The Siren Song of Self-Actualization

television takes on the loneliness crisis, part 1

Five years ago, the Korean black comedy thriller Parasite made cinema history by winning Best Picture at the Oscars - the first and to-date only foreign language film ever to do so. Following the machinations of the poor but clever Kim family, Parasite was critically acclaimed and seemed to typify a trend in films where working-class folks get back a piece of their own from the wealthy - termed “eat-the-rich” stories by social media.

In a post Parasite world, the new hot genre on television is a slow-burn expose of the world of the rich. The White Lotus. Nine Perfect Strangers. The Perfect Couple. Heck, even The Summer I Turned Pretty strays into this at times. Brownie points to the writers if the show has a murder which will cause a slow burn of rotten emotions to surface from within each privileged character.

Though these stories are billed as send-ups of class distinctions in the modern world, the conflict between the wealthy and the poor is only a shiny exterior to the real struggle of the story. On the surface, the story follows an ordinary man who is stuck treading water in a world of the privileged wealthy. But underneath a far more insidious dilemma is brewing: the plague of loneliness in a post-internet world.

The “loneliness epidemic” is now a well-documented phenomenon. With cell phones, social media and streaming services, we have unprecedented access to anything we could want at the speed of Amazon Prime Shipping. Everyone we’ve ever met is available with the immediacy of a quick text. And yet somehow, having everything we want right at the tip of our fingers has made us more isolated than ever before. 

Peter Biles says it excellently in his essay The Post-College Friendship Slump: 

“All I’m trying to say is that technological comforts and virtual replications of community can seduce us into believing we no longer need “the real thing.” It lulls us into slumber, dulls the pain, and over time, might convince us that we don’t actually have true, spiritual needs for communion with God and other human souls…Combined with the message that self-actualization, not self-giving relationship, is the goal of life, it is no wonder we find ourselves lonely, unmoored, and living more or less meaningless lives.”

Polonius tells his son “to thine own self be true” and modern generations have taken him at his word. Live your best life. Be your best self. And whatever you do, don’t let anyone stand in the way of what you need. We become so focused on ourselves and actualizing our fate/destiny/vocation (yes, Christians fall into this trap too), that the focus of our life becomes about us and only us. 

“Only” is a solitary word, though, and “only us” is a lonely place.

Sirens & The Lonely Allure of Self-Actualization

If there’s one show that really gets this right, it’s the recent Netflix mini-series Sirens. The show centers on the relationship between Devon (the magnificent Meghann Fahy) and her younger sister Simone (an equally pitch-perfect Milly Alcock). We first meet Devon, on her way out of a police station after her second DUI. Devon calls Simone but is sent to voicemail. She texts the code word “sirens” - but Devon has texted “sirens” many times, and Simone hasn’t ever responded.

Devon returns home to care for their father (we learn later that he has early-onset dementia), but she finds a fruit basket on the front stoop from Simone with a note: “Keep your chin up, XO Simone.”

The fruit in that edible arrangement feels like a slap in the face and Devon snaps. It’s time for Simone to do her fair share, so Devon decides she’s going to fetch her sister back.

Simone (Milly Alcock) works as an assistant for Michaela Kell (Julianne Moore), the philanthropist wife of a wealthy CEO. By all appearances, Simone is living her best life. She loves her job and her boss is her best friend (Simone alone is allowed to call her “Kiki”). Simone has plenty of money and a wealthy, yet delightfully-secret, boyfriend. 

Simone is especially attached to her life, we find out later, because her youth was a time of great unhappiness. After her mother’s suicide, her father’s neglect landed her in foster care until Devon quit school to come back for her. But the trauma lurking under the surface doesn’t hold Simone back. She made it into Yale despite all odds. She’s out of the paycheck to paycheck life of poverty in which she was raised. Simone has actualized the dream life she has always envisioned. 

No wonder she doesn’t want her problematic older sister Devon around to mess things up.

