Recently, I visited an old friend who is currently living in
Japan. On the train ride from Tokyo to the Sea of Trees,
we caught up, talking about our lives, relationships, careers, plans for the
future, speculating on happiness and ambition and satisfaction, the paths we
took, where to go from here. As the skyscrapers of the city outside the train’s
window gave way to jagged hills and manicured hamlets, we kept coming back to the
truth of the old adage/cliché: the grass is always greener on the other side of
the fence. Realizing this, and living by this, had helped us, so we thought, to
feel happier and more fulfilled (or at least less miserable). All the talk of
relationships and careers and places to live seemed couched in this. And yet,
strangely, that whole day, as I walked around in the crisp autumn air with Mt
Fuji in the distance, relishing the company of an old friend and several new
friends, I kept thinking “this is the
place to live! I’d be happier here”
even though I knew that my happiness had more to do with my attitude (or
perhaps other qualities like self-control, grit, etc.) than where I was. The
grass was still greener on the other side. Like an optical illusion, I couldn’t
not see it even though I knew it wasn’t real.
This got me thinking about some aspect of living in the
world of many media options.
Basically, my hunch is that the
Facebook/jealousy effect (Facebook use can inspire jealousy) encompasses a
larger swath of our experience each day. When you interact with warts-and-all
people, you get frustrated at times, you have to work through problems, and you
hone your abilities to cope with and deal with problems. When you deal with people
on Facebook, you deal with co-constructed entities, products of those other people’s
attempts to hide their “warts” and your desire to avoid seeing some of their
warts (maybe not that simple. Maybe we’re trying to see imperfections at times
and maybe we’re blind to them at other times, depending on mood, individual
characteristics, etc.). I suppose those given to the language of communication theory would call these relationships “pseudo-relationship” and call the larger
phenomenon I’m talking about the creation of “pseudo-environments”.
If these are pseudo-environments we
live in, filled with pseudo-relationships, they are different than the pseudo-environment informed by the mass media and constructed by the Powers that Be. The priorities in their creation are different. They are similar in that they lack some important
characteristics of unmediated relationships and reality. But the distortions
are different. They are animated not by The Powerful’s desire to control the
powerless, but by some aspect of our brains that wants a fantasy, an aspect
that, in real life, runs into obstacles, gets sad, adapts, and overcomes
obstacles, but now, in some sense, runs amok. We’re losing out abilities to revise
our conceptions of what is possible in response to adversity because we’re often
seeking new realities instead of trying to fix the problems of the old
realities. We still live in a world of real, material relationships and must
always, eventually, return to them and confront them, but our abilities to
adapt in that environment have atrophied, and so we’re left in a world that seems
depressingly unfair. But it’s not because the world is depressingly unfair so much as it is because we’re less and less
capable of re-making any of it or ourselves in order to bring the two in sync.
We grasp for explanations for this seemingly insurmountable disconnect: our own
inherent inferiority; malevolent, powerful authorities. Maybe we’re partially
right. Maybe unchangeable flaws in ourselves and changeable flaws in The System
(i.e., corrupt authorities) are part of the problem. But maybe that sense is
exaggerated by feelings of powerlessness that comes with our atrophied
ability to adapt to adversity.
The features of the options we browse
through, be it Facebook profiles or places to lives, are shaped by those
presenting them in a mediated form. The options, as they appear to us, are optimized
for online searches, edited to attract more people and/or the “right” people.
We eventually encounter their hidden flaws in a patterned way. At first, we
can’t see them because we’re hopeful about the New. Eventually, as we get to
know the option better and its ability to hide flaws decreases, we become
disappointed. Not to worry: there are always other untried options, other
greener grasses.
Once you’ve tried many, many
options and are still running into seemingly insurmountable obstacles, you feel
all the more hopeless. The infinite possibilities that initially seemed so
liberating are now just more ideas that didn’t work. The notion that nothing will “work” (in the sense that
it will provide enough meaning and happiness to keep you fulfilled, or at least
extant) seems more likely as the number of failed options grows. Perhaps it’s
right to think, as a hopeless person might, that all those options you haven’t
tried – the people you haven’t met or dated, the places you haven’t visited or
lived, the books you haven’t read, the religions you haven’t experienced –
aren’t that different than the options you have tried. Perhaps they never were
“different” in any objective, meaningful way. But it might have been the
ability to adapt to the
disconnections between fantasy and reality, hardened by the rough edges of
reality with its dearth of options, that provided us with enough meaning and
happiness.
But this is idle speculation. How
could we test this hunch? It would be interesting to see to what degree belief
in this statement (and other adages, like “no man is an island” or “wherever
you go, there you are”. I’m a big fan of adages these days) predicts happiness
in a world of more options.
Related questions:
What exactly does the green grass
statement convey? Is it the opposite of jealousy? It is, but it’s also
something that runs counter to hope, or “hope” as most people think of it. It’s
being happy with what you have, which may be the opposite of striving as well
as hope.
What do you do with the world of
expanded options? That is, what is the practical response to our media
environment for someone who acknowledges the truth of the green grass
statement? You can think of ways to make the options not seem quite so
infinite. And you can identify the characteristics of those who flourish and
languish in these environments.
Who survives best in the world of
infinite options? What is the relationship between striving, hopefulness,
jealousy, number of options, qualities of those options (how mediated they are,
how curated they are) and life satisfaction? What about other individual characteristics like self-control and grit?
This might lead us to the Green Grass Theory: In a world of
many options, those who are high in striving and hopefulness yet low in
jealousy (i.e., those who agree with the aphorism that the grass is always
greener on the other side of the fence) flourish. Those who are not languish.
Our
actions and moods are in part determined by our notions of what is possible or
probable in the future. Media are tools for considering possibilities and
probabilities. The extent to which they distort depends on our orientation to
them.
