CULTURAL VENTRILOQUISM: whose life are you living?

As creepy as it sounds.

TL;DR: Why do we think other people know better?

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IMAGE: SERGEY SKIP

This morning I was in a coffee queue behind a woman who seemed anxious.

She was trying to remember what someone had told her she should order. I know this because I could see her scrolling her Notes app. As the queue built up behind her, she zoomed in on a screenshot of some influencer’s “Blank Street order that hits different”.

This is us now.

We can’t even order our coffee without a tasteful tip.

We won’t book a holiday without checking the tags and pins of the location and reading reviews of the hotel. We can’t buy a book without scanning Goodreads or quickly checking how many stars it has on Amazon. We won’t invest in a lip liner without making sure the internet approves of its longevity and colour pay-off.

We’re drowning in recommendations.

Taken individually, each tip feels welcome. But taken en masse, they’re killing us.

‘Recommendation culture’ has us living someone else’s life.

Waking up when they think is the best time to wake up. Taking the supplements they take. Reading their TBR. Washing our hair in the same ten steps they do. Doing their workout routine. Doing their make-up routine. Ordering their lunch order so we hit their macro goals. Journalling their dreams and manifesting their goals. Finding chic the things they find chic.

We call it curation and celebrate the people who are great at telling us what’s worth wanting.

In its bones, I don’t think recommendation culture is really about recommendations at all.

It’s about something much deeper, darker, and older.

Ancient hunger

French anthropologist René Girard spent much of his career studying exactly this. Mimetic desire was his term for articulating the way humans consistently seem to want the things other people seem to want. “Man does not know what to desire,” he wrote, “and turns to others in order to make up his mind.”

That isn’t woo social-media-age pathology.
It’s how people have always navigated the world.
(And it’s at the heart of how the world’s smartest brands plot their growth).

It’s not exactly comfortable reading. According to Girard, our desires don’t just indicate what we want. They indicate what (we feel) we lack.

For that woman in Blank Street was checking her phone for the right thing to order, this coffee was a chance to feel she’d absorbed a bit of cultural capital, as well as a bit of caffeine (the irony that she was even in Blank Street means that cultural capital ain’t going to cut it among those who know where the really good coffee’s served).

So the psychology is as old as the hills. What’s new is that we seem to have completely lost faith in our own judgement.

Crisis of self-trust

Isn’t it odd that we’ve never had access to more people’s opinions, but somehow we’ve never been less confident in our own? That we seem so sure someone, somewhere knows better than we do?

In her book Self-Made, Tara Isabella Burton traces the history of self-fashioning from the Renaissance through to influencer culture. She argues we have more freedom to create ourselves than ever, but it feels like we’re happier to copy other people. So much contemporary self-making, in her view, is shaped by imitation rather than originality.

The problem that (still) has no name

This whole thing reminds me of Betty Friedan’s 1963 mic-drop (more on that) when she identified 'the problem that has no name’ - a strange reaction she was seeing again and again among post-war suburban American housewives: women who had, seemingly, achieved and acquired everything they’d been told to want (the perfect man, the perfect children, the perfect home, the perfect wardrobe, the white picket fence) but still felt bewilderingly unhappy, hollow, unfulfilled…and ashamed of themselves.

It feels like we’ve got our own version of that going on right now.

We’re doing the things we’ve been told add up to a life well-lived. We have an opinion on the acclaimed books and we’re wearing the key pieces. Our skin is hydrated, our make up’s undetectable, and our weekend photodumps are impeccable. Our careers are hyphenated, so our wardrobes are no longer bifurcated.

But still…do we feel more unsure of ourselves than ever, living someone else’s version of a good life and wondering why it feels hollow?

Clinical psychologist Julian Frazer PhD unpacks in this Medium post that ‘self-knowledge’ is ironically at an all-time low, with people more out of touch with themselves than perhaps at any other time in human history. And we’re living through what these academics describe as an identity crisis of epic proportions.

Why?

Because we’re no longer self-made. We’re someone-else-made.

Recommendation culture is really cultural ventriloquism.

Letting someone else think/speak/act for you.

When we defer to others do we give away chances to build an identity that can withstand the never-ending churn of what’s relevant now and what’ll be desirable next?

Girard warned us about this. The goalposts will always shift the moment we reach them. That well-informed tastemaker we’re emulating has already moved on to the next thing.

And it’s profitable, obviously. Keeping us unsure of ourselves, forever looking to others for validation and guidance, keeps us wanting + consuming. Capitalism, after all, is an insecurity machine.

Well what then?

We will never stop caring what others think. People have always looked to each other for cues about how best to navigate the world, what to want, what to wear, what to invest in, what to celebrate.

But maybe we can start noticing when we’re doing it.

Perhaps the question isn’t “whose recommendations should I trust on this?” but “why don’t I trust my own judgement on this?”

Cultural ventriloquism might well stop us feeling foolish in the moment.
But it’ll also stop us finding out who we actually are.

Thanks for reading.

Beth

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