who do you say that I am?

[j4]

This is mostly in response to something kaet said about www.amihotornot.com and the LiveJournal Valentine's Day thing, but it's also things that I've been wibbling about to other people in email, and it was going to be said eventually, so it might as well be said now.


I was saying something about this to somebody else on email the other day, only about quizzes rather than about popularity-contest stuff. Actually, I'm going to quote exactly what I said, because they probably wouldn't mind, and it was my words anyway:

I did a crap "Which box can we put you in?" internet quiz, which was supposed to tell me whether I was a goth or whatever, and it told me that I didn't fit in any box. I laughed so much at that, and nobody else thought it was funny. They were, like, "That's a really cool result!"

Everybody I know seems to be completely into the internet quiz thing at the moment, it's doing my head in. It's, like, "Which tube station are you?" "Which colour/animal/city/fruit/film are you?" "Which preposition are you?" FOR FUCK'S SAKE! It's self-definition gone mad. And then I end up doing the quizzes anyway because I'm bored, and I find myself getting dragged into them. "No! I'm not a wolf really, I think I'm much more of a ... a cat!" or "Yes! I *am* Dream from Sandman! That's so... *me*!"

So that's what I said. It's not just that I'm bored, though -- although I like to tell myself it is. Like when you tell yourself that a tarot reading or something is just a game, but secretly you want to believe in it and you know you're going to be affected by the results. I think part of the reason I do the quizzes is that I secretly want to have my opinions of myself confirmed ... or to get "good" results so that I can laugh at them and say "That is such a joke, I'm not like that at all, these internet quizzes are a load of rubbish anyway". It's one of those things where you can believe in it as long as it gives you the answer you want.

I'm currently having a bizarre "Desert Island foo" email conversation with one of my cow-orkers. Yesterday we did "What 5 vegetables would you take with you to a desert island?" -- today it's been "What 5 cheeses...", and "What 5 things to distract you from being hungry". It's just another symptom of the same thing -- "High Fidelity" syndrome (it existed before the book, of course, but the book expressed it so well, the way the protagonist lists all his records and his broken hearts in much the same way, and he knows it's sad and pointless, but he does it anyway, because it provides structure). We need to make lists of things, to state our position in the universe -- it's like adding more and more co-ordinates, in more and more dimensions, endlessly refining our definitions of ourselves, adding more dimensions in case we've missed something important.

<aside>This ties in with some of the things I was going to say the other day about "I have never", although others of the things I was going to say (about peer pressure and suchlike) don't really fit in here. But a lot of the reason I think people play "I have never" is that they want to list what they've done, what they haven't done, where they can place themselves in the grand order of who-has-done-what. Am I hot or not? Am I dodgy or not? Am I relatively experienced, or relatively inexperienced? Where would you rate me?<aside>

And the questions remaining to be asked are infinite. What shape of glass would you be? Which flavour of ice-cream? Which major chord? Which minor dramatist of the late 19th century? What does your handwriting say about your taste in clothes? Who uses the most pronouns in their usenet posts? Who posts the largest volume of crap to livejournal?

Who would you sleep with out of Hollyoaks? Who would you sleep with out of your cow-orkers? Which five people would you take to a desert island with you? To which five people would you send anonymous tokens of affection, assuming you only had five heart-shaped clichés? If you have to count, it doesn't count. List your friends in order of attractiveness. Let us put you on this graph, and we'll tell you how much you're worth. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. All in all, you're just another bit of writing on the wall.

Comments

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

We need to make lists of things, to state our position in the universe -- it's like adding more and more co-ordinates, in more and more dimensions, endlessly refining our definitions of ourselves, adding more dimensions in case we've missed something important.

You're definitely onto something there, almost certainly something profound. I wonder if this sort of introspection tends to affect people who are more likely than others to be interested in maintaining some sort of public blog or journal. I also wonder if this is more likely to be common among people who have rejected established religion (me, for one, and I think you said you had too).

Very interesting perspective on "I have never" - certainly one I hadn't seen before and one which makes a lot of sense. I briefly had thoughts in my mind when I was playing it as to whether the logical conclusion of the exercise would be for us all just to go through some sort of purity test and shout our answers out. *imagines drunk people shouting Yes! Yes! Yes! No! Yes! No! Yes! No but I'd like to! ad lib*

Unrelated question: I frequently find myself taking a URL like http://www.livejournal.com/users/jiggery_pokery/friends and trying to select the jiggery_pokery/friends part to replace it with some other username. Unfortunately a good quarter of the time I only end up selecting iggery_pokery/friends and so looking at new usernames with letters j prefixed. For instance, there does exist jj4. Given that you too are of the be-j-prefixed username, do you ever find this a problem?

