Imposters & Our Little Blue Screens
I often think about the world before the universal blue screen. Virtually my entire life has been shrouded, as is the case for the lion’s share of millennials and ‘zoomers,’ by the equally unifying and divisive curtain donned the World Wide Web. While my older brother and I represent some of the last members of the urbanized world to traverse at least a portion of a seemingly forgotten notion of adolescence—one outlined by sweaty, made-up street games turned to routine emergency room trips—the sterilizing reality of a globe delivered by Meta Platforms, Inc. was never far off.
For my comrades of a similar age, I’d venture a guess that we can all remember that not-so-joyous teenaged moment in which our sweet little childhood reality was challenged, if not flipped on its head, by the creeping influence of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and, if you can even recall this far back, MySpace. With the rise of social media and the Internet, out went the cherished safety of home, family, and the comfort of privacy. Social media’s instant and universal popularity empowered its various platforms to mandate a code of public performance on all of us, wedging an often cruel outside world into the sacred space of home.
Millenial, zoomer, or ‘boomer,’ popularity and its effects are not novel to the age of the Internet: the “it kids” have always been just that. But in generations past, the later-in-life peak-ers of us were fortunate to remain blissfully ignorant to indictments whispered at parties we weren’t invited to. What social media and the Internet obliged my generation to in the 2000s and continues to levy on adolescents today is the inescapable, fully public and crushing reality of ostracization. After Zuckerberg—ironically, a famous loser himself—no longer would children, teens, and beyond wonder about the cruelties of their surrounding community; your alienation and marginalization became spectacle, a study hall topic of discussion, a public record.
Speaking for myself, social media’s evolving complex performed a number on my developing, adolescent brain which I continue working to undo now. To be honest with you, its ubiquity and fascistic insistence on performance, constant content, and popularity continues to agitate my everyday just as it did when I was finallyallowed to make a Facebook in 2009. Really, who among us can say otherwise? In each profession, community, passion, and interest, there seems an exponentially increasing omnipotence of social media, and the often toxic, complex cocktail that accompanies it.
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I am a fishing guide. While my ultimate goals are to take my work off the water into the worlds of outdoor organizing and writing, for now, my life is as relatively simple as that. My job is to communicate with recreational anglers about their goals. Sometimes, the responsibility to satisfy those goals falls into my own boat or bag; other times, it means that they are referred to one of my colleagues. I manage several social media accounts and a website amongst other odds and ends, but, for the most part, my job is to talk to people and take them fishing.
This fact makes me very anxious. While in its purest form being a fishing guide might be one of the greatest examples of ‘never work a day in your life’ that I can conjure, it—like everything else in our overly-complicated world—is just not that simple. I’m 27 and entering only my second season of full-time guiding. It goes without saying that on the totem of my work, the space I occupy for now is inarguably slanted towards the bottom. Even in my own market, I look at other guides—some of whom maintain among the loftiest endorsements in the angling world—and feel a bit sick to my stomach with anxiety and existential dread.
It’s worth mentioning that many such individuals sport a breadth of guiding experience longer than my entire life, a fact that should calm my nerves and make clear that someday, I too will be there. But this is the insidious skill of social media and the Internet. Even in one of the most non-digitalized humanities—the ancient pastime of angling—the supremacy of the news feed is law.
We usually don’t talk about it in these terms—maybe it seems crass while the fentanyl epidemic ravages countless families and communities—but social media dependence seems like a quantifiable complex of addiction. I know it’s bad for me, I know it’s going to make me feel like shit: insecure, jealous, and stressed. Yet, for some seemingly uncontrollable reason, the first light I see after dawn’s fledgling sunrays peer in through cracked curtains is the blue backlight of my iPhone. Like clockwork, it illuminates an Instagram feed that, save for maybe a few additions, is more or less identical to the one I stared at for too long the previous night.
