Too #blessed for our own darn good
Blame social media and ubiquitous selfies on our boastfulness
For a while now we’ve been living in a bragaholic culture, fuelled and enabled by social media.
It used to be that only famous people — movie stars and other public figures — would have their ‘ready for close-up’ faces plastered everywhere, their luxe vacations recorded, their haute couture wardrobes displayed, their glitzy social lives chronicled and captured for an envious public to drool over. Oh, why couldn’t we be like them? They didn’t have to brag about themselves or their lives. They had press agents and studios to keep the stardust machine running. It was part of the business of fame. It was also the clever manufacturing of envy.
Gradually, though, with social media including Facebook, Instagram and even Twitter, we became our own press agents, our own paparazzi, literally stalking ourselves with selfies at every turn, transforming our every day moments into monuments to general awesomeness.
So a modest hike in a national park with friends gets turned into a glossy posted photo celebrating our own fitness. Or, a family Sunday lunch photo, taken in just the right light and posted, makes us look like the happiest and luckiest and most together family anywhere.
Except we’re not. Most of us are just human beings, flawed but special to our own loved ones, and hopefully to ourselves, not needing — and many people not wanting — that constant glare of attention.
Yet with the internet, we embarked on the democratization of fame. And in the process we all became a bit too boastful.
How could we not? In an era of fierce competition, and facing professionally and personally more elimination rounds than ever before, we knew instinctively we had to brag to keep up.
Bragging was once so notable it was remarked on at every turn. Think of the late Muhammad Ali, boasting in 1974, he would before one boxing match “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Ali also said, “It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am.” Shocking bragadoccio at the time, but somehow endearing.
Back then bragging was more a male rite than a universal pastime, spreading like fungus in locker rooms and prevalent in boardrooms. In business it used to be described as “snapping your suspenders.”
Women were careful not to brag, somehow knowing it would attract hostile attention.
I used to hear male colleagues bragging all the time, until I figured out I was just as good as they were and should be talking up my work, too.
Now, the whole world snaps its suspenders. Pride was once considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins. That was then. Today we engage in all kinds of public bragging, sometimes rightfully calling it necessary self-promotion.
There’s humble bragging, defined by the online Urban Dictionary as “subtly letting others know about how fantastic your life is while undercutting it with a bit of self-effacing humour or ‘woe is me’ gloss.”
One of the funniest examples submitted to Urban Dictionary was “Uggggh just ate about fifteen pieces of chocolate gotta learn to control myself when flying first class or they’ll cancel my modelling contract LOL.”
There’s brazen bragging, stealth bragging, passive aggressive bragging, wipe the floor with the other person bragging, resumé bragging, kid and grandkid bragging, fitness bragging, food bragging, job bragging and on it goes.
There’s even advice online on how to brag and get away with it: try adding, suggests one writer, the hashtag #blessed to your “pinch me” description of a moment of glory.
One of the few pictures I ever posted — on Twitter — was definitely a big brag. Huge.
It was one taken of me and Hillary Clinton in Toronto, just before selfies became ubiquitous, before she ran for president.
She did not even know I was media, let alone ask me my name, when we posed backstage for a photo. I framed it, thinking one day she’ll be president and this will be fantastic to have. Alas, no such luck. Which brings me to the current occupant of the White House, Donald Trump, whose bragging is so obnoxious I thought maybe it would begin to temper it in the rest of us.
That man has been engaging in factfree bragging probably since infancy: “My diaper is so full, it’s the fullest diaper ever.”
Trump’s daily bragging — mainly on Twitter but also during rallies — has become one of the most mocked aspects of his turbulent presidency.
I won’t belabour all his pathetic boasts — from crowd size to election victory — but one of his most recent was “Virtually no President has accomplished what we have accomplished in the first 9 months.” To which many thought “Virtually nothing.”
I’ve been monitoring the societal brago-metre, wondering whether social media’s favourite pastime has taken a hit with Trump in the White House, as anyone who turns on a computer comes face to face with his alarming and pathological bragging.
It hasn’t yet abated. All of us, in subtle or very obvious ways, are still bragging.
Can you get ahead without bragging these days?
With Donald Trump as a living breathing lesson that even if you supposedly become one of the most powerful world leaders, you can’t stop bragging, maybe we could give it a try.
P.S. Angela Merkel, recently re-elected as German chancellor and considered by many to be Western democracy’s true leader, never ever brags.
Maybe I could get a picture with her. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.