Simone doesn’t need Devon as much anymore because she’s grown so close to Kiki. Simone and Kiki’s are besties with a kind of intimacy which goes far beyond the boundaries of workplace-appropriate. They go for a run everyday. They dress in similar shades of pastel. Simone helps her boss take alluring photos and send intimate texts to Kiki’s husband. They sleep in the same bed when a pet falcon dies tragically. Plainly put - it’s mimetic and really freaking weird.

That’s what Devon thinks when she arrives, anyway. “Come help me with Dad” becomes “You’re in a cult and you need help.” Simone’s life feels like an updated version of The Stepford Wives and if there’s one thing Devon has a track record of, it’s swooping in to save her younger sister.

During one of Devon’s many confrontations with her sister, Simone tries to explain why she loves her life so much. She and Kiki are best friends, she asserts, and Kiki always has her back. “Friends don’t control and isolate you,” Devon returns.

Devon can recognize isolation because she feels isolated herself. She feels caught in a rut - in a low paying job, in a toxic affair with her boss, caring for her failing father. And so Simone retorts that Devon is projecting her own frustration in life onto Simone. Maybe Devon should try living her own best life instead, Simone suggests. “It’s like Kiki always says,” Simone tells her sister. “If it doesn’t serve you, let it go.”

On the surface, it’s class conflict, with well-off challenging dead-broke. And it’s easy to see some truth in it. Devon sure would be happier if she wasn’t working a minimum wage job, using men and being used by them to dull the unhappiness she feels. Why not just shed your life of everything messy that holds you back – “letting go” what doesn’t serve your best life?

Letting go of bad energy and staying away from toxicity sound like a good thing, and even in some cases may be. Pruning people - minimalism of community, we could call it - is an increasingly common, but not new approach to living. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” Emerson writes in his essay Self-Reliance. “Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

The notion that we should only have supportive people in our lives is alluring. If we get the right set of people in our lives, then everything can and should turn out the way we want, right? It’s the siren song of our sin nature. The subconscious belief that other people exist to serve us - to make our pain less excruciating - to make our loneliness less acute - to make our journeys less difficult.

But there’s a problem. Approaching people this way turns them into commodities. “If it doesn’t serve you, let it go” applied to a human person makes their value dependent on their use in my life, not something inherent to their being. It means they can and should be traded out for a newer, better model every now and then. It makes people a mirror which reflects back to us our own self-importance.

While this flatters our sense of self-importance, it’s also really, really lonely.

Remember that pesky verse in the book of Acts which reminds us that “it is more blessed to give than to receive?” Perhaps this is what it is talking about. The spirit of giving turns us outside of ourselves - and that is the best way to know that we are not alone in this world.

Instead of letting go of what ceases to be of service to us, the Christian model of relationship encourages us to give to others. To recognize that they have value in our lives whether we understand what it is or not. That will mean having fights. That will mean hurting feelings. That will mean changing because nothing stays the same. But ironically, it will also save us from the despair of loneliness.

“Dropping out of college to take care of you is the best thing I’ve ever done,” Devon tells Simone at one point later in the show - and at this point, we truly understand why it was her best decision. “You didn’t serve me. And I didn’t let you go.”

Without being explicitly or even implicitly religious, Sirens captures perfectly the emptiness of a life where other people are emotional commodities. Over the course of the series’s five episodes, as the complexities of each character reveal themselves, we learn just how easily we can fall into this way of living. The door is easy to open. You only have to say no to suffering, which we all desperately want to do.

At the end of Sirens, one character breaks out of the cycle of using other people - and it’s only at that moment when they become their better self. It’s a transformation well worth watching. And when we see the joy which comes with that sacrifice, we see the first freedom any character in the show experiences. 

Because that’s the truth behind the siren call of self-actualization: it’s a cage. And just as Michaela releases her beloved peregrine falcon from a cage in the show’s opening shot, so Sirens is hoping to set us free too.