In an effort to stop social bone disease, I propose a new word, biographate, a verb that means to speak of oneself as if writing (or reading from) one’s biography. It sounds harmless enough, but it’s a rampant social disease.
You ask a man at your dinner table to pass the salt. Instead of doing so and smiling, or scowling, or moaning, or stabbing you in the thigh with his salad fork, or any other response that would also show his true emotion, he says something like, “well, you know me, I always like to help a friend.” It’s as if he’s playing a sound byte from the A&E Biography running in his head.
A biographating person has a need to fill in all the cracks of her life to create a smooth narrative. I think part of the urge of biographating has to do with the further need to prove that this narrative is right. If I tell enough people the theory of my life, it will be so, or so the biographater’s logic goes.
The habit seems to get worse as we age. We accrue facts about ourselves as if we were learning about some figure in history. “I always say….” well, maybe you wouldn’t this time if you stopped and took in the situation emerging in front of you eyes. “You know me, I…” If you came out of your A&E Biography for a moment you might change your mind about what you know about you.
Biography’s are about the past. It’s no wonder that experiencing the present as if it were the next page in a biography creates a distortion in perception. Biographies are distillations; real life is full of incongruities, dull moments, contradictions, and generally narrative-spurning experience. Experience first, distill second.
The harm of this habit is that we can’t see things as they are. We don’t experience fully and therefore can’t grow, instead, we are stuck in the First Edition of our life.
To Biographate: Too Much Biography
In an effort to stop social bone disease, I propose a new word, biographate, a verb that means to speak of oneself as if writing (or reading from) one’s biography. It sounds harmless enough, but it’s a rampant social disease.
You ask a man at your dinner table to pass the salt. Instead of doing so and smiling, or scowling, or moaning, or stabbing you in the thigh with his salad fork, or any other response that would also show his true emotion, he says something like, “well, you know me, I always like to help a friend.” It’s as if he’s playing a sound byte from the A&E Biography running in his head.
A biographating person has a need to fill in all the cracks of her life to create a smooth narrative. I think part of the urge of biographating has to do with the further need to prove that this narrative is right. If I tell enough people the theory of my life, it will be so, or so the biographater’s logic goes.
The habit seems to get worse as we age. We accrue facts about ourselves as if we were learning about some figure in history. “I always say….” well, maybe you wouldn’t this time if you stopped and took in the situation emerging in front of you eyes. “You know me, I…” If you came out of your A&E Biography for a moment you might change your mind about what you know about you.
Biography’s are about the past. It’s no wonder that experiencing the present as if it were the next page in a biography creates a distortion in perception. Biographies are distillations; real life is full of incongruities, dull moments, contradictions, and generally narrative-spurning experience. Experience first, distill second.
The harm of this habit is that we can’t see things as they are. We don’t experience fully and therefore can’t grow, instead, we are stuck in the First Edition of our life.