Lost in the Mirror

 1950s Warhol fashion print

 

 

I have been working on the new stories and now all these allusions to myth are popping up. The serendipity experiment is remains exciting.

"The hero in this new myth necessarily needs to become a prophet. For his is the arduous task of reintegrating the various fragments of the self, hearing the symphony in the cacophony, seeing the human in the digital -- or else, man will suffer being trapped forever, in the halls of mirrors."  Andrew Lam

 The above is a quote from the Common Grounds article  21st century Man and the Hall of Mirrors. Further on, ..:"A future in which everyone can be famous for about 10 minutes has indeed arrived. We have all become actors, filmmakers and reporters. We begin to believe that we are not fully ourselves, that we are not viable in the new system, unless we make some sort of electronic imprint, some sort of projection of ourselves, in the virtual world."

Andy Warhol who coined the phrase about everyone getting 15 minutes of Fame, was off by five minutes. The length of "stardom" is reduced to 10 minutes as is the Youtube limit. However the fame and media connection are valid and the need for validation is possibly the key. We need attention but is this the attention we need?

The products and services whirling around us are designed to create, support or mitigate the damages of the idea of profit. We accepted this idea and hooked it to "progress" not realizing when or how we were emotionally hijacked by our vanity, our lust for power and our sense of self connecting to outside feedback as a way to "feed self."  Materialism elicited envy and/or admiration and this was perceived as "a good thing" to the developing ego. Way back in time, this was a real survival  issue, the one with the fur coat had a better winter than the one clothed in woven bark.

Anyway, we continued to nurture that concept of wealth and diamond rings, update remodels and hoarders are proof. Sure a lot of people didn't buy the riff but they didn't stop it, either. Instead the game took on a new edge as stuff became overwhelmingly hard to handle (think landfill and hoarding) 

Along with this we avalanche of stuff; we gave up or otherwise lost community on the first round because some of it was annoying or worse. That we threw out the "baby with the bath water' is now being considered , but is another story.

So with stuff od and a dirth of community; along comes Social Media and the digital community grows like a weed. It created community with what seemed fewer consequences. However, as it is a mainline connection to mirrored self it is as limiting as it is expanding. The paradox is.

So now we are dependent on a whole new state of interaction, which furthers the facade as we are creating new images of self that start to define us and we lose "us" in process. We change our hair not our limits. All the while we do not really mess with "progress" because profit has the reins.

In a system devoted to profit, other paths of possibility whither. We, as a whole, lose all sense of "other," other paths, possibilities, our connections to each "other" and nature and..? However that "other" is actually rooted in a larger reality and is not "other" but is self extended. Whereas profit is a manmade or "synthetic reality" and therefore is the imposter or superimposer, isn't this like crazy?

Are we at risk of losing our authentic selves to the imposter?

This is way too much. i believe that all the necessary "stuff' we humans need to find our happiness is embedded in the seed of self; for it is in that spark, DNA or? , where the gift we are meant to deliver lies dormant but ever ready to grow once we figure out it is there. Like with anything , how do you know to look for something you didn't know existed? We are not taught to deliver our gifts unless they suit the track of profit, which cuts off a lot of gift giving.

That loss of potential is a huge risk, i think it is the biggest by far. Who are we but ourselves? So setting aside "going inside" to believe the mirror's reflection is immediate gratification but isn't a good design to develop a dream. It is instead a story that reiterates the short term profit story that has taken over economics.

Consider:  skanking the environment for a dollar now and withering away from immune systemic dysfunction later is creepy. Accepting a suicidal belief as normal is like believing a dead end sign. (on a round planet that is a mere transportation difficulty not a truth)

As Fashion is also mirror dependent, changing the paradigm of fashion will adjust the concept of image.