Prema Jayakumar

Narcissism – excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one’s physical appearance.

Sounds familiar? It does to me. What is the predominant image you take home with you if you go out for a while, walk in the park, go for a ride in the metro, go to a picnic spot? Earlier, the camera fiend used to be the person who brought a camera to all occasions, took snapshots of views, came visiting you at home and took photographs of every hapless person who happened to be there. There were also those who insisted on being photographed before every monument seen and every scenic spot visited. But, for a while now, this camera obsession that used to belong to only a few, the need to immortalise each moment, has spread to people of all types – differing in age, sex, dress – taking selfies either alone or with others. If we were to give a name to the age we live in, wouldn’t we call it the age of selfies? Somehow, the selfies being taken all around us, those posted on the Facebook and Instagram and other platforms of the social media seem to define the world around us. The ultimate expression of this, to me at least, came when I read of a Selfie Toaster that prints the image of your face on your morning toast? Why would anyone want to eat one’s own face in the morning? I would say even looking at your own face in the mirror each morning would be penance enough for some of us at least. If Narcissus lived now, he wouldn’t have to die of starvation, he could print his own face on his bread and look at it even while he ate it.

The myth of Narcissus who fell in love with his own image in the water of the pool and died because he could not leave it even to eat, no longer seems so unlikely when one hears of people who take selfies in dangerous conditions – at the edge of a precipice, hanging out of a train, posing on slippery rocks before a waterfall – and give up their lives because of their foolhardiness, because of their obsession with themselves and their appearances.

People who needed the constant reassurance of others around them used to be a few. Now that the active participation (passive participation in the form of their presence on social media platforms being sufficient) of the people who have to validate you is not necessary all the time, the need seems to have surfaced in everyone almost. A recognition that you are special, that you are noteworthy, that you are to be immortalised if only in the ephemeral image of the digital camera, seems to be everyone’s need. What is frightening is that the approval of these unseen societies is very uninvolved, touching just the surface of each other’s lives. And this seems to be a way out for people who are afraid of involvement in real terms.

Narcissus was cursed to die like this because he was so enamoured of himself that he could not notice anyone else. Are our present narcissists too going the same way? Are they so obsessed with themselves, their own appearances, perhaps their own feelings, that they cannot relate to others, cannot empathise with others? If so, if each one believes he or she is the centre of the universe, it portends badly for them and for the people involved with them. It reduces each individual to an isolated existence, with other people being needed only to admire them, validate their view of their selves.

And no man should be ‘an island, entire of itself.’ The lives and deaths of other people should create an impact on you. Or society, as we know it, becomes a failed construct to be replaced by something else.

Perhaps these are only fears that will prove baseless because they come from a lack of understanding of the changes that take place. After all, mankind has survived so many upheavals, and each time people have, Cassandra like, predicted disaster and dissolution. And still, we have lived on, making mistakes, fighting terrible wars, wobbling on our axis and somehow sometime righting ourselves, so that life and the world go on.