🪳 Are You an Insect or a Person?

📲 FREE PDF “CLIFFSNOTES” for the multi-award-winning & Amazon #1 bestselling GET OUT OF HERE ALIVE …

Sol Luckman, GET OUT OF HERE ALIVE

Compared to anonymity with its lack of social pressure fostering extraordinary personal freedom—people plastering their face all over the internet are far more likely to be phonies.

These famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” perfectly elucidate this dynamic:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,Then how should I beginTo spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?And how should I presume?

Oh, the irony!

Today’s online narcissists making viral videos touting the virtues of authenticity and how to embody them to the letter—often complete with long catechisms of specific dos and don’ts—remind one of plastic insects “pinned and wriggling on the wall” for inspection by the scrutiny of the public gaze.

Gone is their liberty to be anything other than what they’re assessed as being by the “eyes” forever watching and judging.

Their public identity is now “pinned” down and “fixed” by the “formulated” phrases used to describe it—phrases that speak to the domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species of the insectoid under examination.

Such people, who fancy themselves so alive, are in a sense dead to the world. This is especially sad given that, as Carl Jung sagely observed, the “privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” Meanwhile, to cite Virginia Woolf, a “self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”

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