ALIEN SELF: PUSHING PAST LIMITATIONS.
A look at the digital constructs we build
to combat the social constructs we wish to tear down.
Alien:
Foreign or Strange: It can describe something or someone that is different from what is familiar or native to a specific environment, culture, or group.
Avatars. Social Media. Virtual Reality. The Metaverse.
It’s a limitless, expansive self with no rules. It’s life heavily filtered and distorted. It’s an interactive Art installation, often enmeshed with a hoax in the dark corners of the web. It’s beautifully crafted aspirations mixed with deception. It’s otherworldly possibility and opportunity.
It’s an alien version of self.
And it’s keeping us from pushing our limits and understanding ourselves better in the real world.
These programs are replacing the opportunity to evolve into the best version of self through out time in the real world with the opportunity to instantly become, in a man made coded simulation, the best version of a self that doesn’t exist outside of that digital construct.
Used responsibly it’s creative liberation from a reality that is filled with repressive systems based on social constructs. It’s a way to safely explore new territory and ways of being. I can see the appeal.
When used recklessly and forever independent of the physical realm it’s delusion cloaked in creative expression and a “out of body” experience.
So I have to ask- where do you seek to evolve?
In the physical realm or in the digital realm?
Do you keep building up your avatar, your social media personal brand, your online realms?
Or do you keeping doing the self reflection, taking on those experiences that make you uncomfortable, and challenging the status quo of the culture you currently live in?
I personally think we should be favoring who we can become in the physical realm and heres why:
Who we are in the digital realm is still governed by who we are in the physical realm.
We all know theres’s a draw to a virtual reality and the possibility it brings, and that begs the question-
If you could be anyone you wanted to be and do anything you wanted to do online, who would you choose to be and what would you do?
Take some time to answer that, as freely as you wish! Remove the limitations you find yourself grappling with.
And after that I have to ask- what’s really stopping you from being that and doing that in real life?
I ask these questions again within reason. I know there are limitations. For example- if you were born with no arms or legs you can’t expect yourself to climb a 20,000 ft mountain. If you live amongst capitalism you can’t just drop everything and go live in a Hobbit Hole.
Yet, “limitations” are extremely objective.
Because someone who has no legs or arms DID climb unassisted to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in 2012. Kyle Maynard. And someone IS living off grid in a Hobbit hole- Dan Price, a former photojournalist.
By definition, these people are aliens to most of us in our current society.
I think it’s our personal view on limits that can make virtual reality and avatars so appealing. But there are people in the physical realm ever day doing the “impossible.”
Erik Weihenmayer became the first blind person to summit Mount Everest in 2001.
Born without arms, Jessica Cox became the first licensed pilot to fly using only her feet. Unable to move or speak on his own, Stephen Hawking used a speech-generating device to write books that changed how we understand the cosmos. Haben Girma, born both deaf and blind, became the first person with her condition to graduate from Harvard Law School and is now a civil rights lawyer.
I have included hyperlinks to all aliens (just click on their names) in hopes that you will spend more time with them and be further inspired by their real life stories.
These things took fucking grit. They took bravery, strength, determination, will power, passion, innovation, and above all-
acceptance of who they are in order to better understand what they needed to do to become who they wanted to be.
Could they have stepped into a virtual reality and pretended to climb a mountain, live in a Hobbit hole, fly a plane, explore space, or be a social justice keyboard warrior? Yes, and they could have done it in minutes. Instant validation, gratification, and dopamine hit. They could get those experiences through a headset, as an avatar, or through a filtered social media account. The problem is, when the head set comes off, when the phone dies, when the dopamine rush cools down, they still would have had to come back to reality on their couch finding themselves unwilling to accept who they are, controlled not by the “limitations” given to them but the idea of limitations they were willing to accept for themselves.
The people in these stories didn’t take their reality and put limitations on it. They looked at their reality and they took control of it. That’s the most empowering thing you can do as a human in this life- is to CREATE the REALity you wish to live in, not create an avatar for an illusion.
So the next time you design your avatar and login to your social media account or put on your VR headset I urge you to look at who you have created and ask yourself- do you want to be an alien in a digital construct or an alien based off of society’s constructs?
This entry is based off the Self Portrait and Instagram post I created back in Feb. 2022 when the Metaverse was first being released. My original entry questioned if it was good, bad, if it was ok to be depressed in real life but happy online, and if I would succumb to running my business through it for the fun of creative freedom, like they claimed so many of us would.
I eventually printed that portrait and turned it into a multi media art piece with gold leaf in 2024. This was my first step in taking my Art out of the digital constructed “gallery” it had solely lived in for years and making it exist in the physical realm where I could hold it in my hands. Creating this piece purely for the joy of experimenting with my work and wanting to get my hands dirty finally made my Art REAL, and it has changed the way I see myself as an Artist. I made 3 other art pieces during this time and 1 ended up in an exhibit in a professional Art Gallery, that being the first gallery exhibit of my career. More on that in another blog. I’m happy to say I’m just getting started after a long battle with limitations and fear (which I talk more about in this blog.)
I wanted to release this piece for sale as a reminder to anyone who needs it-
We get to choose the reality we live in. We get to chose how our lives unfold. We get to choose the Alien we want to be.
Choose wisely.
3 years later and I find myself with an app on my phone that locks me out of my social media apps after 10 minutes because my mental health had declined so much when I believed the only way I could continue to achieve success in my business and in my creative journey was through them. That was by far the most damaging limitation I have ever put on myself. Yes, even worse than when I thought I could never run my own business or make more money than a man. Destroying those old societal norms, oddly enough, actually became possible for me because of the digital platforms created. Ironic now, I know. It was an alien way to run a business at the time and my Photography business had great success when I started it through Facebook in 2010. I now believe many people, especially Artists, think it’s an alien way to run a business without it. Even some people think it’s alien to live without it. Due to the addictive nature of the platforms, the battles we face to destroy that thought process, I believe, run even deeper than the pressure of societal norms. And when I did some research with A.I. it agreed.
I asked: Is is easier to personally fight societal norms or fight social media addiction?
“Fighting Societal norms requires external resistance—going against ingrained cultural expectations, traditions, or power structures.
Fighting Social Media addiction is more of an internal battle—rewiring dopamine loops and breaking a habit that’s designed to keep you hooked.
This is harder because it’s immediate and accessible—unlike societal norms, which push back from the outside, social media addiction hijacks your brain from within.
Ultimately, Social media addiction is harder because it’s engineered to be addictive, while societal norms (though rigid) at least leave room for individualism.”
Since 2023 I have seen an alarming number of artists begin to leave the platforms, or put their focus elsewhere, because they are no longer serving them. Creating content and posting is either taking up too much time with little to no financial reward, the reach and connection with others is nearly nonexistent, or the pressure to keep up is tanking their health, and so on.
I have also seen a lot of people claim they are leaving, either for political, mental health, or time management reasons, but sadly they don’t. Very, very, very few actually fully pull the plug.
I myself have, unfortunately, spent an unhealthy amount of my physical time in this digital world trying to build up a digital version of myself.