Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, where writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week Spencer Klavan, host of the delightful classics podcast “Young Heretics,” reminds us what we’re really craving when we spend hours scrolling through social media.
Online, supernormal has become the new normal.
Supernormal is what you call it when something is exaggerated to make it more intense than usual. A supernormal stimulus is a more-than-usually exciting one, as when a cuckoo plants oversize eggs in other birds’ nests to excite their affections, so they’ll provide free day care. If you’re continually exposed to supernormal stimuli, you can get hooked on a more and more potent high, like the extra-concentrated THC in today’s pot compared with what the hippies smoked. Or like “Instagram face,” the strangely exaggerated cheekbones and overfilled lips that no one is born with, but everyone now seems to want.
Social media is a force multiplier for supernormal stimuli, a petri dish that spawns artificially extreme imitations of natural beauty at an exponential rate. If girls are under pressure to put on Instagram face, men struggle with “physique inflation,” which has made action heroes from just 10 years ago look noodle-armed in comparison with today’s standard-issue fitness influencers. (Hugh Jackman’s career, from his barrel-chested appearance in 2000’s X-Men to his rippling eight-pack in Deadpool & Wolverine last year, is a perfect case study.) Meanwhile, artificial-intelligence image generators make things still worse, reflecting our hypersaturated world back at itself like a blinding hall of mirrors.
