In a cold shower this morning, a memory suddenly came in my mind. It's a story of my adolescence 7 years old drew a picture of a house with stairs. As I can remember, that was my very first time drawing house with stairs. A haute couture kind of stairs with quite bizarre ornaments, resembling the pattern I usually saw at the animes and mangas (Sailormoon and Cardcaptor Sakura).
After a very serious hour of making the bizarrely ornamented stairs, as other artist would do, I feel the need to get some comments from people. Unfortunately, I was too young to have some big social events to make people come just to criticize my art work. I only had my older brother around that time. I approached him, and set up some question, a self deprecating one.
"Mas, the picture I made is ugly, isn't?"
I told you it was a self deprecating question, a set up question to make my self look humble though I admitted it was a very beautiful stairs that I would have one for my house. In the scenario I made, I planned to get a compliment that would be like, "no of course not ugly, my dear sister, very beautiful indeed. We need this one for our house."
But, reality is evil.... And my brother was very wise. He decided to give me,
"Yes it is."
A very cold and not amused Yes It Is. I got angry and insisted him to say that the stairs were pretty but he refused. Then I left, and made myself believe that they were beautiful stairs.
That story is probably everybody's childhood memory too. This phenomenon of human reverse psychology is indeed so classic and frequently occurs in our adulthood. But does it bad? If self deprecating is so bad, why do our parents teach us to be humble, at least for a normative purpose?
I was recently read an article: "Welcome to Generation Overshare: Lena Dunham, Taylor Swift, and the Politics of Self-Disclosure" . I read it and then I see my self in an embarrassment. I probably that Taylor Swift's case which overvaluing my not-so-edgy story of life by tweeting it or post it as instagram caption and other social media activity in such pride to get attention. And then aggravated it by writing in Lena Dunham's self deprecating style.
Damn, this new media thing is becoming so complicated to my generation. Everybody can utter themselves as a socially and financially valuable to the society, just because their artistic (artistic here means the individual way of doing, making or appreciating something) abilities are easily shared in the new media. It gives us so many space just to share our most unimportant thing and makes it so important. In that case, everybody is an individual product, and they compete to be the best product in the social media, Even maybe, they actually think themselves as the best product, at least in their league.
But, in a normative way, people can't be feeling so good about themselves, right? It will be disgusting and not human and so naive and so on. In that case, we need the self deprecating technique in order to make us look humble and not overvaluing our best achievement.
For example: Lisa is a pretty girl and also very good at playing saxophone. She aware of it. Well, how could she not aware if she deliberately goes to beauty parlor twice a week and practices her saxophone 2 hours every night. But however, she still need that one thing, that social acceptance thing. She plays very good saxophone at the senior dance in her beautifully crafted $1,500 Cynthia Rowley dress. After the show, she's telling people her apology that she is not that much into saxophone thing and the dress is just a typical retail store dress, but we can tell that it is expensive by its couture sew pattern.
Lisa is looking for pity while we are already awed to the talent she has and also the dress she beautifully wears. But why'd we have to share our effortless-ness? Does nobody appreciate hard work nowadays?
Well.. Not-showing-hardwork is probably the conclusion of our self deprecating issue, yeah probably. Because people would likely to appreciate you more if you can be flawless in the effortless way, don't they? It will be like this expression: "Hey she is not putting her best effort, she can do better than that. It's dope. That was a really great saxophone show but she actually can do better than that, how could!
But, in this social-life driven world... I must say, this technique is getting old. Is it just me or do we all sick of it?
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