While part of me feels a bit vulnerable in sharing this not-so-happy fact with you, I’d guess that what I’ve described isn’t wholly unfamiliar, if not altogether fully identifiable. In conversation with loved ones, there’s been a bit of relief to know that not only am I joined in my struggles to stay off the feeds, but that the imposter syndrome and overwhelming FOMO often resulting from a scroll session is equally universal. It would seem that for the many of us who desperately want to succeed at what we care about and love most, social media is one of the best places to see just how far from that success we are.
What’s important, though, is our autonomy; our in-grown empowerment to escape not only the Internet ’s snare, but also the complex of self-doubt that’s often consequential to its use. Just like high school-peakers turned adult tenants in party basements long forgotten, if we are, instead, to place our intentions and energy into the process of building the self rather than disappointedly comparing it elsewhere—as adults, often to those with resources and/or years beyond our own—imagine how far each of us could go.
It is, of course, naïve to believe that everyone accesses the ability to just reposition their sense of place and self in such a way. The simple fact is that much of our lives, careers, and virtually everything we experience between them on social media and the Internet is channeled through a seemingly endless, non-negotiable sales pitch. As children, now adults; in angling, my brother’s field of professional performance, my fiancée’s field of political science, my step-dad’s field of contract handiwork, my mom and good friend’s field of non-profit work, his partner’s field of psychology—you get it—corporate interests run a universal through-line which drives social media’s knack for making all of us feel like imposters within our own jobs, passions, and interests.
These interests and their dividends function on a system of insecurity and insufficiency. In our childhoods turned adulthoods, we might be convinced to believe that our very virtue and value as human beings rely on the ownership or lack thereof things like iPhones, Ugg boots, The North Face and then Canada Down jackets, Tesla cars, AirPods, Playstations and a truly endless universe of cheaply made, overpriced crap that we’ve been duped into believing is just the opposite.
In angling, countless brands and their products have convinced many, me included, that an angler’s skill, knowledge, and perhaps entire worth, can be summed to the value of their setup. I do not mean to argue that a lot of these manufacturers don’t represent the pinnacle of gear quality, because most of them do. It’s not likely that I will ever be able or willing to justify spending an amount of money that’s greater than my current housing payment on a fly-tying vise; however, from what I understand, there are plenty of diamond rings less precious and expertly crafted than a Renzetti Master.
The point is, and not to be overly proverbial, but it’s a poor craftsperson who blames or credits their tools too much. If you are fortunate enough to make such significant investments in angling and are resolved to put those resources towards expensive gear, power to you. What’s becoming increasingly important in a world where even oxygen carries a rising cost, though, is to do what each of us can to resist the culture of shame-based impulsivity that keeps the makers of overpriced things—top quality or not—thriving.
Even more, so much of angling’s beauty lies in the fact that the sport is most importantly characterized by guesswork. There are certainly countless biological laws present—you can reasonably rely on smallmouth to spawn in spring, the high tide to eventually come, the salmon to run upstream, etc.—but so much of our pastime is based in experienced inferences, hypotheses.
I love to fish for lake trout from shore in the spring. A deep-water species, lakers are notoriously difficult to dial from the bank and so a laundry list of variables is usually employed to deduce their general location. With years of practice, I can usually get close by taking account of cumulative precipitation & water levels, water temperature, topography, and the presence of diving birds like loons; however, I have spent many skunked hours soaked to the bone in frigid early spring air, desperately trying to solve for x as my original formula refuses to equate. Anglers are liars and we have a phenomenal knack of telling ourselves endless fibs in such moments, all skirting around the only real truth: we are not lake trout, and no number of years in experience can personify these, or any fish, to the extent that we truly understand them.
Among each other as individual anglers, this fact is a funny contradiction. To the corporations controlling this and every other industry, it’s an opportunity. I don’t mean to submit that fishing manufacturers are bloodthirsty and seek to take advantage over the angling community in the same stroke as, say, the pharmaceutical industry, but they are certainly more than happy to market and sell us products which they know will not bring us any closer to elevated understanding or skill, and may even act as a crutch—just ask much of the bass fishing world their feelings about Garmin’s $2,000 Panoptix LiveScope system.
