Playing Pretend
The age old game of pretend is something that, ironically, we only pretend to outgrow. As children, we construct elaborate veneers to graft upon the world around us that transform our otherwise mundane reality into one that is exciting, grants us importance, and allows for escapism into a place where we can focus on the aspects that we desire most. There are of course many examples where adults do similar things, either explicitly via things like video games and tabletop role play, or implicitly through daydreaming, mimicry, and forms of ideation.
As a person who regularly engages his imagination, I am hardly here to criticize the practice overall, even for adults. Arguably, I take “pretend” to an extreme, given my love of Dungeons and Dragons and prolific video game playing, I do my best to escape the “real” world as much as I humanly can. I lead a pretty decent life, which may seem to counter the need for escapism, but I think that for me, life is made dramatically richer when seen through the lenses of story telling. A couple great movies that illustrate the way I feel about this are Big Fish and Secondhand Lions — both, an incredible watch, if you’ve never seen them before.
Central to the concept of pretending, is substituting an augmented or entirely different reality in place for the actual reality that one lives in. It is this illusion one wraps themselves in that sustains the narrative which enhances the quality of life in the mind of the imaginer. Sometimes life can be so much better in the realm of the imagination that one starts to pour inordinate amounts of resources into their particular escape. One example where I’ve seen this happen are MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars. In Guild Wars specifically, I’ve never understood why players will spend literally hundreds of hours doing the same activity in game, over and over again (colloquially known as “grinding”) so that they can earn the requisite components necessary to create “legendary” vanity items. Only marginally better than the other high tier items in the game, legendary items are basically a bit of a status flex — it’s a way to “dress up” your character and make them otherwise a bit distinct. Certainly I can understand grinding for thing or two, but others just grind endlessly, always trying to get the next thing. For years this baffled me, to the point where I’ve confronted some of my friends and asked them why they did this — the answers I got were completely unexpected.
The Dark Side of Imagination
The few friends I asked who engaged in the endless grind for better items in games cited that, essentially, in real life they were poor, and felt like they were not in control of their circumstances. The life they led online, created a better world for themselves than they thought possible in real life. Where their actual social lives were at a stand still, in game, their social lives flourished with others doting on them and looking to join them in tackling various portions of the game. They were able to make their avatar look exactly as desired, decorate personal spaces to their liking, and show rank and status within their social circles, whereas in real life they could barely afford underwear, lived in a trailer, and were on disability, or being humiliated by their parents for “failure to launch.”
I had always assumed there was something foolish underlying their inclinations, but instead I found sympathy. I think we can all relate to feeling “stuck” in some fashion in our lives, and having a game where life is better inside of it, is an amazing gift. Is there a point, however, where engaging in this sort of fantasy goes too far? I think we’re able to draw some obvious lines, like when someone could be fixing their actual life but instead is choosing to dwell within a digital environment at the expense of their outside life. Or, perhaps when someone’s gaming habits cause them to be neglectful of their partner or children. But are there more subtle lines? And, what about for non-gamers?
It’s been my observation that social media has enabled a similar sort of fantasy lives for its users. Here, participants will live their lives in accordance with whatever popular trends there are right now, and instead of experiencing the gifts life has to offer directly, they will instead try to capture photos and video of a life that will make others jealous, be it via signaling status, pandering to trends, or constructing a false narrative around one’s actual life. So pervasive is this practice, that it would appear that the vast majority of those who post on social media do this in some shape or form — it’s practically mandatory.
Take my wife, for instance, while she’s not one to engage in trends or “challenges,” she will absolutely post about large gifts form me, nice purses she gets, vacations we go on, and similar topics. She one hundred percent admits to this being to demonstrate to other people that she lives a good life, and that it is in response to the one-up culture from others on the platform. One-upping your friends and neighbors is as old as time immemorial, but competing en masse on the internet, and through constructing an uninspectable false narrative from behind a keyboard, that’s a whole new level.
What’s the harm, you might ask — it’s not hurting anyone right? Everybody’s doing it. And hey, my wife still spends time with me, she’s a good person, and no creatures were harmed in the production of her facebook posts. I believe the harm occurs on several levels: first, my wife is enabling and supporting this culture of competitive comparison which ultimately leads to unhealthy outcomes — creating unsustainable standards and tension in relationshisp where her friends are trying to keep up but can’t. We out earn most of my wife’s friends and my wife is better at playing the status jockeying game and isn’t used to losing; eventually, this could come to bite her should she be confronted with someone who is able to flaunt more than she does. But, whatever, this is small potatoes compared to the rest of the list, a little bump to the ego to send someone back to reality is beneficial in the long haul for someone who is otherwise stable.
A second, even more insidious harm, arises when you stop enjoying experiences themselves and instead focus on capturing shareable moments. I’m the first to call “bullshit” on the forced serendipity of “one time only” experiences, like a guitarrist performing on the street as you’re passing by. The number of things where “you had to be there” is vastly diminished in this era of ubiqutious and near-homogenous access to technology. Yes, it’s an amazing circumstance you walked into, but nothing about it needed to only happen once, it can easily be recorded and recreated, with most if not all of the same feelings from having been there in person — but only if you were in fact actually there. People spend so much time capturing moments through their phones that they’re barely present in them themselves, and on top of this, ruining things for those around them. A moment lived is better than a moment captured, and if you can unobtrusively do both, it’s worth it sometimes, but “being there” almost always comes first.
