Privacy and the Narcissism of Small Differences

How an erosion of personal privacy has fueled societal divisions.

Once upon a time, in a world far, far away (exuburban Missouri, 2003), I did not know that my neighbors redid their bathroom.

I didn’t know that they put in a new jacuzzi tub.  I didn’t know that they put in granite.  I didn’t know that they took a weekend trip to Lake of the Ozarks to get a break from the construction.  I didn’t know any of that—I might have noticed a contractor’s van out front once or twice, I might have noticed that their Camry wasn’t in the driveway one weekend, and I might have noticed the new bathroom six months after the fact when I had to go inside their house to pee during the neighborhood block party—but I did not know about their bathroom renovation.  And in that moment of grand reveal—going inside to take a piss after four cans of Coca Cola—the precise costs of bathroom renovations were unlikely to be at the forefront of my mind.  

And that’s if I noticed the renovation at all.  

I probably wasn’t going to. All they did was swap out a 1991 builder-grade bathroom for a 2003 builder-grade bathroom.  My mental schema of “Things I might find in a middle class neighborhood” had hardly been disrupted. 

….

Now, of course, that same renovation would be a multi-month saga.  

Mrs. Meyer would post a picture of her old builder-grade bathroom asking if anybody had any suggestions.  A month later, she’d start posting pictures of paint swatches and Pinterest inspiration.  Then there would be a post about how the remodel was already $3k over budget. Followed by pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Meyer relaxing at Lake of the Ozarks with drinks in hand, captioned “Taking a weekend away from all of the craziness!”.  Followed eventually by the grand reveal of an updated bathroom, shot and edited to make it look like a piece of Versailles had landed at the end of the cul-de-sac.   

And, in becoming a multi-month saga, this bathroom renovation would take on a new importance to everybody.

“I don’t know about that cabinet color.  Tom and I were thinking about selling next year to downsize, and I worry that greige cabinets will hurt our comps.”

“I just don’t know where they got the money for that.  I can’t afford to renovate my bathroom.” 

“No kidding.  In this economy?  How could they waste money on something like that when there are so many causes that need help?”

“Forget that. For all I care, they can keep their money in a coffee can under the bed, but geez, talk about conspicuous consumption!  Way to rub it in all of our faces that Dave inherited that chunk of money when his mom died.”

“Don’t forget about the settlement he got when he was laid off from Dildo Corp.  Talk about a golden parachute for regional bigwigs like him…”

And on and on this would go.  For months.  It would indeed be treated like somebody was building the Palace of Versailles at the end of the subdivision, with the Meyers instantly vaulted from a regular, middle class family to the neighborhood’s very own symbol of excess and inequality.

All over builder-grade granite and a $30 soap dispenser.    

….

In recent years, more and more talk is being given to the dark undersides of social media algorithms.  People are starting to realize that tech giants like Facebook have been promoting fake news, and capitalizing on the clickability of wild, misleading headlines.  There’s a greater awareness that politically divisive content from every side has been boosted by algorithms that care only about user engagement.  It’s come out that foreign governments have specifically worked to destabilize western institutions by tapping into this.  Across the political spectrum, alarms have been raised about how big tech is eroding public trust and tearing at the fabric of society.  

And it is.

But something else is going on, too.  Something that may be compounded by algorithms, but that is ultimately much simpler:  We’ve lost our privacy.  

Not in the “How is Facebook making sausage with ad tracking, bad headlines and Russian content this week?”-way, but in the sense that back in 2003, I didn’t know that Mr. and Mrs. Meyer were planning to redo their bathroom.

…

Some people, of course, did know that the Meyers were renovating.

The sales guy at Home Depot knew.  The contractor they hired knew.  Mrs. Meyer’s mom, sister, and best friend were all consulted during the renovation.  Mrs. Clark from next door knew, because she and her husband had to do quite a bit of work after a kitchen fire the year before, so Mrs. Meyer turned to her for advice from time to time. 

But, crucially, these people all had some kind of rational tie to The Meyer Bathroom Renovation.  They had perspective and context.  They understood that the old bathroom needed to be replaced after years of hard wear, and that after the stress of Mr. Meyer losing his job and mother in the course of ten months, the family was ready to treat themselves in any way they could.  They understood that no, the Meyers were not living some Robin Leach fever dream, and that the $3k spent over budget all came out of Mrs. Meyer’s 401(k).  They understood, quite simply, that this was not Marie Antoinette telling the neighborhood to eat cake.  It was a regular renovation being done by regular people who had survived a shitty year.  

Social media, on the other hand, separates everybody from this context.  It inundates us with images the size of a phone screen, but it leaves out the world beyond the camera’s frame.

Even the most prolific over-sharers leave out crucial pieces.  

Somebody might share 20 drama-filled statuses a day, along with multiple sandwich photos, a photo of her youngest child on the toilet, and three different FacebookLive videos devoted to pyramid schemes, but there’s still a lot going on off-screen.  There’s important nuance being lost, even in the most introspective posts.  The why becomes hidden, leaving only Minion memes and posts about tummy-flattening tea.  With every post, more and more of the complexity of life gets hidden behind “Like and Share if You Love Jesus Christ” (or “Like and Share if You Stand Against Climate Change”, depending on the preferred method of virtue-signaling). 

