On October 27th, a video of Lady Gaga’s speech at the Yale University Center for Emotional Intelligence hit the Internet and quickly went viral. In the video, Gaga talks about social media and stepping away from the entertainment industry. Her speech emphasizes an issue that most millennials will understand: existing authentically in a digital age.
The video is part of the full speech (available here) which focuses on the negative effects of her celebrity persona and the status of her mental health. The fear of rejection became fundamental to her existence. She curated her life to gain acceptance from those around her. When we do this, Gaga says “we are unconsciously communicating lies”.
Much like Gaga’s fame, our reliance on social media has instilled in us the habit of editing what we show the world in order to create an idealized version of who we are. By having direct access to all avenues of social media, we have the power to change how we are perceived by friends, acquaintances, and “followers.” We tailor our posts to reflect an identity that we assume people will accept, a personality that is funny, kind, and successful. The need to be accepted is an essential part of growing up, but when does this need become an obsession?
Instagram model Essena O’Neill recently quit social media because of how unsatisfied it made her feel. Despite posting sponsored content and accumulating over half a million followers, O’Neill was, in her own words, “miserable.” Her Instagram pictures only made her life seem ideal.
Tailoring ourselves to avoid rejection creates a dependence on other people’s “likes” and comments. By relying on this type of validation, we shrink our own voice. Our self-doubt makes our self-worth so small that our lives become dictated by other people instead of our unique beliefs and attitudes. This self-doubt is a pain, which as Gaga says, “can lead to all kinds of behavior that’s not true to who you are”.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, discussed the Achilles heel of any success: the FEAR of impending failure. Especially in creative living, people who are successful are meant to be “mentally unstable.” Gilbert quotes Norman Mailer as saying that “Every one of my books has killed me a little more.” As a result of the emergence of social media, which gives us direct access to craft ourselves in the public eye, it is as if we risk descending the intertwined paths of creativity and suffering. Gilbert revisits the idea in Big Magic and argues that “You don’t have to suffer to be a creative genius. That’s just a lie told to us by society and media.”
Gilbert says that the only way to keep working without succumbing to the notion that her biggest success has already passed is to create a “protective psychological” distance between her work and her natural anxiety about the reaction. She discusses the term “genius” and how it has developed from “having a genius” to “being a genius.” While we can’t erase this idea of “success” as derived directly from an individual, we can change the way we treat our own success. We have to find a way to deal with success in a way that makes us sane. After we succeed, we shouldn’t wait for the other shoe to drop. We should thrive.
If famous people are becoming deranged from the pressure of always having to present themselves as on point, then what will happen to the generations of people who are trying to do the same thing on a smaller scale? As anyone who has worked in customer service knows, being happy, on your feet, perky, upstanding members of society for hours is mentally straining. Keeping up “perfection” for a customer base the size of a hundred football stadiums is overwhelming (at best).
We millennials grew up (as will the generations after us) editing how we appear. Exploring social media was a part of our childhood. In college, it is absolutely essential to start learning what makes us, as individuals, truly happy–not just what we can do to make other people happy. Other people’s happiness is not our responsibility.
In sum, I’m not calling for an immediate answer to the meaning of life, but I’ll bet the farm that life isn’t meant to have a filter (also the answer is really 42).