The third, and final harm, I see, which is the most insideous, is when social media users effectively construct lies and publish them as the narrative they want others t0 ascribe to. So maybe there’s a beautiful sunset over the beach, but in reality those in the picture are freezing cold, have blisters on their blisters from hiking, and are being crapped on by birds (hidden only by photo angles). They also just got into a fist fight with their partner and are inches from divorce, but they’re smiling in the photo; that’s all people see. Social media tends to push users away from honest interactions and toward those that generate interest or match trends. Social media rewards conformance, controversy, and creativity; creativity is hard and takes a bit of effort to gain traction, so folks generally focus on the first two. The reality is, most peoples’ lives simply aren’t that interesting, and having nothing interesting to say is more normal than trying to convince others that you’re living your best life, but the algorithm doesn’t reward that, and your friends don’t care about your grilled cheese sandwhich.
A Balanced Approach
I’d say that somewhere along the line it became popular to construct a world of appearances vs living your authentic life, but really, this has been a feature of society since long before the advent of social media or video games. Back in the day, you’d keep a nice yard and would dress nice, but beat your wife and kids behind closed doors (facetiously my way of saying that one leads a shitty life), and your neighbors would treat you with respect becuase you “kept up apperances.”
What these technological innovations do is create a pervasive opportunity to ensnare ordinary people in these dopamine dealing attention traps, keeping up with a global set of appearances. There’s no harm in taking pride in your life (virtual or otherwise) and showing others, or partaking in a fun trend, or even some gamely one-upping of your friends. I think where it becomes a bit less advised is when the various modals of self-deception that one engages in starts to detract from, rather than enhance one’s life. Or when self-deception keeps someone trapped in an unhealthy life rather than reminding them that they have the power to change it (save for the rare cases where they truly don’t).
So, certainly, tell a tall tale, live a bit larger than you might — but also remember to ground it reality with your friends. Make it a point to tell the truth in a reasonable percentage your posts and photos. Is the infamous beach leg photo you took last week taken on a frigid day with a bunch of assholes yelling and getting drunk behind you? Don’t leave that out of the caption, think of it as a civil service to maintain honesty in appearances. Don’t just show the nice status-item things you have, show the ordinary or sentimental things too that are special to you, and moreover, mix in some completely mundane things. Be a basic bitch sometimes and be proud of it. Err on the side of having pride vs being prideful. Don’t let the life you’ve built in video games subtract from the life that is right in front of you, no matter how little you might feel it has to offer.
Moreover, don’t fall for the neurological rewiring that tells you that if you live your life in accordance with these trends, that that is what happiness or success is. Judge your happiness by the things that make your heart light, and success by the things that produce a benefit commensurate or greater than the effort put in. Don’t settle for throwing endless layers of paint over the ugly things in your life so that you can lie to yourself about them and accept them. You deserve better than that and you have only one life to live. Don’t settle for feeling trapped in a nightmare that you only escape through a carefully constructed illusion you put on for others. Let your escapism be for you and you alone, if you want to live within a story, let it be one of your own making — don’t place yourself in a prison that others have built for you.
I don’t aim to pontificate how to be happy, far from it — different strokes for different folks. But, I do want others to simply take inventory of the subconscious levers that are being pulled on their behalves all the time. To some, living in a game and having an entire parallel social life will be genuinely rewarding; perhaps the person in question is wheelchair bound and this is mobility for them, perhaps they have some severe social obstacles, but can manage their online persona well. Perhaps play broadens one’s horizons further than they can realistically attain in the physical world. Maybe showing off a bit the on the “Gram” helps build your self-confidence. Go for it; but remember, all of these things can be taken away, they’re artificial constructs and are not a substitute for the real thing.
We all need forms of play and pretend in our lives, I believe it is a vital element of humanity, an essential way of reinventing, soothing, and entertaining ourselves. Pretending can be therapeutic, healing, and transformative. Sometimes though, we use these facets as excuses to perpetuate a behavior that doesn’t actually serve the life we want to live. I’d encourage anyone to evaluate the things they think make them “someone” and decide whether that’s a lie they tell themselves to get by, or whether they really are “somebody.” I think, in an honest self-inventory, we’d find many of the most talented people actually have fragile self-esteem and often think ill of themselves. Contrarily, the vast majority of humanity are, at best, parents, lovers, caretakers, volunteers, and workers; all of these things are absolutely fine and normal, and the rare few who achieve much more influential lives than this are douchebags if they look down their noses at the rest of us.
There’s no reason to not strive for a huge influence in life, but not at the expense of being a sociopath — humanity matters above almost everything, except perhaps survival. Most of us can’t be those influential people though, so instead, we look for ways to approximate the vestiges of those lives, and end up just competing with appearances and doing things that really just serve to make us bigger assholes than others. At best, perhaps we remain decent people, but we spend our lives trying to compete with something we never truly wanted for ourselves — humanity thrives on appearances, and often we become engrossed in living a lie when all we wanted was validation and acceptance. Life is only ever what you make it, and all happiness truly comes from within, external happiness and validation can only be sustained until it is taken from us. If you’re going to live in a lie, let it be one of your own making and within your control, not the ones prepared by society to trap and manipulate you. Where can you build sustainable, real happiness from today, and what short cuts have you been taking that have ultimately not served you well?
