I Love Me

I generally dislike travelling to the US.

Not because it involves a >10 hour flight, jet lag and an immigration process built on the presumption that I want to stay forever, carry out illegal stuff and blow something up.

It’s not because if I choose to smoke I am treated like a Middle Eastern leper with a worryingly oversized belt.

It’s not because I still get carded and have been refused alcohol because my British passport was not, to quote a Jurassic sized Polynesian doorman with an oily smile, ‘a valid form of identification sir’.

It’s also not because they have gun laws which should have been cast aside at the same time they stopped burning witches.

No, the main reason I dislike travelling to the US is that it’s a place where as soon as I land I start to feel wholly and horribly inadequate.

Self-confidence is a trait so ingrained in the American psyche it really should be added to their constitution. All men are equal, the pursuit of happiness, the right to arm yourself to the teeth and the right to be so self-confident that it borders on narcissism.

I am British and all that means. I would consider myself to be reasonably self-confident but even after living in liberal Europe for over ten years I still carry the baggage. I still struggle at the point in a job interview when the interviewer asks ‘So tell me about your strengths’. I giggle uncontrollably in mixed nude saunas and worry about rising. I feel distinctly uneasy when someone decides to discuss a deep personal issue with me and fully support ‘because I was drunk’ as a reasonable and forgivable excuse.

So how does your average, arse the size of a settee, American immigration officer become so self-confident and at what point does his or her self-confidence shift from endearing to ugly Kardashian-esq?

I don’t know, but I do think we are all right at the edge. We are teetering at the tipping point, clinging onto the edge of a self-confident/self-love cliff and very soon will find ourselves plunging headlong into an abyss where the words restraint, modesty and humility do not exist.

America has already jumped. They are lost and through the medium of Facebook we will probably (and I include myself here) join them soon.

On that, Facebook is a strange medium. I along with the other gazzilion users quite happily post without restraint or thought. I then sulk when no-one ‘likes’ or comments on my check in, my blog post or my hilariously funny joke.

Why do you not like the fact I have just checked in to the Holiday Inn in the arse end of nowhere Germany at 9.24pm? Probably because they don’t really give a fuck that’s why not but I still sulk for a brief moment before making up, or stealing, another joke and going for it again. Someone will like something I post eventually. Please.

The photos of me picking my nose, lying flat drunk or waking up looking like a 1,000 year old peat-bog man never make the cut. Why not? Because I choose what other people see and delete the ones I am tagged in if they show me in a light which I dislike.

I am, like everyone else, a real person. I am good, I am bad and I am ugly but two of these don’t make it onto my Facebook page (you might argue differently) and thus I am probably displaying a narcissistic trait which I have written about to this point in such disparaging terms.

Is Facebook to blame? Probably not, we would have gotten here anyway. How is less relevant.

In the Big Brother house, within days, the contestants descend into a manic state of inward looking self-absorption. He said this. She said that. How do I look in this? Me, me, me. Without other, more important distractions: a global war, famine, biblical plague or Mayan apocalypse its basic human nature to go all Lord of the Flies and I think this is exactly what is occurring.

So what is next?

Are we doomed to tip over the edge, fall madly in love with ourselves and suddenly become super self-confident?

If our collective Facebook pages are anything to be believed, then yes.