There is no shortage of people, famous and not, ready to tell women how to live their “best life”. From Oprah to Gwyneth, on Facebook and Pinterest, Tumblrs and Instagram accounts, this ostensibly self-empowering phrase is used to hawk everything from beauty products to yoga mats to $200 keychains. Naturally, it all presupposes that everyone’s “best life” is contingent on a certain genre of gluten-free, eco-friendly wellness – and that fame is accessible to anyone who drinks the (organic, freshly squeezed, fair trade) Kool-aid.
The digital wellness charade also assumes that you can’t possibly be living your best life if no one sees you doing it. Social media is strewn with self-congratulatory, unsolicited advice about how to be as awesome as the person doling it out: how to rock your queerness, your geekdom, your cosplay hype, plus-size jam, love of swing dance and plant-based diet, all while anchored in a sort of “I am so dope! Look how great I am!”
But that Goop-ian outlook assumes that everyone is or aspires to be like Gwyneth and Oprah – educated and privileged, with a keen sense of image curation, and no concerns over who will clean your bathroom or pay for your kids to go to college. This all creates a slippery slope where it has become more challenging than ever to distinguish between authentic self-empowerment and promotional posturing. Timelines trail on endlessly with inspirational quotes, self-promotional ascendancy and coy, personal revelations couched in false humility.
We’re all living our best lives on the internet, and we want everyone to know it even though it can lead to some ugly places. The personal essay has become ground zero for confessional pageantry, guts spilled and shared and tweeted, with titles that suggest their writers have liberated their true inner selves. Meanwhile, Gwyneth Paltrow suggests women steam their vaginas (probably not a great idea), and Australian wellness blogger Belle Gibson, who became famous for claiming to cure her terminal cancer with “whole foods”, was outed as a compulsive liar. These are worst-case endpoints of the “best life” mentality.
There was a time, though, when confidence was something more than a performance – a hard-won thing, something that some were lucky enough to be born with but most of us had to figure out how to embody in our post-puberty bodies. Now there’s no way to tell which confidence is hard-won and which is a put-on; who is a macrobiotic expert and who is hiding deep distress behind a cheery digital facade.
That’s unfortunate, because our newfound ease with offering TMI – too much information – to anyone who will listen or click or follow is less about a need for fame, I think, and more about our need to be known. The evolution of digital and social media has just given us another way to do that. But brand-building marginalizes the more difficult life issues that no amount of uplifting Facebook posts will remove from human existence.
The focus on our online selves is a misguided way to seek purpose, reducing it to whether our ideas gain traction, our voices are heard and our identities, however we choose to define them, are seen – even if we send missives of real joy and positivity from our hearts into a world of coded algorithms and hope that they really will improve the day or the life of anyone who sees them.
Don’t let this stop you from reveling in your own real, hard-won dopeness, or from believing in yourself. But does everyone else need to know? Are you still dope if no one hears you say it?
Our lives have meaning beyond the public gaze. In the intimate spaces that we do not share with the online world is a life on our own terms, in the company of un-Instagrammed friends at un-tweeted gatherings, where we remember that being truly known is reserved for the people who might not even know our Twitter handle.
In the words of film-maker Ava DuVernay: “You can be a star in your own life, right where you are.” I would add, whether or not anyone is watching.
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