MosesWrites
See Me Maybe
Have you ever opened the social media app of a teenager, to see what they see? To view what algorithmically feeds and consumes their psyche, often for many hours each day? To analyze what and how they’ve posted, or not?
In most cases, I find what I’ve seen profoundly disturbing.
If I think back to my childhood, perhaps the equivalent self-expression involved photos on the inside of a locker, drawings and stickers on the brown-bag book covers of textbooks, the pins or patches on a backpack.
Before the internet, the tableau of self-expression had quaint, essential, physical limitations.
Now images occupy an essentially infinite space. Filters, editing tools, and AI blur entirely the representational realities in which we might otherwise ground ourselves. As my students have told me cheekily, never trust a photo a woman has posted, especially on a dating app. Their cynicism has truth and consequences, for themselves as much as for me.
A few days ago, I shared a quick reflection that included a somewhat sultry photograph. No clicks, no likes, no comments on LinkedIn, other than a few invited from younger Chinese students.
A female colleague, about my age, also a head of school, expressed admiration but also situational impossibility: she couldn’t acknowledge the words publicly for fear of professional repercussions. I’m certain she’s not alone.
Why on LinkedIn, something rather tame by Instagram standards, causes impossible consternation? The daily diet of young people entirely absented by adults in a professional space?
Of course, I understand why: it’s simple, though also rather complex, the outcome of cultural forces intermingling modesty and misogyny over millennia.
Back to the children, about whom I care most.
A research assistant rightly said that more than gender, more than bodies or social media, teens face a crisis of recognition, and I couldn’t agree more.
Know me for who I am!
Anyone who has spent even a modest amount of time engaged in self-reflection realizes the endless contradictions of that imperative. In my mid-40s I can barely wager a halfway good answer.
Recognition requires open, expansive, patient, dynamic, multi-dimensional love and kindness, especially given how fickle our minds and moods become from early puberty through some stabilization of brains and bodies in our early 20s. That’s a long time!
Existing structures for reward and recognition have huge problems, especially in terms of academic achievement and, at least for middle and upper-middle-class and rich folks, the teleology of college admissions. Yet social media has started to democratize the anxiety of judgment, even if you’re sharing the struggles of rural life, promoting your handicrafts, just trying to get by. Image has become everything.
As I tried to express in my earlier post, in tandem with “wellness” it has become fashionable to take physical fitness and health as a proxy for success and as a means to quell the tumult of 21st-century life. I argue in many cases it makes the problem worse; fitness represses in the body the unresolved and unexplored challenges of a larger selfhood.
We often suggest that motivation, will power, self-discipline, grit, perseverance, all the things required to have a bomb body, ought to gain recognition. But in large part that’s easy. Even for uniquely talented athletes, ultimately, it’s a matter of conditioning, coaching, practice. Most anyone with a physical trainer and nutritionist and personal chef and arsenal of body care specialist can look like a super model, at least from neck to toe (and hence how often selfies obscure or eliminate the face). You just need time and resources.
But kindness? Tough ideas, empathy, care, love? How do these get cultivated and felt and rightfully inform the recognition we all need as human beings? Likes and thumbs-up and comments strike me as a horribly poor substitute for actual human interaction.
The expectations created for adolescents have become so perverse that I can’t honestly endure the patterning of young lives into curricular and extracurricular molds that too often obviate growth rather than promote it, not least in expectations for quantity over quality.
Again in the narrower yet revelatory space of college admissions, institutions and their representatives will say, for example, you should only take four or five or no more than eight Advanced Placement courses in high school. Don't stress!
Yet parents and agents with whom I speak, they know: they have the hard data that, say, just to imagine an example, students admitted to Yale from AP schools in China all have had 12+ courses. Or 15+ to Stanford and 16+ to Princeton or whatever. They have studied with tremendous intensity every successful case, at least amongst Chinese applicants, over the past two, three, four years. They know the truth of outcomes, which then undermines tremendously whatever institutions profess publicly.
So why not concentrate all that anxiety on your abs and pecks and calves? Sure they teach me a healthy weight in health class, or the right number of calories, but the truth must be more, or less, or really what I’ve been told doesn’t add up, can’t compute.
If we repeatedly lie to teenagers, why should they trust anything we say?
Ironically in most cases it all becomes a singularity, or a few unoriginal singularities: the lithe model, the bulked-up body builder, the perfectly sculpted cycling enthusiast, the enlightened yogi, the frumpy eccentric, the fun-loving frisbee player. Then who can be the most perfect of these? No one, never, endlessly competing in the destruction of an actual individual, inter-subjective self.
Perhaps it’s not all that bleak and I do find solace working with any number of incredible, thoughtful, decently well-adjust young people: this truly brings me tremendous joy.
I also find amazing potential in the connections and creativity of the internet.
Still, what of the pressures children face? I could write a whole book just on the hashtags and turns of phrase used on Chinese social media. Take one ideal-type: 筷子腿 (kuai zi tui), literally chopstick legs.
Meet bunny, who has posts with thousands of likes. She’s 20 years old, 170cm tall (5’7”), weighs 39kg (86 pounds); she has a video showing how she can fit her fingers around her upper thigh. I’m not a doctor nor a health expert, but the internet tells me her BMI indicates “underweight/severe thinness,” versus an “ideal height weight chart for women” (really?!?) suggesting she aspire to the 56-68kg range. I can’t be sure Bunny is a real person, but I do know many real people will have seen her posts.
We can view another chopstick leg contender, 一只奶泡 (yi zhi nai pao, or, literally, a milk (white) bubble—though note 泡 can also imply something sexual or flirtatious, particularly directed by a male toward a female, as in the example “想泡我妹妹，做梦.”) She has over 25,000 followers and nearly a quarter million likes and saves. Whatever she embodies, it garners attention.
We can find thousands of others, male and female alike. For example, I find honestly, humorously quite bizarre this recently shared and rather homo-erotic video of young men drinking together: do we think with all that flesh, those hard bodies, added up with alcohol, all will end in a big Platonic group hug? What multitude of viewer fantasies get played here?
I’m not against fantasy, not in the least! Imaginations are a must.
Yet again, though, pretend must play out IRL, in real life, in interaction and physical contact, in the complex sensory selfhood that makes us human.
Do take time, if you’re a parent, if you’re an educator, if you engage with any younger person, take some time to step back and see what they see, to see what you see, and to carve out some space for a fuller personhood. Engage young people in honest, vulnerable conversation. Encourage them to take a break, if not to quit social media entirely for a good stretch.
Because meet YEYE, too, part of a growing number of middle-aged fitness influencers in China who, at 42 years old, 163cm and 47kg (somewhat better on the “Ideal Height Weight Chart for Women”), could well be a parent, a parent of a student attending your school, or your child’s school. “
YEYE has 30,000 fans. I’m unsure what influence all this might have on progeny, “keep exercising.”
“At middle age! Circumstance is more important than ability,” the post reads (my translation).
We’ve got a hell of a lot of work to do:
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