Digital inflatable neighbors | The Press

Télé-Québec presented last week a disturbing documentary on these young men obsessed with their physique, who fall into excessive training with large doses of steroids¹.

Adonis is a documentary that unfolds on several fronts: the relationship with oneself, the too easy access to steroids dangerous for health, the stigma of bullying suffered as a child and what it is (or not) to be a man…

But it is also a documentary on the effect of digital platforms on the human being of the 21st century.^e century.

I’m old enough to remember that we used to talk about “virtual” to describe what was happening on the internet. It’s over: what is now happening in the digital world is completely real, even though it is a huge part of reality.

In Adonisdirector Jérémie Battaglia, himself in remission from an unhealthy obsession with his muscles, sets out to meet young men whose lives revolve around an obsession: being “fat”, as they say in the industry bodybuilder…

Translation: to be an Everest of muscles, to achieve the “perfect” physique according to the parameters of these bodybuilding addicts. Striking scene in the documentary: a strong young man who spends his days lifting weights in the gym, weighing his food and watching videos of muscle influencers looks at himself in the mirror of his bathroom…

And he finds himself “small”.

Not “big” enough, not muscular enough.

Then he drops a comment which speaks in other words of his state of prisoner: “It’s never enough. »

Of course, body obsession among men is nothing new. Documentarian Battaglia interviews Harrison Pope, professor of psychiatry at Harvard, about the evolution of this obsession, “dramatically illustrated” by the evolution of the GI Joe action figure over the decades, the old doctor then explains…

In 1964, GI Joe is a completely ordinary guy. In 1975, we see that GI Joe spent some time at the gym, “and in the 1990s, he not only spent time at the gym, he did a few cycles of anabolic steroids.”

In the media coverage ofAdonis, the use of steroids has received a lot of attention. But what struck me in the documentary Adonisit is the new incarnation of this old phenomenon, that of the “inflatable neighbor”…

Do you remember this old-fashioned expression illustrating the race for consumption through comparison? Your neighbor bought an above-ground pool: the following summer, you had an in-ground pool installed. Your sister-in-law was going to Cuba in February: you ended up going to the South in February and July. The neighbor was buying a BMW, you were shopping for Mercedes.

And so on.

But now, our neighbors, our colleagues, our friends, our cousins ​​are all there, in our digital lives, scrolling through the “feeds” of our social networks. We see them at restaurants, on weekends at Tremblant, on vacation in Portugal, in bikinis, at the gym, at yoga, at the Bell Center…

Almost a lifetime ago, I did for The Press a series on our relationship with money. Two financial advisors told me of their exasperation at the appearance of a new inflatable neighbor, a digital one: the Facebook feed, they told me, pushes many of their clients to spend too much…

In the past, the inflatable neighbor pushed us to consume.

By viewing Adonis, I thought: the growing importance of platforms in our lives has created inflatable neighbor syndrome on steroids. We no longer simply compare our consumer fantasies, it is our beings and our lives that we now compare to those of our peers.

These young men in the documentary constantly film and photograph themselves. They idolize other mountains of muscle who film themselves, who constantly photograph themselves. They are all in comparison, in emulation. In the show, too, in the staging.

The result is an unhealthy vicious circle: of course you will always be too “small” if you can compare yourself in real time, if you can compare yourself to everyone, all the time.

It will never be enough, in fact.

You will never be enough.

I’m talking about bodybuilding here, but that’s an excuse. I do not speak that bodybuilding.

I’m talking about a bad era where comparison makes us sick, I’m talking about the era of the digital inflatable neighbor who plays in our heads 24/7, who fucks up our relationship with ourselves and others. I’m talking about an era where digital technology is present in a thousand spheres of our lives, as digital technology becomes more and more established. In our lives…

I am 52 years old. I lived my late adolescence and the beginning of my adult life at the dawn of the 1990s, so at a time when we didn’t film ourselves, where we didn’t photograph ourselves all the time. We had to go to Direct Film to have our photos “developed” which were monuments of imperfection.

I’m not saying that comparison with others didn’t exist, it did exist, in its own way. But there was a way, in the past, to escape one’s own image and that of others – the diktat of the perpetual staging of perfection.

I write these words trying not to answer a question that resonates within me, implicitly: to what extent would I be damaged by the digital inflatable neighbors, if I were 20 years old today?

Write to me about it, tell me about your digital inflatable neighbors, about the effect the times have on you, or your loved ones.

I want to read you, I’m going to come back to this dizzying subject.

1. Watch the documentary Adonis on the Télé-Québec web platform