Becoming A Caricature of Yourself

One of my biggest fears is becoming a caricature of myself. Of course, this is something you worry about only when all of your basic survival needs are met and you have the luxury of being able to think too much about your soul. About the person you are. About the person you want to be. About the person other people see when they look at you.

When you become a caricature of yourself; you’re not really you anymore. You’ve morphed into a distillation of who you used to be. You’re a basic, oversimplified, and ugly version of yourself.

The process of becoming a caricature of yourself is almost impossible to define because you never see it coming and you don’t know the exact moment at which it happens. In fact, I’m sure that people who have become caricatures of themselves don’t even realize what’s happened. But the people who know us the best, who have watched us change and grow over the years, are the ones who know. Even if they don’t want to admit it, they know it deep down.

They know that we’ve become the most hyperactive, hyper-aggressive, over-the-top version of ourselves at the peak of our hysteria or elation or anger or anxiety. An attention grabbing punch line always looking for the easiest thrill or cheapest laugh.

And that’s the way it seems we’ll be for the rest of our lives. Alternating from one extreme to the next. Alternating from one catch phrase or prepackaged idea to the next.

All reactions and no contemplation. All buzzwords and no meaning. All front page headline and no corresponding article. All fluff and no substance. All loud noises and no message. All exclamation points and no commas. Those fleeting moments of self-introspection and genuine feelings are so few and far between that they’re barely visible. And, of course, these rare flashes are washed away and forgotten soon after they occur.

We see these people every day. At work. On the subway. At the grocery store.

I’ve seen it happen to people I know. It’s hard to describe the way it feels when someone you’ve known for a long time is no longer as nuanced and beautiful and quirky and flawed as they used to be. They’re no longer pained by things that happen. Except if they’re told they should be pained. They’re no longer sensitive to the stimuli around them. Except if that stimuli is a television set or a buzzing smartphone or some sensationalized news story that has no real significance.

Now these people resemble a machine more than a human being. A machine that repeats what it has heard in the past. A machine that feels a certain way because that’s the way it has been programmed to feel.

There are loud exclamations. But they are hollow. There is bellowing laughter. But nothing is actually funny. There is excitement. But there is nothing worth getting excited about.

The most heartbreaking thing is, the true moments of humanity and vulnerability are completely ignored, or worse yet, mocked. It’s what the future seems to hold for humanity: a world of people who are reduced to caricatures of themselves.

No one is listening. They’re just waiting for their turn to speak. Rarely reflective about what has just happened, they’re only looking ahead to what’s next.

The end result is a person that is an amalgamation of everything they’ve been exposed to. Well, not everything. It’s really just an amalgamation of the most popular and persistent things they’ve been exposed to. Catch phrases. Commercials. Pitchmen shouting things from rooftops. Certain people delivering a very specific message. Certain colors. Certain moods. Certain emotions. Certain ideas expressed a certain way.

Today, we want the elevator pitch. We want the bird’s eye view. We want the finished product, yesterday. We want the whole damn world summed up in two sentences so we can get back to whatever it was that we were wasting our time with. And if that’s the world we strive for, the person we end up being won’t be much different. An elevator pitch of a person. A person distilled into four or five key bullet points. A person stripped of their humanity and vulnerability.

Some of the most famous people in popular culture today are caricatures. Or, at least, they are condensed and packaged into caricatures for our consumption.

• To the world, Kim Kardashian isn’t a person. She’s a caricature.
• To the world, Donald Trump isn’t a person. He’s a caricature.
• To the world, Michael Jordan isn’t a person. He’s a caricature.

We celebrate and worship caricatures of people in popular culture today. But we rarely consider the actual people themselves. This is because we either don’t want to consider these people any other way or we simply aren’t allowed to. Just as it’s becoming more difficult to be who and what we truly are.

To be nuanced. To be different. To be layered. To be, in some ways, indefinable. To be, for lack of a more descriptive term, human. Maybe these qualities won’t help us stand out in a society that pays attention to the loudest, crudest, and ugliest characteristics more often than not. But most of what society is paying attention to today is garbage.

I’m fighting like hell to avoid becoming a caricature of myself. But maybe it’s already happened and I don’t even know it. Because no one ever knows when they’ve become a caricature of themselves. And therein lies the problem.