The Smaller Life
Lately three similar, yet distinct images have been on my mind. The first two most definitely happened. The third of which, I’m not too sure. It seems as equally possible to have made it up as it does that it happened.
First is the time I randomly bumped into my favorite singer at a popular tourist attraction in the Cayman Islands. My wife and I had moved there nearly two years before when some friends happened to visit on their honeymoon. We’d gotten as far as the holding area of the Turtle Farm when a man with messy blonde hair blew past me with a camera draped around his neck. As quickly as it happened, I remember thinking he looked like someone I recognized. I also knew, though, the odds were infinitesimal. Like any self-respecting individual, I looked for distinguishing features. The singer I was thinking of would’ve had a tattoo of Van Gogh’s Starry Night on his forearm. Trying not to completely give myself away, I covertly glanced at the stranger. Right there, in all its glory, was the tattoo I’d watched master a piano for over a decade. Andrew McMahon, of Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin, was in the Cayman Islands of all places.
Second is the time I discovered my friends in Tampa were following an old classmate of mine from California on Twitter. I was a grad student at the time, and between drafting papers and revising screenplays, I was self-medicating the way we all did then: mindlessly scrolling through social media. This day, though, I noticed a post from my middle school classmate on my feed. Ordinarily this wouldn’t have been cause for concern, but I thought I had muted them. Upon investigation I found they were, in fact, muted. Looking at the post again, I realized the reason it wound up on my feed wasn’t because Twitter had ignored my preferences, it was because what they tweeted got reposted by, not just one but, two of my friends in Tampa. I nearly fell out of my chair. When I asked if each party if they knew the other or knew I was connected to them, no one had the faintest idea. Somehow my classmate had amassed such a large following, their circles overlapped without me.
Last, the one I’m most uncertain about, interestingly enough, is the time I went to grab lunch with a friend only to find a handful of college students I loosely knew sitting poolside, posing in front of their phones.
The throughline between these similar yet disparate images is people and context — the way we know people and the way we desire to be known. In the first instance, once I got past the initial excitement of running into a celebrity in an unexpected place, I felt extremely uncomfortable — almost felt like bumping into your teacher outside of school. There’s a way you know that person, a context in which you’re used to seeing them. To see them in another context feels too intimate — almost like you should not have seen them. In an effort to preserve the mystique, I tried to exit the situation as quickly as possible only to continue running into him and his family throughout the facility.
The second instance was the opposite. I knew the human being. All too well, in fact. I was in no way prepared for my worlds to collide in that way and for the person I went to school with to almost be a celebrity. She was the girl who didn’t quite fit in. When did she become this person? How ever I had known her, she was not that person anymore — at least not entirely.
The third image, to me, is the second in its infancy. It wasn’t so much seeing familiar faces in a new setting that threw me off. It was the image itself. Rather than being present to the moment, they were documenting it for all to see. I realized then that behind every Snapchat or Instagram story that seemed totally normal for me to watch on my phone was a moment that would’ve been awkward to witness in real life. Those students had the choice as to whether they wanted to exist in one place and time or everyone everywhere all at once. They chose the latter, and I felt the effects.
It seems to me the desire for prominence is at least as old as Babel — maybe even older — but the avenues to achieving it, or at least delude ourselves into thinking we have achieved it, are more abundant than they’ve ever been. Between Instagram influencers, YouTube content creators, Twitter mobs, and TikTok celebrities, we live in the age of influencers. Now more than ever before we are faced with the choice of not just who we want to listen to, but also the kind of lives we wish to live. We can choose to exist in a concentrated place for one people or we can choose some mass-marketed existence.
I suppose the reality is that we all exist in several circles at once. It’s not just that we exist in a context but that we exist in several, each one containing a different group of people. The people on your ultimate frisbee team don’t know you in the board room and vice versa. The choice then isn’t necessarily to exist in one space as much as it’s a choice between a physical, incarnate witness and a broader, disembodied presence.
What’s interesting to consider is that any influencer we look to or aspire to become does exists in a real time and space. They went to a high school, have people in their hometowns that don’t like them, and experience awkward conversations at Thanksgiving with family who don’t understand what they do. For those of us who know influencers in real, it can feel very strange. The person who you sat behind in math class may have somehow amassed a critical following but to you they’ll always be that kid who couldn’t solve quadratic equations without singing the song.
But the opposite is also true. For those who are rooted in a particular place, the moment the outside world peers in can seem especially strange. Your language and way of existing has always been for a concentrated group of people, never intended to go out broadly. Those on the outside looking in may not understand. It makes me wonder if it’s possible to exist well in both spaces, and if not, which should we lean toward.
In an interview for The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, Andy Crouch outlines two ways of thinking about power and influence. Contrasting Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, he called the first the path of celebrity and the second he called the path of sainthood. The irony is that while we all aspire to celebrity, something none of us can achieve it, sainthood, is something we could all wake up tomorrow and decide to pursue but none of us want to.
We all want to be Princess Diana, known and adored by many, seen as possessing a special something in our person– but none of us can be Diana. It’s a status reserved only for the few. We can all be Mother Teresa though. It’s just that none of us want it. The years of suffering, anonymity, and seeming ineffectiveness don’t appeal to our sensibilities. Society at large, the Western church included, has bought into the notions of celebrity and influence when all the while this other way, the way of sainthood has been offered to us. It doesn’t guarantee earthly success or international recognition, but it is the way of Jesus.
The desire to be a brand or an influencer is a desire to be more than human and yet as much as we aspire to be gods we know we can’t live under that weight. That’s why influencers, knowing how used we are to consuming their polished selves, also try showing us the unglamorous aspects of their lives — the irony is that this, too, is curated. To achieve godlike levels of power is invite godlike levels of scrutiny. We are witnessing this reckoning now. Might a smaller life save your soul?
In a world clamoring for fame or significance, to choose to serve in relative obscurity seems ridiculous. Why not be a brand? Why not be an influencer? After all, it would be false to say that such a big platform doesn’t change things. It does. Even now, at the time of writing, I’m witnessing the rise of an influencer in the CrossFit space and the effect it’s having on CrossFit as a community and business. Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that his platform is almost solely based on calling out CrossFit’s tendency to bend the rules for those with platform. But maybe the argument for a small life lived in obscure servanthood is because Jesus himself chose to change the world by entering it and confining himself to a people and a place. It was Jesus who, when offered celebrity, got the heck out of dodge, and opted instead for covert miracles, discreet healings, and Messianic secrets. I think there’s something to that.
What if we could live lives of positive mystery? What if instead of the poisoned chalice of fame, we chose the unglamorous road of obscure servanthood? We might miss out on celebrity, but we would gain gravitas — and I would argue that’s the far better prize.
