Life's Best TV Channel
You will call me weird, but my favorite part of the movie The Truman Show is the ending. No, not the protagonist’s climax of triumph over personal fears and simulated yet real adversity, but that after-ending where the two parking attendants simply change the channel to find some more entertainment elsewhere.
Our individual trials and tribulations loom large in our minds. They demand our direct attention and thus consume our thoughts. Survival depends on this response, so we can be forgiven a certain degree of self-absorption.
But in the wider scheme of things, our struggles, successes and failures pass most people unperceived. To those who do perceive them, our victories or sufferings serve only as disconnected examples to emulate or avoid, like a blurb you read in a newspaper about some distant stranger’s misfortune. A level closer, some observers may look upon our ups and downs as mild entertainment, and a level closer still, some observers will celebrate our accomplishments or revel in our nadir.
As adults, we develop a fair sense (one hopes!) of who is who in our lives. Juveniles may have developed no such sense. They put themselves “out there” for evaluation by the “community” on social media, and often they are unable distinguish the feedback they get in terms of praise and criticism. The angst which we all feel when growing up leads us to feel like “the whole world is watching,” but in truth the whole world could care no less, generally speaking. We are all just a name and face momentarily appearing on a screen somewhere. It takes a degree of maturity and distance to realize for whom we exist as a source of mere entertainment (for good or ill), and for whom we exist as something more.
By no means is this an argument for illegalizing social media for juveniles, as some statists have proposed. If anything, this is just a reflection for consideration by parents rearing kids in the age of omnipresent smartphones and tablets. No modern parent will ever regret having a heart-to-heart chat with a child to remind the child that s/he is the center of your universe and there’s no better channel to watch on life’s television.
