The pounding heart before you post a selfie may be the sanest thing about you.
Freya India’s essay “Rejecting the Machine” starts from a feeling that many young women will recognise. Posting a selfie on Instagram makes the heart pound. It feels wrong, close to shameful, and checking how many likes the picture has collected feels humiliating. Girls joke about throwing their phones across the room after posting, still shaking with anxiety.
The usual reading of that reaction is psychological. The pounding heart is social anxiety, the shame is insecurity, and the cure is confidence: work on your self-esteem until posting feels normal. India asks the reader to take the reaction more literally. Suppose the body is reacting the way it reacts to any act it registers as degrading. Then the useful question is no longer how to quiet the shame. It is what the shame has noticed, and why so much of the culture is eager to talk you out of it.
What the selfie asks of you
Look at what the act involves. You present your face and body to an audience of friends and strangers, and they score it, publicly and in numbers you will check several times an hour. Ordinary status-signalling uses things you own to say something about you. The selfie removes that distance: you become the thing on display and the thing consumed. In a crowded room you are a person among people; on the feed you are inventory.
Why would a culture train people to override their unease at that? India’s answer is that we promoted personal “liberation” to the exclusion of all other values, and that particular value happens to be the one most easily monetized. So the voice telling a nervous girl she is just insecure and should post anyway is not a neutral voice. It belongs to a system that profits when she stops hesitating. The result is a culture in which the pressure to Instagram yourself is both psychologically damaging and highly profitable. The culture is profane and commercial at the same time. They feed off each other.
Shame as information
Orthodox Christianity has a word for what is happening: prelest, spiritual deception, being deceived about the state of your own soul. The deception does not lie in posting a selfie. It lies in learning to read the alarm as a malfunction, when the shame may be the body’s recognition that something sacred is being violated. If that is right, then the shame is real and rational, and dismissing it as anxiety to be treated is itself a form of the spiritual deception. The discomfort may be the last remaining signal that a person’s dignity has not been fully consumed. When the shame stops, you have not healed. You have been fully captured.
The obvious objection is that shame is an unreliable oracle. People have been ashamed of their accents, their bodies, and whom they love, and much of that shame deserved to be unlearned. But shame about what you are is the kind therapy rightly loosens. The shame India describes attaches to something you are doing, offering yourself up to be priced, and an act can be examined. The same act — sharing a photo — can be an expression of connection or an act of self-commodification. A picture sent to a friend who was not there carries the evening to someone. A picture edited for strangers’ approval carries you away from the evening.
Alone at the same table
India describes a group of young women who spent an entire evening in a restaurant taking selfies together and barely exchanged a word. While they ate, they edited their photos in silence, one hand editing and the other holding cutlery. They looked possessed. They belong to the same generation that says it feels painfully alone.
The scene shows why posting can feel degrading even when nobody is cruel in the comments. In Pleasure as Organizing Principle, the opposite of pleasure is dissociation: the departure of mind from body into a fantasy of its own creation. At that table, the edited selfie is the fantasy and the bodies sitting together over dinner are the abandoned reality.
The women who say they feel painfully alone have located the problem with perfect accuracy. They are painfully alone because they are taking selfies together. What India calls the Machine has replaced the thing (presence, vulnerability, the risk of being genuinely seen) with a performance of the thing, and the performance is compelling enough that almost nobody notices the original is gone. The shame notices. It is the part of each person still keeping count of what the evening was supposed to be, and the real question when the phone goes down is whether that evening is still there to return to.
References:
- Freya India, Rejecting the Machine