POV Perversion & the Splitting Western Psyche 📸

An insidious development in collective self-perception.

📍 Coordinates: Jungle Mat Dojo, Uvita, Costa Rica.

📖 Reading Time: ~5 minutes.

🥋 Vibecheck: Deep in the training montage right now. BJJ, weights, and the newly discovered Budokon ‘mixed movement arts’. Unlocking some serious power and will be channelling it into more writing. Earlier this week I published a fun piece on the meaning crisis for Apotheosis, you can find it below. I’ve got a poll at the end of this piece I’d appreciate your feedback on – to inform my writing here going forward. With love, EB. 🦁

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Meaning Crisis 🗺️

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A most insidious split has unfolded over the past decade…

Glacially—nearly imperceptible—it has progressed nonetheless. 

The redefinition, I consider it a perversion, of ‘POV’.

You’re familiar with POV from your childhood. The acronym stands for Point of View.

In its original cultural context, it referred to a first-person perspective, particularly when used in media. It was looking at a situation from an individual’s perspective – from a singular, first-person point of view.

Proper POV references.

Over the past decade, but accelerating in the last 3-5 years, POV and its use in modern culture has entirely changed.

READER NOTE: Be careful searching for examples of this online/on social, as POV is also a popular porn term. You’ve been warned. At least porn understands how POV is properly used.

POV has shifted, mutated, perverted, warped, and evolved, to mean your point of view looking at the individual. 

It has shifted from a first-person perspective to a second or third-person perspective.

I encourage you not to shrug this off as a mere linguistic misunderstanding, like when your mom thought LOL meant “lots of love”.

This goes much deeper…

What you’re seeing reflected in the collective psyche is the individuals’ perception of their lives.

People see themselves now from the outside, in.

Believe someone when they show you who they are. 

This is their point of view. It’s a second or third-person perspective. A self-perspective entirely dominated by an outside perspective.

Their existence and self-perception are filtered through how they appear to someone else. It is their appearance–not their direct experience—that is the foundation of their identity and sense of self.

This is sad, pathetic, and deeply disturbing. 

Imagine how fragmented a psyche must be to exist in a constant state of immediate self-reflectiveness. To exist only within the eyes of other people, with no substantial internal existence of your own.

How demoralizing? How anxiety producing? How depressing? How depersonalizing?

Driven by the rise of narcissism, and fueled by hyper-selective algorithms incentivizing and prioritizing the refinement of an external facade – we are witnessing the splitting of the Western psyche in real-time.

This is why, alongside this, we’ve seen the equal rise of the ‘zombie’ and ‘NPC’ (non-player character) memes.

Both of these are archetypes of a being that exists on this planet with little to no internal experience. They are there, but the lights aren’t on.

To disavow your internal experience and make it subservient to the filter of the externalized other is a crime against your humanity.

Your fundamental aliveness is found only within the hallowed halls of your conscious, dynamic, vital internal experience.

It is the first and last sacred object in your life. 

“That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna

Never abandon yourself. 

Never let them dismiss your experience. Never discount your perspective. Never abandon your point of view. Your perspective, your emotion, your experience, your dreams, your thoughts, your ambitions.

These are the bedrock of conscious existence and the seed of a meaningful life.

I leave you with this, the very last inch of us:

“Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free. […] I had roses, and apologized to no one. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An Inch, it is small and it is fragile, but it is the only thing the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I hope that whoever you are, you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you.”
— Valerie’s Letter, read by Evey, V for Vendetta.

Love, tea, and dragon energy,
EB. 💚 🍵 🐲

p.s.: I want to drastically update my writing here and create something truly valuable for you. What would you prefer, select one below: