we should see so it can manipulate us even further. Some days I resent the
intrusion and the waste it is gradually becoming. It’s become a like a
cluttered digital bulletin board that someone really needs to clean up.
Personally I find that social media is becoming a lot of work to keep
authentic in my life. My feeds are being taken over by the marketing. It takes
so long to unfollow and hide all the things that I don't care about that I
don't even post that often anymore. Lately I tend to just post pictures of
things/places and other people, but rarely pictures of me. The fear of someone
taking offence (if I post without thinking) is always there, which means I don’t
like voicing any opinions. So I'm making some social media rules for myself
this year.
#1 - Primum non
nocere - 'first do no harm' - I'm going to try harder not
to post or comment until I have thought about how anyone reading it might
react. And if I decide to like or share someone else's post, it's because I
would be happy to do so in person with someone I've never met who might feel
very differently.
#2 - Only share
things I have made an effort to authenticate - if I don't know where it
comes from, I need to find out and make sure it's actually true. I need to
exercise due diligence in my fact-checking.
#3 - No fishing - this is going to
be hard, but I suspect it's important. We like to have others acknowledge our
joy/pain/success/discomfort. We really like that pat on the head or that gold
star. If I share a photo of food, it will only be because it was delicious. I
won't complain about service I received or didn't receive. If I share a
success, it will be accompanied by a qualifier giving credit where it is due -
I NEVER succeed by myself. There are always others that helped it happen.
And that's about it for now, I think. Time to grow up and accept who I
really am and avoid misrepresentation. The posts could very well thin out this
year because of it, but I'm okay with that. I need to stop checking social
media so I can check into real life and work on my authenticity. Because at
this stage in my life, I think it's time to be more honest with myself and
others. I am nearly 50 years old. I am often tired. I could be in better
shape but lack the time and motivation to really commit to that right now. I
eat stupid things sometimes because they make me feel better. I read a lot of
novels because they help me escape from reality and words are like a drug when
they fit together well. I probably believe I’m smarter than I actually am. I
often hide from the outside world because it’s so much work to pretend I am an
adult who knows what they’re doing. I don’t need to filter or augment that
reality to belong. None of us do. We belong because we are here. We belong
because we are flawed. We belong because this is our life and we're all living
it together. But yeah, it's time to get real. No more pretending. It just makes
everyone dissatisfied and unhappy.
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