MySpace

I really think the whole rabbit hole of trying to make our lives epic and trending started way back in the late 1900s with a little something called "MySpace." 

The Internet was still relatively new, at least for public access, and here comes this platform that tells you that you can have your own little piece of it...to do whatever you want with. 

Listen, I grew up in the 90s, and my room was my sanctuary - as it was for pretty much everyone else that I knew at the time. There was a period where my walls were literally plastered with music posters. And cut-outs from magazines. And for a brief period, a giant mural that I painted literally floor-to-oops-onto-the-ceiling-a-little of Jonathan Taylor Thomas's face. Yes. His 8-foot-tall face. (And it was not well done.) 

*I also invited him to my birthday every year, but he never even sent a card. Hmph. 

But my room was "cool" to me. I would walk in, and I would feel comfortable in my space, and I would know there was one place in the world where I felt like I made sense. 

And actually, the same is true as an adult. We cultivate our houses and our living spaces so that we're comfortable there. So that when we come in weary from the world, we feel like we make sense again. Something is right. 

Then...MySpace. 

It gave us the opportunity to turn our own little piece of the internet into a "home" - a reflection of who we were. A reflection of what we liked, what made us comfortable, what made us feel like we made sense. 

And for awhile, it was just like we were walking into each others' living spaces. We would ooh and aah and say things like, "That's totally you!" or "That makes perfect sense." We would marvel over each other's spaces the way we'd marvel over a friend's house when we spent the night - it's so cool here. 

Until we'd start browsing around a little more and find other places that were also cool. And then, all of a sudden, it becomes a contest. "But mine is the most cool, right?" And it became an exercise in trying to learn things about the world, but without context. You can look at someone's bedroom and learn quite a few things about them, but none of it will make sense until you actually meet the person and form a relationship with them. 

All of a sudden, we found ourselves in a context-less void where we were looking at things that we thought were cool, but we couldn't possibly understand them. And if we could not understand them without knowing the person, then it slowly occurred to us that others couldn't really understand our thing if they didn't know us, so we started putting ourselves out there a little more, trying to provide context to our little corner of the digital world. 

You can see how this sort of thing spirals. And now, here we are, 30-ish years later, still trying to cultivate context in a world that doesn't actually exist when our real lives are so much more than what we can show of them. We're more human than our digital presence allows us to demonstrate, and yet, what has happened is that we've fallen into the trap of believing that what is epic is what is most human and we couldn't be further from the truth. 

See, being human was never about being "cool." It has always been about something way more important than that...

(Come back tomorrow; I'll tell you more.)