Through social media I have been able to take a look into communities of people that identify outside of themselves; with machinery, animals, objects, or people of a different race. These are all groups of people that build a social network around a state of body that will never be truly emulated or experienced. I can understand when someone desires an impossibility that was standard among others like parental love, childhood friendship, or peer acceptance, but this is obviously a different case.
Capitalism, especially its state in the online world relies on the contextless as a way to increase capital, a blank slate that can only be expanded in profitable means. For example, a contextless video or image for people to debate over interacting with the post and staying hooked on a platform. To pertain to the previous paragraph, a blank profile that can be thoroughly curated exclusively on the platform to create a deeper relationship with its user. The more you interact with your feed, the better the algorithm is to keep you hooked. The more you post, the larger the audience you garner, and there’s more incentive to grow your audience in hopes to capitalize on it.
I wonder if the familiarity and the unique ability to have complete control of how one is perceived and how one desires to be perceived online, creates a complex among individuals that hold distaste for their physical, non-digital self that cannot be completely changed or altered as conveniently. I came to the conclusion that this belief system was not because of a strong connection to the object of desire but instead a desire to enter a state of non-existence. I believe that the individual projects their desire outside of themselves as a response to some sort of self-hatred, no longer wanting to be themselves alongside the things that they are in direct proximity to.
In a more logical scenario, I could argue that there is no real inclination to truly be the object of desire but instead fixating on the expected result that comes along with the state it could provide. The allure of a new self, a new kind of flexibility inaccessible to them before, or even a kind of power that their existence lacked. Though how could someone want to be in a new body when they have not experienced anything outside of their current existence? This fixation on a lacking existence, a degradation of their identity to its relations– I wonder if this technically illogical yearning in the first place is a desire to non-existence or a fixation to the behaviors a desire for the impossible invokes (Or a secret third thing?).
Our contemporary era transformed the idea of self-actualization as a list of traits of someone who is the best to exist in society into a buyable and unitary ideal self of the individual, creating more avenues to generate capital. This perfect self is another arbitrary reflection of culture and trends, a transient and unachievable goal; the chase for perfection in the current era is a chase towards non-existence and a complete rejection of the present self.
When someone yearns for the impossible, I feel as if it is being desired because of its impossibility. It has never been comprehended, a state that cannot be “entered”, cannot be changed into, or cannot be reversed into. If one cannot comprehend something that exists outside of themselves but still desires becoming it, what are they truly desiring? There’s always a justification of what that state of existence could bring, but it is always an approximation, false comparison, or even romanticizing of the object’s reality. There is truly nothing to compare it to that could ever make someone fully understand what it is to exist outside themselves.
In the western world especially, there is a large culture of self-identification. One is usually aligned either left or right, the individual sees themselves on an axis of receiving or enacting oppression, and people curate their identity in specific communities of the internet that carries a unique aesthetic. I wonder if the culture has fed or even sparked into this hunger of existing outside of oneself, with the ability to disconnect from societal or social weights.
When I brought this subject up among close friends, there was a response about the desire being inherently nonsensical. However in a personal perspective, when I desire something that seems to be impossible or nonsensical at first glance, I explore it further and realize it’s a kind of psychological labyrinth to avoid a distasteful conclusion. To assume all impossible desires are solely nonsensical can stifle the opportunity for personal analysis and introspection.
It seems like feeding the carnal desire of achieving the impossible only worsens a voracious appetite, when will the indulgence ever be enough? When does it border on self-destruction trying to achieve a state when you can only assume the object’s experience? There is a kind of disintegration of the present identity, a death to the self in hopes to have more control of what could be built from a blank slate. In the end, there is no complete detachment of the self as splitting one’s identity into clear-cut phases is simply building off of a more recent understanding of an unbreathing time instead of a constantly existing present. There is no true disconnect to what happened in the past as it will always shape how one acts in the present, and this unique brand of escapism is a true example of that. When attempting to achieve the impossible, the underwhelming result forcefully points out the unattainable feeding back into the desire that creates this drive. There is no technology that could ever satiate the desire, even if hyper-modernists insist otherwise.