The contemporary era offers us a thousand opportunities to indulge in vain pleasures. The first of these is the cult of the person, which is primarily directed towards the self. The love of one’s own image is so deeply rooted in our society that a whole economy has been created around self-idolatry.
Admiring oneself becomes pathological when it ends up summing up the purpose of existence. To get up, to be ecstatic in front of the reflection of our mirror, whether it is digital or glass, and then to go to bed dreaming about ourselves, such could be the three pillars supposed to organize our life. Why so much frivolity? Is it because we have been lulled by stories and fictions since our childhood that we want to be an everyday starlet?
No doubt, since technology gives us the illusion of being able to do so. Dreaming of being adulated, finding an audience to like us gives us an accessible pleasure within reach of a thumb and a click. The ephemeral stories we tell about our special little ego are added to the endless stream of fables and other nonsense that abound on the web. These clichés that we catapult with filters and magical retouching install us for a moment in the virtual or mental newsfeed of an anonymous horde that we dream in groupies. These marks of attention deposited here and there on our wall, numerous and yet always insufficient, never manage to fill with joy a moody heart.
The desire to please hardly hides the pain of existing or the fear of living. To live by interposed images is only a semblance of existence. This icon that we put so much effort into building can collapse overnight like a house of cards when we realize that real life is elsewhere. Choosing artificial light with authentic opacity is more convenient. Creating a shiny, happy avatar from scratch requires less effort than digging into the tunnels of our being to find the gold that lies hidden there. Falsehood spreads like wildfire except that there comes a time when it will explode in a quest for sincerity.
