a gentle reminder
warning: this post contains sensitive and heavy information. reader discretion is advised.
After finishing work and catching up on the latest episode of The Gilded Age on HBO Max—great show btw—I sat down and aimlessly scrolled through Tik Tok as I would habitually do before probably crawling into bed. After a few scrolls, I came up a post featuring Cheslie Kryst. If this is the first time you’re hearing the name, you and I would be in the same position just 24 hours ago. CNN reported earlier today that Cheslie threw herself from her high rise apartment in the early morning hours on Jan 31, 2022. Self deletion is something that happens quite too often to be honest but the story of Cheslie’s demise was all the more interesting. You see, Cheslie wasn’t just another regular individual. She was crowned Miss America in 2019, had a law degree, and had worked her way into the heights of social media. As of right now, she had amassed over 450k followers on Tik Tok and I’m sure other hundreds of thousands on other social media platforms.
The background of a lot her Tik Tok videos were filled with a plethora of shoes and clothes. The ring light highlighted the near perfect makeup that accentuated her natural beauty. Her videos were filled with amazing stories about how happy she was in her new role in the media sphere. How law became a toxic place to be and why she was happy she made the transition. By all means, this was a life that so many people wanted. She had everything. The money, the brains, the beauty, the fame. So why was this not enough? I’ve always thought about humans as a species and their actions. Some may even go as far as to identify this study as praxeology. What happens in the human brain that causes us to go as far as ending life as we know it irregardless to how good things are going for us. What are we battling that we can’t overcome with all the time and resources that we’ve created for ourselves?
This leads me to believe that time and resources have a marginal impact on someone contemplating or going through these thoughts or ideas. What’s even crazier is that it’s almost virtually impossible to help someone if they show no symptoms of something that’s potentially terminal to them. Last year, Chris Hayes came out with a post in the NewYorker entitled On the Internet, We’re Always Famous. I implore you to read it when you have a chance. In it, he posits that the internet has become a place where what is said about has morphed from something that was once contained to a physical space to a never ending room with incessant whisperings. The human brain was not made to handle that level of attention on any level. Whether we want to believe it or not, we draw inferences and ascribe judgment to people we don’t know. When we do this, we think other do the same of us thus warping how we see ourselves based on how we think others view us. He must be happy, he has everything I want. She must be happy, she’s so pretty and has all of the latest clothes. When this happens, we internalize and believe that this is what people must be thinking about us so it has to be true, even though at times it’s not.
We fail to accurately asses our feelings because to mob has decided how we should feel. We fail to take time to rejuvenate and be carefree because, well, everyone is hustling so I must be too. I’ve always been skeptical about social media. No doubt, social media has done wonders for our generation. It has connected us to communities and given us ways in which we can celebrate others but there’s a part of social media that I think is truly deleterious. Whenever there is a metric to which we can ascribe worth (i.e., likes) we begin to believe that whatever we share can be commoditized to the a social sentiment to how your followers feel about it and not to how you truly value that moment. Went to a basketball game and had the time of your life but then came home and posted it on Instagram and it only received three likes? Then this is where to problem begins. You begin to second guess your memories not as you experiences them but as how validated you feel from your followers for having had that experience. We know that receiving likes activates the dopamine receptors in your brain. More dopamines, the high of feeling good, more dopamine, and the cycle continues into addiction.
I’m not on the pulpit preaching down to the members in the congregation. I also fall victim to the harmful effects of this whole system that we’ve been placed in but in short, life isn’t about the hand we’re dealt but the hand we play. So stop, think, and play your hand carefully.
la vie en rose,
Daviel