The Pernicious Consequences of the Selfie

The best pictures contain a story. If the story is simply "Look at how pretty I am, how cool I am, how special I am," that's a lousy tale.

Three weeks into the new job and I receive an email from the corporate VP of HR. She wants to announce that I'm on board via LinkedIn and wonders if I have a better headshot for the post. The picture I have is one of those AI-generated cartoon things. It looks enough like a cool version of me that it does the trick but it's hardly the selfie she's looking for.

She ends up trolling the internet and finds a decade-old photo of my, one I took as a part my extra work in Chicago for Chicago Fire. She used that one. I am not bothered by it.

A few years ago, I decided to do one of those photo clean ups one is seized upon to engage once in a while. I noticed an almost pathological number of pictures of myself. Pages of selfies taken when I was losing that massive amount of weight, of me in the gym, of me posing with shades on in interesting places, of myself and the then third wife. Why are there so many pictures of myself on my phone? What the hell was I thinking?

I deleted nearly a thousand shots of my narcissistic mug, only keeping around twenty that made me laugh.

Not long after I deleted all my social media accounts. There are plenty of problems with social media: a flood of conspiracy theorizing, intentionally false information, high school mean girl made up rumors, and the overwhelming sound of ten out of a thousand screaming over everyone else but the narcissism and nearly fatal depression that comes from the selfie is not the fault of the platforms.

Research has shown that narcissistic individuals take more solo selfies, but fewer selfies that feature other people. And while researchers have focused a lot on how the frequency of selfie-taking relates to personality, few studies have really examined why people take selfies.

In a recent study, 276 college students completed a survey consisting of a questionnaire measuring narcissism. Then they estimated how many selfies they took in the past week, both alone and with other people in the photo. Respondents also answered an open-ended question in which they listed what motivates them to take selfies.

The results showed that one particular aspect of narcissism — grandiose exhibitionism — was the only personality trait linked to self-taking, and solo-selfies in particular. Exhibitionism wasn't related to taking selfies that included other people.

I did not delete pictures of me taken by others because those photos have an added layer. Someone is on the other end and chose to capture that slice of time and I was the subject. I look at pictures of me on vacations in Paris or London and I know that the ex-wife took them. It reminds me of both the places and the experience.

She and I were in Paris. Our first anniversary. I had spent the year saving up to send her there to be a poet in the City of Poetry, on her own for three weeks and then I joined her. She sort of resented that I showed up—her solo ride in France was just too fun to be burdened with a partner who wanted to do and see things, too. We took a trip to the Louvre because I really wanted to soak that amazing place in. She didn't want to go but reluctantly agreed. When we arrived, the line to get in was long and she dug in her heels and refused to wait.

I shrugged because we were there for us (which ultimately meant her) and if I decided to stick it out, she'd leave and I wouldn't see her for the day. So we strolled across the river and found the Musée d'Orsay, a museum housed in a former train station. Their ticketing system was down so they just let us in.

We split up as we did but not before she took one of my favorite pictures of me while in France.

When I look at that shot, I think about all of the context before and after. I recall that we both went through an exhibit about the Prostitutes of Paris which was both amazing and an odd predictor of our future. It is a snapshot that drips with memory.

Selfies don't have that kind of importance. They are pictures we take of ourselves to look as put together as we can. They are for other people because, in the world of selfies, the opinions of other people is of the highest of stakes. This is why teenage girls find themselves judged by strangers and have suicidal thoughts as their selfies are compared with millions of others in the Zuckerberg dream of a decade ago.

The consequences of selfie culture are a sense of self that is warped and shaped by our dreams of being affirmed by strangers. A view of the self that is of over-exaggerated significance that is so easily shattered that the only addictive response is to attempt to up your selfie game. It's an ugly, relentless pursuit like forgetting to eat in a restaurant filled with mirrors because you can't stop posing. It is a surface-level image of each of us in a society that continues to moralize about individual identity. It makes every inch of the internet a grotesque high school yearbook, photo after photo of people posing for their own camera in the desperate desire to be seen without showing any of the interesting parts of themselves.

The best pictures contain a story. If the story is simply "Look at how pretty I am, how cool I am, how special I am," that's a lousy tale.