How do we decide what is a significant moment?
When my boyfriend asks me how my day was I usually answer with a long and detailed run-down of everything I did that day. “I did some writing and then a bunch of reading then I went to the grocery store because we needed spinach but they didn’t have the big packages of spinach so I only got a small one sorry about that I guess I’ll have to go back tomorrow and then on the way home I was listening to this CD that my friend gave me and there’s this great song on it that got me thinking about…” I sometimes feel like I never stop talking. It must be incredibly boring for him but I keep going anyway. It’s a compulsion I have to share everything.
But I don’t actually tell him everything. To recount every single moment of a day would take another whole day. I’m selective about what I share, even if I feel like I’m not. I’m interested in how I choose those moments. What makes one moment significant enough to share and another insignificant enough to completely forget once it’s passed by? I wonder about this with things like Twitter and Facebook Status updates. Why do we share updates on what we’re eating for dinner but not on the day’s other minutiae? Do I choose an update because it’s somehow a significant moment, or because it just happens to be the content of a moment in which I’m trying to kill some time or reconnect with the world?
Virginia Woolf has a theory about “moments of being” – moments when we become completely conscious of our being and of the patterns underlying the everyday. These moments can be marked by traumatic or significant events, or they can be inspired by seemingly insignificant events. The content of the moment isn’t important – it’s the transcendence of that content towards a universal truth that makes it a “moment of being.” It’s an interesting theory but I can’t help but take issue with it’s metaphysicality. Why do we have to rise above the everyday minutiae to experience a more authentic state of being? Doesn’t the actual content of the moment shape our experience of our real, material, social lives, and thus our being?
March 13, 2009 at 2:54 am |
“To recount every single moment of a day would take another whole day”.
Somebody should read “Funes, the Memorious”, by the beloved Jorge Luis Borges.
As a comment to your post, I don’t know what is important in our day, but I do know that we tend to talk or write more about things that are interesting than about things that are important. Ideally, what’s interesting is also important. Oh, and “interesting” should be read as “interesting to ourselves”. Also ideally, what’s interesting to ourselves is also interesting to the people around us.
I know I didn’t offer much to your thoughts, but I thought I should keep it light.
March 14, 2009 at 1:44 am |
You’re right I think – we share the things that interest us. But if the things I talk about interest me, there is a really boring side to me. Seriously, I spent a good half hour once sharing with my roommate which fruit juices I liked and which I didn’t and why. Based on that, I assume that most of what I have to say is uninteresting to most others, unless they’re everyday nerds like me.
And I may actually just read the Borges… it’s high time I tried again.
March 14, 2009 at 6:42 pm |
Isn’t marking certain moments “significant” and then recounting those to others simply a cultural practice? I think we’re very queued to consumption events, like buying spinach, while someone in another culture might have thought the black cat that crossed your path on the way to the grocery store was really important.
I’ve heard the claim that (within our culture) men and women both identify different moments as significant and use a different style to recount them.
March 17, 2009 at 10:28 am |
I think you’re absolutely right Jared – the moments we mark, or perhaps the way we divide up the moments of our days, are (at least in large part) culturally determined. I hadn’t really been thinking of it in that sense…
I’m uneasy about saying there’s a gendered determination though. Not to say we don’t have a gendered response to our everyday lives – but maybe we assign significance to certain moments and recount them in different ways because of a historico-cultural prescription to do so, and not out of an innate biological difference. Does that make sense?
March 17, 2009 at 1:53 pm |
Tara, I’m a social constructionist, so I don’t even acknowledge the distinction you’re worried about.