A Preface to Lunch Facing myself on Facebook

Author: James O'Brien

When I started to write this article, I wrote the sentence, "Who are you?" I didn't think I wanted to write an article that began like that, though, mostly because if I was flipping through a newspaper and started reading such an article, I would immediately stop. So I decided to write an article about Facebook, instead… kind of.

I've been reading a couple books about Zen lately, and, although they are for the most part incredibly insightful, the authors have an annoying habit of writing some variation of "Who are you?" at least once every four pages. While I've enjoyed the authors' insights, these questions have made me uncomfortable. I keep feeling as though I need to have some sort of Zen-ish answer to the "question of me."

I thought about all kinds of odd ways to research myself, but I decided that the best thing to do would be to log onto Facebook. I looked at the "info" section of my profile, in an attempt to flash back to who I thought I was at a time when I wasn't thinking too hard about that particular question.

It didn't take me long to realize that a Facebook profile is not a good place to determine who you are. It is, however, a good place for you to understand the difference between who you think you are and the identity that you portray to the world. My profile was a combination of true things about me (I like to listen to The Weepies), and things that aren't true but apparently I felt the need to say. For example, my favorite books list includes Tender is the Night - which I did read but neither liked nor understood - apparently because I wanted to prove that I had read it. Perhaps I was afraid that fellow members of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Fans Facebook group might inexplicably browse my profile and consider me unworthy if The Great Gatsby was the only Fitzgerald book among my favorites. I seemed to be trying to portray myself as a literary snob, which - along with my love for all things about sex and death - might be the same reason I'm majoring in English. You can learn a lot from your Facebook profile, especially from those words you once wrote which don't even seem to apply to you anymore.

It seems silly to suggest that Facebook could help to explain who a human being is. But, oddly enough, it's actually not any sillier than examining your thoughts or actions. Think about all the words you say everyday that aren't quite true, or those seemingly uncharacteristic thoughts that pop up and make you think, "That's not me." Well, those thoughts and words are you. And they are not you at all. What I mean is, they define how you function in the world. They define the "you" that you can describe with words. But that is such a simple understanding of "you."

To me, the word "you" or the word "I" refers to all the experiences that you have had in the world. Sometimes this includes the words that you say, or thoughts that you think. But these things are not you. Even your personality is not "you." Your personality's just a carefully crafted collection of reactions based on conversations, movie quotations, and previous experiences in social acceptance. Watch what you say closely and you'll see that this is true. Your brain seems to be creating a "you" right in front of your eyes. And it's all just sort of a movie scene. We spend a lot of time with ourselves-around 24 hours a day in fact-but we can probably learn more about ourselves from our Facebook profile than we can from asking ourselves "Who am I?"

So if we aren't what we do, what we say, or what we think, who are we? The answer to that question is probably hidden somewhere where we would never think to look - like 51 Main. Or maybe, and this is more likely, there are illusions right in front of us, ones that we've created for ourselves. So I'm taking Tender is the Night off my list of favorite books. I figure that's a start.