Stories from the Road
Part 1
Hi there, good people.
I’ve been toiling away on a set of stories which I’m poised to start publishing following this little note. They’re all readable one-offs about some of the crazy things that just happen when you live on my side of the glass.
I wrote them in an effort to bring y’all into my world so to speak. The catalyst was feeling like I’ve been exiled to my own planet. I’ve had this… struggle… over the past year and a half that has been just murderous to my soul.
The problem has been an absolutely agonizing two-headed monster. On my side, I wasn’t able to just… show everything. I couldn’t just spill all of the things that would have made it easier for people to grasp what was going on; what was affecting me; and why it was.
That was compounded by people being exposed to an intentional fraud meant to both: 1) mask what was occurring in private; and 2) con people into believing such a thing couldn’t even be possible.
You good folks have had a smoked window and an entirely false window. How could you possibly see?
That was one head of the monster.
The second is the one that, frankly, I cannot allow to persist. It is truly harmful to my health. It not only interferes with my ability to even make progress on a Complex PTSD that, at the moment, it is making it vastly, vastly worse.
The second has to do with… you.
Not you personally.
The second is just the difference between ‘me’ and ‘you’ and the seats we occupy.
I inhabit this place like a regular person… because I am one. I carry myself like just another person at a table we share because that is how I see myself, and that is what I want. I want THAT. I want to just be myself. The same person you would find next to you if we happened to sit next to each other in a bar. I want something that I am coming to realize may not actually be possible: closeness at a distance.
I conduct myself like a ‘regular person’, but I don’t live in the same world that you do as a regular person.
I want something that I am coming to realize may not be possible. Not at an increasing scale, at least:
*Real human relationships* over channels that inherently foster ‘parasocial relationships’ instead.
The term ‘parasocial’ was coined in the 1950’s to describe a social phenomenon that arrived with television. While ‘the TV’ had been invented decades earlier, it wasn’t until the 1950’s that most American families had one in the living room and regularly gathered around it.
With the arrival of television, for the first time in 2.7 million years of human history, a human being could observe another living human being who wasn’t right there in front of them.
I find that data point to be mind-blowing.
Human beings have only been able to see other living human beings who were not in their immediate vicinity for… .003% of human history.
For the other 99.997%, a human observing other living humans happened either in the flesh or didn’t happen at all.
Soooooo, the whole ‘seeing people through a screen’ is Newy McNew.
The problem is that evolutionary updates tend to roll out Slowy McSlow.
Our brains are designed and configured for the world BEFORE television – the one with real-world social contact and ONLY real-world social contact. Our brains are not designed and configured to do well with ‘mediated’ social contact – meaning, contact through a ‘media channel’ like television, the internet, etc.
With that being the case, things get… reeeeeally squishy… when you put an audience on one side of a screen and a human being on the other.
When that is the setup, the relationship between the two sides is said to be ‘parasocial’. It is ‘half-social’ in the sense that it is… only one-way. The person on TV doesn’t see the audience and has no ‘relationship’ with the individual people watching. The people watching, however, DO form a relationship of sorts with the person on screen.
Since that relationship is only one-way and from a distance, it isn’t a real-life ‘social relationship’; it is a mediated ‘parasocial relationship’ – or a PSR for short.
And y’all, this is where the whole subject just turns into a complete dumpster fire of complicated fucked-uppery.
PSRs are fundamentally inauthentic, based on incomplete information, and reflective of the person watching not the actual social connection between them and the figure on the other side of the glass.
They are inauthentic because whatever we see on a screen is what was chosen for us to see and prepared for our consumption. It isn’t a ‘live look-in’ at someone’s unfiltered human existence… even when it is allegedly a live look-in at someone’s human existence.
When something is broadcast to us live… it is a broadcast. We aren’t tapping into a Ring security camera in someone’s house and watching them mill about. We are watching whatever it is they are doing *in front of a camera*: 1) while they are fully aware they are being watched; and 2) while they are consciously doing things they want us to see.
There is no ‘watching someone when they don’t know you’re looking’ anywhere but in real life.
In real life, we can peek in from the other room while someone is cooking. In the parasocial world, the closest we can come to that is… watching their cooking show. We don’t actually them in the kitchen. We see the footage edited nicely to create the media product they want to serve us for dinner.
With our brains entirely designed and configured for a world where we can only see things *in-person and in real-life*, we process what we take in with too much ‘real-life-ness’.
Rationally, we *know* someone on television isn’t standing in front of us talking while they chop carrots. We get that. We grasp that just out of frame are lights and people wearing headsets and someone holding a boom mic. We know it is a show. We know it’s fake…
…but since we spend 0% of our lives in studios observing *the taping of cooking shows* and some portion of them *observing actual people in actual kitchens,* our brains process what we see as if it is real life and not just another program on television.
And that’s… nice.
It makes us feel like we really are spending time with that person… like we really are sitting across the counter while they talk to us and cook. It *feels* personal and intimate and warm… and that’s nice.
It just… isn’t... real.
Having taken it in as real in a way that it isn’t, our brains then do what our brains do when it comes to other human beings:
They form a mental picture of the person – an ‘image object’ – a placeholder for that ‘person’.
Those ‘image objects’ allow us to maintain an ongoing relationship with people. Were it not for our ability to hold onto a mental placeholder for a person, they would simply no longer exist the second they left the room.
Mental ‘objects’ are what allow us to experience ‘object permanence’: things continue to exist even when we can’t see them.
The rub with parasocial relationships is that we form mental ‘image objects’ of people we don’t actually know but feel like we know. We see them only through an inherently ‘non-real’ lens of ‘media’; develop our own imagined mental picture of them; and then our brains file the images away in the only filing cabinet we have for people: the one for people we REALLY know.
We commingle social and parasocial relationships as if they are all just human relationships - even though one is real-life and the other could be entirely staged. Our brains treat them as close to the same level of ‘real’.
With that being the case, people form a sense of connection – an attachment of sorts - to the ‘image object’ they hold of someone… which they experience as if it is *to the actual person themselves*.
And that is where things get… oof… wild… and sometimes downright crazy.
With the ‘relationship’ only existing on one side and only in someone’s mind, they can ‘make the person into anyone they want’… and they can make ‘the connection’ as casual or as close as they want. They can invest little or no emotion in the ‘relationship’ or they can become EXTREMELY invested in it.
It isn’t a two-way relationship.
It is closer to fantasy, and the person on the audience side controls the story.
Sometimes the story they invent isn’t just fantasy, it’s delusion.
Sometimes it isn’t just a healthy person’s imagination. Sometimes it is an unhealthy person’s fracture from objective reality.
When that is the case, for the person on the other side of the glass, is is never benign – and sometimes, it is downright dangerous.
[Continued in Part 2]