As anglers, handiworkers, political scientists, non-profit workers, entertainers, psychologists—what have you—let us all take a breath. Perhaps if we’re able to swipe up and away from corporately sponsored feeds detailing desperately craved success that’s only made possible by things and places we can’t access; if we can pocket phones and silence our minds for a moment long enough, perhaps we could reflect backwards on the beautiful passions, skills and interests that call each of us into this most complex human patchwork.
Speaking for my own reflection, I realize the excess time I spent with phone in hand and head in the wrong direction in the past year of full-time guiding. The crunching, overwhelming stress of survival is certainly due some credit as debt, precarity, and some of their closest buddies are inherently conjoined to small business ownership. The proper misstep, though, was the point at which my mind conflated the harsh realities of entrepreneurial vulnerability and the doubt accompanying it with the very core of the thing: the passion. Compulsively, I’ve looked to social media to see the same guides—some with greater resources than myself, some more experience, some both—enjoying the same amount of hard earned success, with the same satisfied clients, throwing the same top-shelf gear that, truthfully, I’m unable to justify for myself let alone for client equipment. In some situations, I find myself resentful towards these colleagues, in others jealous, but seemingly always insecure, feeling like an imposter in the trade.
What I’m realizing, though, is how truly meaningless these differences are. To be honest, even with greater resources and experience, I’m not sure how much I’d align myself or my business with the most expensive or prestigious parts of this industry. My invested goal as a guide is to usher my client across the threshold to an experience at least one entire world away from the minutia that all too often outlines our daily lives. My goal is to take that client’s investment in my knowledge and exchange it with an irreplaceable set of memories. As an individual angler, my goal is the pursuit. Pursuit of the animal, yes, but even more, pursuit of learning and experiences that only the natural world can provide. Perhaps most of all, I pursue to hold close things that are no longer tangible.
When I really consider the direction that I want to head in, I realize that I am more than okay to cut corners where possible. I’m confident that the difference between production and custom models lies mostly in reputation, hype. A Helios 3D is a great rod and outperforms its cousins off the production line in every regard, no argument. The reality is, though, that I’m equally assured in my ability to place my client or myself in the position of not needing to rely on the idea of a thousand-dollar stick, that at the end of the day, is no more a magic trick to putting fish in the basket than a Clearwater or Encounter is. As a fly-tyer, while doing what I can to respect the history, I’ve yet to meet a trout with a palate refined enough to reject a well-presented nymphal imitation because the recipe called for Danville and I used UTC. If it fishes and catches, it’s good enough for me, and the resources saved for the same degree of success are more than welcome.
If your own pursuit is top of the line gear, brand deals, lawful fly-tying, prestige, truly, power to you—to each their own. And maybe that’s the operative phrase, our message if you will. One of humanity’s beautiful intricacies is that we truly are eight billion individuals, all answering the call of life to build a path to walk on. Let’s work to understand that it’s squarely in the interests of the commercial world to centralize these trails; to erode each of their fine and winding curves into one homogenous plane in which all of us may look good in our Canada Down jackets, but still owe lots of lucrative debt on products we cannot afford. The less of their Kool-Aid we drink and the more to each we encourage of their own, the less they sell and the more our community and individual economies thrive.
Let’s have a try doing what we need on social media, and then channeling our attention and energy into creating a new ‘right way to do things,’ hopefully one that’s based in what drives individual passion and propels one towards an original definition of success. If my math is correct, it’d be a short time after that the subjectivity of success would become inarguably apparent, and with it, the notion that we are only imposters in aspirations which are not our own creation, but are symptomatic of the dystopic, homogenous world that lies in the curdled dreams of those with the power to remove themselves from it.
Here’s to breaking world records with Ugly Stiks. Here’s to lifetime shore anglers. Here’s to an infinity of ‘right ways to do things.’ Here’s to cherishing passion. Here’s to silent phones and quiet minds, undividedly focused on new, exciting measures of success and failure. And perhaps most importantly, here’s to having a bit of fun; after all, what life has ever been lived in regret of that?
Eat. Breathe. Fish.