Transcript
Hello everyone, welcome to the Daily Gym. This is the episode for Tuesday, February 27th, 2024. I say that when I am slightly past the hours of when the day actually ends. Today I want to talk about...
Oh, I don't know what a good title is. I'll title it afterwards. But the concept is is presenting almost like our holiday selves to the Internet. This idea that on the Internet, just as in many other jobs, there's almost a pressure we put on ourselves to maintain a specific image and branding, story, narrative, whatnot. So I say that in light of feeling exhausted. I feel tired. And I thought, you know, when people post these podcast episodes or they're news journalists on TV or they are game show hosts or they are doing whatever, or if it's somebody posting on Snapchat or somebody posting on Instagram just to their friends or Facebook or TikTok or whatever, how much do we try to maintain a specific narrative? Narrative, and a specific emotional narrative, rather. In other words, I'm trying to be the happy person, or I'm trying to be the person who's always angry at the injustices of the world, or I'm trying to be the person who is just calm and peaceful all the time. How much do we try to present this story to the world, to whatever the story may be, and to make it a consistent story, a.k.a. I only feel this.
Because, you know, even you look at my website and the design that I have, it's got the light blue background, it's got the cartoonish face, the big, you know, smile, and it looks like it was drawn in an old, they called it Microsoft Paint, an old, like, very simple program. It wasn't. I actually made it in a vector program, but it still looks like it was in an old program.
And...
I think it was a vector program. See, it doesn't matter. No, no, maintain image.
And I think even I struggle sometimes. Like there's that image, but can I talk about sad things? Can I show the world that I'm feeling sad? Can I show the world that I'm feeling angry? Can I show the world that I'm feeling confused? Can I show the world that I'm feeling exhausted, helpless, powerless, excited? Excited, you know, if somebody's got the emotional brand of being calm, they may not want to get too excited.
Maybe they don't post the exciting things that happen in their lives or the things that, you know, they feel excited to do because they got to maintain, oh, I'm calm or even the kind of the cool indifference. I don't want to look too excited. If I'm too excited, then maybe I'm a nerd right so maybe some people say this and i'm talking about today obviously because i'm feeling tired and i almost went to bed and forgot about doing an episode whoa whoa whoa man don't do do the episode um but i've also thought about how there are many people in my life who.
I i like having conversations with them because they can be really real real like and by real i mean three-dimensional emotionally show me kind of the whole range and then i see them post on on facebook or instagram or whatsapp or snapchat or i don't do tiktok but i see them post at linkedin and on youtube all these different platforms i see people post on the internet and i go but why are you only showing this one side, like a friend of mine who posts like a lot of things and she seems like she's thriving and on top of the world and i talk with her and she's like dude i'm i'm like falling apart like but then why are you posting that you're on top of the world, or you know you think about um i think his name was switch the dj on the ellen show who they say died by suicide and that's a whole different conversation but like, committed suicide died by suicide um and the image that he was portraying the emotional brand that he portrayed didn't seem to align with his full humanity.
And it just, I wonder how much the internet is kind of forcing us to emotionally brand ourselves, and how it becomes such a narrow focus, such a narrow slice of our humanity and how we either avoid the internet, as I often have, because I've been afraid to, it's hard for me not to show the full thing, the full heart. Heart um or we we go on there and we we hide and we pretend we're still there but we're putting up a huge uh wall to say like nope this is all i'm showing i'm showing this one specific thing, and it gets tricky because maybe we want to show the full range but the people who are listening or paying attention to what we post don't want to see the whole range maybe they just want to to see us as a caricature of of a human that i am they listen to the podcast because they want to feel insightful they don't want to feel sad so if i'm going to talk about something sad you better stop it because i just want to hear insightful stuff or if i um get angry oh no no i don't want to be angry about politics no no anger and politics is bad like i just want to hear you talk Talk about calm, relaxing things. Like, really? Well, maybe that's not the one for me, but I can do it occasionally.
And, yeah, just reflecting on it because I think so many of us struggle with this idea of showing up to more public spaces in person, let alone on the Internet where there's, gosh, hundreds, thousands, millions of people potentially watching. We may never know.
And I think it's a real struggle for us to show the full range of emotions in more public spaces, especially on the internet. And I'm hoping that my sleepy ramblings right now help convey that message a little bit. But anyways, and also not just convey it, but also show me trying to play with it and experiment and see if there's a way for me to learn about this space and maybe help others learn as well. So on that note, I am going to sleep, and I will talk with you all soon.
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