My favorite quote from one of my favorite movies (and also happened to be my senior quote), goes like this:
“You know it’s funny what is happening to us. Our lives have become digital. Our friends, virtual. And everything you could ever want to know is just a click away. Experiencing the world through endless second-hand information isn’t enough…
If we want authenticity, we have to initiate it”.
Professional snowboarder Travis Rice said this in the opening scene of 2011’s The Art of Flight as a way of telling what was to come in the documentary-style film showcasing the world’s greatest snowboarders traveling to far off places in search of the perfect line to ride.
Rice’s entire point of the quote was to show that if you want something, you have to go get it yourself.
When I used it as my senior quote, I looked at it as saying, if we want real connection, real experiences and real understandings of the world around us, we have to go out and make them happen. It’s too simple to grab your phone and look something up or try and meet people, but without actually going out and seeing new places, meeting new people or trying new things, we’ll never get a full understanding of what it is we’re trying to get close to.
In the context of digital media, this quote is still relevant nearly a decade later. Simply scrolling though social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and so on, we are so quickly pulled away from our own reality and brought into someone else’s.
For example, my favorite YouTuber, Seth Alvo, runs the channel Seth’s Bike Hacks and is constantly filming himself and others mountain biking around different locations, trying new things with his bikes and gear and constantly makes changes and improvements to his backyard bike track.
Seth posts on a weekly basis, and I watch each video as it comes out. Having been a pretty regular viewer for about the past 6 months, I’ve learned a lot from Seth about bike maintenance, how to build jumps and have simply been entertained and inspired to go out and do what he does with my own bike.
The thing is though, that’s exactly where I stop. I get myself to the point of being so inspired that I’m ready to jump on my bike at any given second, but I rarely act on this feeling. Usually, I just go watch another video.
Twitter and Instagram does the same thing to me. I follow plenty of people on these platforms that have the same interests as I do. Whether it’s music, snowboarding, sports, art or anything for that matter, I’m connected to these people that seem to be doing what I’d like to be doing 24/7.
The more I think about it though, are these people really out here living what I would consider a dream life? Or are they taking moments of excitement from their own lives and saving them for a rainy day?
This is comparable to the concepts of anxieties Wesley Yang writes about in his article "A Critical (But Highly Sympathetic) Reading of New Yorkers’ Sexual Habits and Anxieties."
This is the anxiety I call, the anxiety of "flexing"
According to the internet's most reputable source, Urban Dictionary, flexing means showing off or "fronting" on people. This is an anxiety people have because they find themselves posting pictures in an effort to make themselves look cool and that they live a life more active than the one they actually live.
I look at Drake’s line from his song “Emotionless” when thinking about this idea.
Drake raps, “I know a girl that saves pictures from places she's flown
to post later and make it look like she still on the go.”
I think Drake makes a solid point here.
So often I scroll through social media and see pictures people post of places they’ve been and places they want to go. But a lot of the time, the individual is nowhere near the place their location says they are.
This causes people to envy those they see around them.
In my opinion, social media should be used to let people know what you’re doing in real-time, not what you were up to days, weeks, months and maybe even years ago.
By posting these pictures making it look like you’re still on the go, leads to people envying you for no reason.
Now, envy isn’t all bad.
Envy makes people do some pretty crazy things, but one of the things I think it’s good for is inspiration. I’m definitely inspired by Seth Alvo to go get on my bike and build dirt jumps in my backyard. And I’m definitely inspired by friends of mine who post pictures of themselves in cool places to go see the world, but how often do we as consumers of this media actually act on it?
Like I said earlier, I’m very quick to be inspired by what I see on social media but not act on it. I carry my bike in the bed of my truck basically year-round. That being said there’s never an excuse for me to not throw the front tire on it and take it for a spin, trying something I saw in Seth’s videos. However, I’d say more times than not I let the inspiration come to me, but then I don’t act on it.
Going off Travis Rice’s quote, the world needs to be explored through first-hand experiences and engagements in real-time. It’s very simple to get caught up in what other people are doing, but what’s stopping us from doing these same things? I know money, family, school and so on all play a role into why we don’t hop on planes to far off lands or build dirt tracks in our backyards.
These things all play a role, but I’d say before any of them, we as humans would be closer to an authentic life if we put our phones down and went out and experienced the world around us.