This, in turn, divides people more than any political candidate ever could have.

…

Going back to the Meyer renovation, forget any broader unity.  Forget any sense of “we’re all in this together”.  If everybody is bitching about the Meyers, there will be no uniting the neighborhood against the planned smelting plant being built a mile down the road.  There will be no uniting the neighborhood against closing the park.  When the county talks about bussing in poorer kids from underperforming districts, there will no longer be any rational weighing of “On one hand, I want to see kids from less privileged areas have the same educational opportunities my kids take for granted.  On the other hand, I don’t want the overall school quality to decline, and I’m not even sure that bussing poor kids 40 miles each way is the best solution in the first place…”

No, thanks to the Meyer renovation (and the trillion similar sagas), the development is no longer a comfortable neighborhood made up of regular people trying to muddle through life the best that they can. It is–despite all outward indications of being a subdivision full of identical tract houses–the most unequal place on the entire planet, populated entirely by rich NIMBYs, champagne socialists, and far-right nationalists who hope to enslave women and brown people for their own gain. 

Very real concerns about economic inequality and the slipping middle class all get directed away from major corporations and the .01%, and towards the fact that somebody was able to spend $14k to put in new granite and subway tile.  

Forget about Bill Gates and Amazon; an old high school classmate just bought an Acura.  

….

This has always existed, of course.  Freud coined the term Narcissism of Small Differences in 1917 to describe a phenomenon that had been going on for much, much longer.  The narcissism of small differences is why you’ll hear doctors complaining about how hard it was growing up as the “dumb” kid in the family, and why Methany bitches about the neighbors acting like a bunch of hoosiers even though she’s running a meth lab out of the ‘02 Sunfire sitting on blocks in her driveway.  

For as long as people have existed, they’ve sought to differentiate themselves from those around them, and, almost by necessity, have done so in silly ways.  When every other kid in the family has been a valedictorian, graduating ninth in the class marks a person as a bad student, and when half of the neighborhood cooks meth, the details of where and how become the defining moral flashpoints.  

But, again, prior to social media, knowledge of someone’s personal matters tended to go hand in hand with context.  

Dr. Johnson knew that his siblings had an easier time in school than he did, and that they went off to better colleges, but he also knew that his sister’s Harvard degree hadn’t been the golden ticket she was hoping for.  He knew how much it sucked having to settle for UMKC when the other three kids in the family all went to schools with more name recognition, but he also knew that he had a better experience at UMKC than his brother did at Hopkins.  

That knowledge would never erase the narcissism of small differences, but it often softened the blows.  It prevented his sister’s Harvard degree and his brother’s new condo in Naples from ballooning into something so unreasonable that it permanently blocked the view of his own swimming pool and Mercedes.  It’s when the context vanishes that those small differences really begin to magnify; that the Harvard diploma and Naples become emblematic of all of the ways that life has ever been unfair.  

And, few things divorce knowledge from context quite as efficiently as social media.   

…

In recent years, on some level, the zeitgeist has recognized this.  More people have taken to opening up about mental illness and personal uncertainty on the very same platforms where they share smiling vacation pictures and memes written in millennial pink text.  Gen Z’ers roll their eyes at the glossy, flawless aesthetic of Instagram.  Companies are either reducing their reliance on Photoshop, or at least coming clean and saying “Yeah, no. Actually, our models do have pores.  We just edited that out because we’re a sneaker company…”  

People are realizing how devoid of context social media has truly become, and they’re working to fight it the best way that they can.  

But perhaps the best way of fighting it is simply by re-taking one’s right to privacy.  Not by never posting anything, but by at least thinking, and recognizing that sometimes less is more.  

After all, there’s no harm in knowing that the Meyers redid their bathroom.  My parents are talking about redoing theirs.  If I can reach out to Mrs. Meyer to help them find a good contractor and avoid some of the budget nightmares that plagued their project, then that really is an example of social media doing what it promised so many years ago.  That’s what Facebook and Instagram and a thousand other platforms should be about.  

It’s just that the conversation will never happen if Mrs. Meyer and I each decide the other one is a Khardashian, and get into it over who has benefited more from white privilege and the patriarchy.  (Spoiler alert: All in all, the system has probably treated us both pretty equally. That’s why we’re talking about greige cabinets while some woman is waiting in line at the food bank with her five kids in tow, and another is lounging on her own private island, drinking $200 “sustainable” cocktails made from an endangered species.)   

When that sort of strife and division occurs, the tech companies become the only winners.  Mark Zuckerberg gets to hang out on his yacht and laugh, while a smelting plant goes up down the road and the impoverished kids from the other end of the county rush around to catch their 5:00 AM buses. Nobody from any of the neighborhoods will be at the table for any of the discussions that really matter, because they’re all too busy tearing one another apart over the geopolitical implications of shower curtains and soap dispensers.