Relatable

Nowadays, when everyone of us is facing similar circumstances, resonance buds from the very source of our daily routines. We catch up with people to reiterate the same daily routines and feel that everyone is doing things that can be related with. “#relatable” had been the newest wrinkle for a while on social media.

Today, let’s take a few minutes to understand this facet of life!

A life without resonance is hell

– Toushin

Being idle has its own perks, doesn’t it? We can sleep and wake up whenever we want. Do anything that pleases our whims at any time of the day. While this is a time when many people like me are enjoying a lot of freedom, most of our days go completely opposite of the way we planned them to be. The list of reasons could be very long, but can mostly be clubbed under one particular category, fondly called “social media”.

Like every other normal person these days, the first thing I do when I get up in the morning, sorry, afternoon, is reach for my phone and look at the messages and posts that I might’ve missed while I was doing something as unproductive as sleeping. Wait, this isn’t normal? Then what is? Anyway, I look through the various knowledge enriching posts that my social media feed is filled with. Okay, guilty as charged, I look at memes.

And that’s how I got the inspiration to this particular piece. One fine day, I came across this question, why are memes so entertaining? Not all of them are funny, but why is it that we continue looking at them for hours on end without having to stop and think, what am I doing with my life?

The pattern, slowly yet surely, discerned itself in front of my eyes.

Dissecting the meme culture

Every meme page has thousands of followers, and almost all of them display content either based on our everyday experiences, invokes nostalgia or agrees with other feelings that we can truly relate with.

Extrapolating this question, I pondered upon the fact that meme pages comprise of just one side of social media these days. What about the other side, the one filled with people expressing each and every one of their emotions, and we being the lucky (or unlucky) consumers that find something coherent with our feeling at every point in our lives?

The answer was quite simple. We resonate with them.

In my personal opinion, it is probably the worst thing to go on social media when one is going through an emotional challenge. Even if we inadvertently end up searching for something that we relate with in that situation, we are blessed with artificial intelligence, which shows us content that is going to strike nerves that you would rather not be struck, even at later stages, when we’re completely over the said challenge.

And before we know it, we are 48 posts deep on the thread, looking at similar posts or worse, having popped out a pint of ice cream to numb the pain that we had been dealing with for quite a while.

While it is an extremely effective way to kill our time, what is evanescent is these sorts of posts are extremely good fuel to the fire called confirmation bias. In this, we assign higher value to stimuli in accord with our newly formed (or instantaneous) beliefs and lower value to others. And whatever we accept, we like more of, hence the unstoppable urge to scroll through them!

The confirmation bias prevents us from turning our attention towards bringing about the much-required alterations in our mindsets that would help us recover from the situation.

Movies much?

Resonance also happens to be the formula for success these days in the entertainment business. The most notable examples can be seen through the array of superhero movies that we have seen over the past decade. While their alter-egos are larger than life, the other side of the cowl completely humanizes our heroes in front of our eyes. This makes them relatable for the average Joe and hence the connection with the audience.

The underlying facet

While we are on the subject of the engagement we experience while looking at the human-heroes, it is crucial to note that it is one amidst many other triggers that make us a little susceptible to a confusion, which I believe is rampant in the society currently.

We see people on the virtual world enjoying their perfect lives. With every terrestrial possession; perfect bodies, fancy cars, homes that look like castles and whatnot. While we’re talking about resonance, it is hard to find a large percentage of the population that does resonate with this demographic. And hence, we do all sorts of things to be relatable with the modern times.

Or is it something else that we desire here? Cosmetic surgery, fad diets, unnecessary purchases and everything else under the sun, can hardly be considered measures to be relatable.

Resonance and acceptance are two very distinct terms, and should not be used interchangeably. While getting fit and spending huge sums of money to acquire an affluent lifestyle does provide us with a sense of fulfillment, but vanity hardly helps us be more resonant with people we actually want to resonate with. It might get us their approval. But a connection, actual relatability? Hardly.

And this isn’t only applicable in cases where the approval is from a large number of people. Even in our daily lives, be it the personal or professional front, at times, we end up trying so hard to be like what is our perception is of the condition, we end up forgetting who we are.

Although, in the moment, it seems great that because of our efforts towards being more coherent, everything seems hunky dory and the boat is completely stable. However, human psychology is equipped with a correctional switch, which is termed cognitive dissonance. It arises when there is a difference between our beliefs and our actions. Sooner or later, it kicks in and the real trouble starts at that instant.