[j4.livejournal.com]

You're definitely onto something there, almost certainly something profound.

It's something that I keep running up against no matter what I do or where I go. I really wish I could set it down seriously, somewhere more lasting than LiveJournal, but I seem to alternate between feeling like it's all too big to say, and feeling like it's all been said before and is too obvious to say.

... I also wonder if this is more likely to be common among people who have rejected established religion (me, for one, and I think you said you had too).

I think that's a symptom rather than a cause -- the problem with established religion is that it generally only seems to operate on one or two sets of axes; it discounts all the rest as unimportant. In a way I wonder if that's a good thing -- if the whole point is that most of these ways of defining/analysing/locating oneself are irrelevant, and the only one that really matters is (for example) our "relationship with God." However, I find it impossible to discount all the other things that I know about myself -- I know that I'm the sum of all the experiences I've had, all the people I've known, all the things I've seen and thought and felt, all the beliefs I've held, the books I've read, and so on; those things are what makes me a multi-dimensional person, rather than just a pawn on the chessboard where God plays the Devil, or Good plays Evil, or however a particular religion chooses to express its ultimate dichotomy.

(At this point I'd normally just say "moo" and lapse into self-parody, but this is something I often think about and while I recognise that a lot of it is derivative and obvious, it's not something I want to dismiss out of hand as mere pseudo-philosophical ramblings.)

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating stuff - please keep thinking about it and I know that I for one would be fascinated to read what you wanted to share about it. I have a vague feeling that the process of self-exploration is far more valuable than the actual conclusions reached and that the results make little sense without having performed the self-exploration - and, because people's self-explorations will produce different sets of results, people will produce different and personal sets of results.

More power and respect to you for performing the self-exploration process. :-) Keep going!

[j4.livejournal.com]

I have a vague feeling that the process of self-exploration is far more valuable than the actual conclusions reached and that the results make little sense without having performed the self-exploration

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(T. S. Eliot, from Four Quartets: "Little Gidding")

In "The Matrix", Neo gets knowledge and skills uploaded into his brain. "I know Kung Fu!" he says, after one such upload. He's wrong: he doesn't know Kung Fu, or any other martial art. He knows a series of moves -- but without having gone through the process of training, without having travelled the hard path of learning (both learning about the art and learning about himself, for in the end they are one and the same) he doesn't have the skills required to use that knowledge; he still fails to best Morpheus at Kung Fu, and he still fails the Jump. He only gains the knowledge he needs to become The One -- to become truly himself, to become real in a world of illusions -- by the hard process of trying, failing, losing everything to find himself.

I believe that when we travel, when we learn, we do so primarily to find ourselves at the end of our road, to learn about ourselves. "To arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time." Seeing new places helps us to see in a new light the place that we should know the best -- our own interior landscape, the vast plains of our minds.

There is no shortcut to enlightenment ("A circle", says Stoppard, "is the longest distance to the same point") because we are already there; all we have to do is learn to know it.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I seem to have forgotten to reply to the other bits of your comment, sorry...

Very interesting perspective on "I have never" - certainly one I hadn't seen before and one which makes a lot of sense. I briefly had thoughts in my mind when I was playing it as to whether the logical conclusion of the exercise would be for us all just to go through some sort of purity test and shout our answers out. *imagines drunk people shouting Yes! Yes! Yes! No! Yes! No! Yes! No but I'd like to! ad lib*

<grin> Something like that. Although I think there's a certain amount of ... thrill? not sure that's quite the word I'm looking for, but I can't think of a better one ... in having the answers dragged out of one.

The idea with purity tests, apparently, is to administer them to a group of people, and (presumably) hear everybody's answers. When I try to think about it now it sounds awfully tedious, but I suspect if somebody proposed the idea I'd be joining in with everybody else -- to prove (to myself?) that I'm not afraid to admit the things I've done? Or just to carry on plotting my co-ordinates?

Unrelated question: [...snip...] do you ever find this a problem?

Er, no, can't say I've ever noticed it. I'm not quite sure what you mean, actually. I don't tend to wander round the journals of people I don't know, though, because statistically there's a high likelihood that they'll be full of the semi-literate ramblings of 14-year-old goths...