Now, the fact that most of us might want to record special occasions or stay in contact with loved ones might well account for a good number of selfie postings, but that’s only a part of it. Selfie production has become an obsession for many. We have become the “Me, my Selfie and I” generation – a selfie-absorbed generation.
But the problem with so much of the social media content we are producing – the artfully posed selfies, the tweets of facts such as “I just had my third cup of coffee today”– is not the delusion that other people really care or find this so interesting, but the fact that we are placing so much importance on what happens to us. It can be selfie-centered to a sad degree. You don’t need a degree in psychology to figure out that the more we feed the self, the less likely it is that the self will engage in unselfie-sh behavior.
Selfie-fixation is certainly the opposite of an outgoing and other-oriented attitude. As Christians we know that even Jesus himself said: “I can of mine own self do nothing … I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me” (John 5:30 KJV), and we know that the will of God is that we focus our lives not on ourselves, but on God and others (Matthew 22:37-39). Focusing on others is hard to do when so much of our time is spent focusing our cameras and our thoughts on ourselves.
So am I saying we should never take selfies and try to selfie-righteously discourage others from doing so? No, of course not. But I am saying that we can at least use the selfie-fixation in the world around us as a reminder of what our lives should be about. If every time we see someone taking a selfie, or we see a selfie on our computer screen, we take a second to think “what can I do today for someone other than myself?” we may keep ourselves very busy, but we may move a little closer to perfecting the increasingly rare, and increasingly important, art of the “unselfie.”
