On Mirrors – A Review

Everything can be a mirror if you’re vain enough.

Take, for instance, leftover Indian food. While its not exactly polished metal or a still pond, it can reveal a lot about you. You left over half the rice but under half the curry. So, you’re greedy. But you also left most of the bigger pieces of chicken. So maybe not greedy, maybe you were just careless in your portioning.

Or. Maybe you were just really hungry two days ago and you prefer the sauce to the meat.

Perhaps it would be more apt to say: everything can be a mirror if you don’t mind your mirror being incompetent.

Self-worth and identity are concepts I find myself coming back to a lot. I guess when you’re writing a blog where you sort of “review” different aspects of human life you’re going to find yourself circling these topics from time to time. But I guess I also come back to them because it’s fascinating to think about where identity comes from and how different people tend to find theirs in the strangest of places.

It’s safe to say this is, like all times, a divisive time. A lot of people are very mad! About… well, just about anything. From silly things like M&M’s and sports to very serious things like education and bodily autonomy. I realize I’m coming to the M&M discourse a bit too late but do we all remember when that was news. Can we take a moment and appreciate or at least try to appreciate how many hours people dedicated to discourse surrounding an M&M redesign.

People with college degrees who spent years working to become accredited journalists were paid to collectively spend at least 1,000 hours studying the changes made to candy mascots. And then thousands of social media addicted consumers then spent tens of thousands of hours having discourse about it.

Talk about a mirror! Examining that really puts me in a strange space. Am I to be proud that my species is high enough on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to spend real time doing this? Or am I meant to shudder at the fact that the mobs can be whipped up over just about anything given the right demagogue. I know the latter is probably the right answer, but I let a bit of the former creep in from time to time, you know, to stay sane.

Anyway. Mirrors.

I think it’s important to sometimes reflect on what grabs our attention and other times… maybe not. Like I’ve been saying in my last few blogs, I’ve been chasing escape a lot lately. My free time has been spent reading comedy fantasy books by the same author or playing The Legend of Zelda. Both very safe things that take up my brain space and are just challenging enough to keep me from, I don’t know, getting mad at people getting mad at candy I guess.

Sometimes, when I’m in the mire of time where I have just 5 minutes to kill, I’ll find myself opening Facebook or Twitter and I don’t really like what I see. Paragraphs and paragraphs of meaningless vitriol all commented on posts that were designed to stir people into endless arguments for the coveted engagement all platforms need to stay afloat. After some time, I have to remember to pull myself out before I get sucked in scrolling through comments by self-assured people just being mad online.

I want to sit down with each and every one of them, including the half I agree with, and just say “what are you doing!” “Life is so short. Why are you spending your time here of all places?”

But then I see it, in the mirror of the screen, I’m in there. It’s a distant me. Much younger. Arguing with people online for no reason.

Did you know YouTube keeps your comments in a history tab? Well. I do. Here’s some questions.

Why did I write two paragraphs about the US’s foreign policy in the 1980s? I don’t know. Why did I get in an argument with someone about the etymology of the Greek “titan,” or whether or not Obama was a good person, or if God exists, or if Abraham Lincoln would be a Republican today?

And apparently, I had a multi-day argument with someone about igneous rocks.

I don’t know anything about rocks. Or any of these topics! but in all of them I’m talking as if I’m an authority. Except, I’m 15.

Now how do I reckon with it? People are doing what I did. Granted, the people on Facebook and Twitter are much older than that. But maybe it’s just something everyone goes through. I don’t know! But it’s a bummer to think about how much time and energy is wasted on a “hot button” topic that truly isn’t a big deal.

Right now, my hometown is going through a crisis and has made the news a few times because of Pride month. To put matters succinctly, a school board official stated that they shouldn’t use a history book that discussed Harvey Milk. His reason was a terrible one. And well, I don’t really feel like platforming this joke of a person anymore than I already have.

My mom reminded me about last year, where there were terrible protests that involved a lot of very angry people screaming, sometimes directly at children, during a Pride rally.

Of course, that led to protests and counter protests. And things just got worse. This year, once again people have already begun to start fights. And all over the news you can see how different communities act in response to Pride.

Where I live now, a fairly progressive neighborhood in a mostly progressive city, in a very progressive state, Pride is a celebration and while there are protesters, they are quiet and on the sidelines.

The district Temecula belongs, however, voted 47% blue 53% red in the most recent congressional election. It seems like places that are closer in terms of politics are the fullest of that vitriol. Hate becomes so many people’s identities.

And coping with that is hard for me.

Obviously, what a lot of people say at these protests is terrible. And the fact that many people pretend their side is “for the kids” is sickening. But I struggle to feel anything but sorry for them. But is that the right reaction?

So, we hold up the mirror to humanity and see what of us are in them. Passion, of course. Tribalism, maybe. But also, the overwhelming desire to be right.

When I first started writing I had a short story that I was working on that was… far beyond my reach as a 14-year-old. It was a story about a kid who believed he was the modern reincarnation of general Ulysses S. Grant. He mentioned that he believed he was Grant to several people and they told him he was wrong. He slowly started acting like the former president and began smoking (Grant was addicted to tobacco). At the end, the main character is told that he is forcing his life to follow the trajectory of Grant’s because he’s too afraid to be wrong. He refuses until his father sits him down and says: “there’s more to life than being right and wrong.”

Which was advice I needed when I was that age and probably need now too.

The kid then gets mouth cancer and dies (like Grant).

Everyone thinks they’re right all the time, even people who live with constant uncertainty, (they just think they’re right about being uncertain). And it’s important to get a reality check that you’re fallible and that that’s okay.

The mirror also reveals how susceptible we all are to groupthink. I think most people are convinced that they’re above groupthink. Maybe that’s a bias I have, who’s to say. And this mirror also helps me see my own biases and generalizations that I might be making because of what I hear and see. That isn’t to say I suddenly think the viewpoints of people screaming at kids for being different is okay, but just that I need to make sure I am watching my own thinking.

In those comedy fantasy books I mentioned (Terry Pratchett’s Discworld if you’re wondering) there is a series of novels about witches. In it, witches are magical, but they don’t do much magic. Instead, they look at the world critically and try to fix problems with words. One of the ways witches identify problems is by using second and third thoughts.

Second thoughts are when you think about what you’re thinking about. In most of the novels this is important for witches to realize when they’re being tricked or hexed in some way. Rarer are third thoughts, which is sort of a background noise that thinks about how you think about what you’re thinking about and also picks up on small details in the real world. Everyone has the capacity for 2nd and 3rd thoughts, but in the novels, witches (and the cosmic forces they’re up against) are really the only ones who use them.

In the same vein, a mirror in literature is often meant to reveal some hidden truth, but I think it would be more effective to think that metaphorical mirrors actually reveal how we think and feel when faced with a truth. And I guess the purpose of this blog is to take a step even farther back and think about how we think about truths.

So maybe those comedy fantasy books aren’t as much of an escape as I thought. Oh well, at least I have The Legend of Zelda. There’s no way I could learn anything from that!

Thanks for reading! I hope you liked it. About a quarter of the way through this blog it really changed trajectory and I felt myself truly thinking deeper about my own thoughts and actions. Scary!

I’m definitely going to be coming back to this subject when I feel like I have something more concrete to say about it. For now though, I’m comfortable thinking about how I think about what I’m thinking about. Stay tuned for in three months when I write a blog entitled “On Thoughts” where I go over thinking about what I’m thinking about what I’m thinking about what I’m thinking about and that it’s all due to the final boss in Zelda.

Thanks again!