Age of Pretension

The era we are currently living in will be called lots of names by historians of the future: Age of Information, Age of Data, Age of Social Media, but the most interesting and the most overlooked name for this era will be the Age of Pretension. We are living in such an era that nothing is at it seems; to quote Ezio Auditore da Firenze from the game Assasin’s Creed “Nothing is true, everything is permitted, and we are the architects of our lives as well as our future.” Meaning that the truths we accept as true are just the sum of what we collectively believe to be true and we construct our lives accordingly. Belief is the keyword here. For something to become the truth, we just need to pretend it is true until we believe it, and if we can make a collection of people pretend the same way, the distinction between truth and pretension dissolves to make way for the truth as we believe it.

In the Age of Pretension, the most important possession, aside from money, is reputation and how we are perceived by others. Previously, the only way for an individual to get recognition was through their acts in their local community whether through physical acts of service to their community or the work they did. There was no social media, so people lived and died by their local community, and no matter what they did they could not hide their real selves since they physically interacted with their community on a daily basis. However, the invention and commercialization of the internet and then globalization gave birth to the need to be known and respected outside local communities. Before the internet, there was no need for us to be more than we really were, but with the internet came the need to seem much more than we really are. Before the internet, our only competition was the Johns and Janes of our neighborhood, but after the internet, the scale of competition increased to include billions of people. Consequently, being physically present went from a necessity to an option. Since we all became global citizens thanks to the internet, getting recognized via physical acts turned obsolete. Earlier, we could just hunt down a potential employer to ask for a job and dazzle them with the acts we did for our community because they lived around the corner, literally, but now we need to create an online persona, a resume displaying who we are, and why the employer should hire us because our potential employers are no longer known to us, just like we are unknown to them. Hence, we all have taken ourselves online since the emergence of the internet in hopes of building a reputation through the life we put online for the world to see.

This act of putting ourselves online comes with its filters. There can be no curation when we physically build a reputation for ourselves because we are living it as we are showing it off, for better or worse, but online does not mean live, so we can filter the stuff we do not want others to see when we put our lives on the internet. In other words, we can easily filter the bad stuff out, only showcasing the stuff the others would be impressed by. Fundamentally, we can pretend like we are living the idealized versions of our lives. Since there is no way to validate the truth of our claims, we can pretend like the lives we are showing off are the real deal, and all our lives on the internet seem more than the lives we are really living. Now, we can just create a new, improved, and online version of ourselves with just a few clicks and use this version as the real us. This version does not necessarily need to resemble the real us in the least, but the closer to truth the better since it will make it harder for us to be singled out as a pretender or a liar. Yet, there is no need to bother to stay closer to the truth when you can imagine the perfect life and showcase it through your online self. There are billions of people in the world and you will not meet most of them physically, so they will never get to know the real you and compare it with online you anyway.

Hence, the Age of Pretention. Nowadays, telling lies about our age, profession, height, weight, social status or utilizing whatever else we can use to get ourselves a competitive advantage are akin to breathing. The world is bustling with frauds, swindlers and con artists. These people are all around us. They are our friends, our employers, people we share our lives with; they are us. We are so used to this fact, we are so used to pretending that we do not even try to see the truth because the real truth would foil all our plans to reveal us as the frauds we are. Hence, we keep on pretending until our pretension becomes the truth that everybody else accepts it to be. Take out your phone and scroll around your social media apps. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, the app does not matter; in all of them, you will see magnificent people living wonderous lives. You will see white-collar employees running from conference to conference, YouTubers travelling from country to country, or your friends posting pictures from their holidays, and what is common in all these posts will be the perfection of it all. You will not see people crying, admitting their failures, or anything else that would shed a negative light on themselves; it would just not be advantageous to do so.

This is why everybody is pretending and everything we see around us is either not what it seems to be or an outright lie. In social media, we are all living grandiose lives because we are trying to impress our potential employers, partners or friends, but in reality, we all are miserable people living miserable lives. Displaying our life as the perfect one on social media does not make our lives perfect. On the contrary, we are just hiding the fact that our lives do not amount to anything through pretending and lying through our online selves. However, no matter how much you pretend you are saving the world through your job, in reality, you are not, and pretending this is the truth online does not make it the real and unquestionable truth. This makes it so that you do not fall behind competition since everybody is pretending to gain a competitive advantage.

Unfortunately though lies have a way of getting out. Eventually, lies will catch up with the person telling them. It will not be someone else but you who gets sick of this life of pretension, and when that happens, your entangled web of lies will collapse on top of you. Then, you will realize the futility of all, but it will be too late to turn back to live your real life because by this point your real life will be the online one.