Flypaper Follies

You are not a fire chief: A brief essay on our pretend society

We pretend too much. As soon as we are old enough to sit up, we are encouraged to do little else. We are given toys and costumes so we can pretend more dramatically, which may be just the opposite of what we should be doing. We pretend to be something until we tire of it, or can no longer believe it, then we pretend to be something else. It’s Superman one Halloween, Batman the next, then Harry Potter.

Sometimes we pretend to be something we might actually become, like a fire chief, but our pretending bears no resemblance to the reality. In fact, it can discourage pursuit of the actual career. Pretend by its very nature focuses on the dramatic, not the work-a-day. Pretend creates a swashbuckling caricature that bears no resemblance to real life. Real life looks horribly dull by comparison. Perhaps it is this realization that moves us to pretend to be something else.

On the other hand, life has a way of pulling back the curtains. Some time around puberty, most children lose forever the ability to leap to the next imaginary hero. They’ve been encouraged to pretend their whole lives, to pretend they can do anything, and then they realize they can’t. Or maybe they can, but the reality of what they can do bears no resemblance to the thing they’ve been pretending to be. The illusion they’ve been living is gone. They don’t like the reality.

In particularly dramatic examples, they begin to dress like zombies and listen to music that would move almost anyone to entertain at least fleeting thoughts of suicide. I think these are the children who were best at pretending and therefore the most scarred by disillusionment. Their illusions were so beautiful that losing them forced them to proclaim in the starkest possible terms that life is dark and horrible in comparison.

Still, much of our adult lives are predicated on the need to pretend. Our radio stations blast soaring inspirational ballads. Reality shows are in effect illusions, showing people doing things that most of us will never get the chance to do. Even if we did do the things they show, no one would be watching so it wouldn’t be the same. In fact, that’s the only time it would be reality – if no one was watching.

Marketing preys on our need to pretend. Thanks to years of pretending, we can easily believe that we will soon have bodies of unbelievable beauty or new careers that will quickly turn us into millionaires. We can become investment wizards overnight or make $100,000 a year working part time from home. We can buy SUVs and become rugged individualists. Mini mansions will turn our families into happy families with full, rich lives.

Worst of all, we can become the kind of people that skillful politicians tell us we are. There was a time when our abilities to pretend were laughably modest. If we could conjure up a chicken in every pot we were happy.

Over the last few decades, we’ve cut loose. Now we can believe almost anything about ourselves. We can believe we are a beacon of freedom and democracy, though we work hard to topple unfriendly democracies and some of our closest allies are horrible dictatorships. We can believe we are good people who never torture after seeing dozens of lurid photos of Americans torturing other people. We can believe that freedom is on the march in the Middle East and blame the messenger when the marchers get blown to bits.

We can’t stop our children from pretending. But maybe we should work harder to disillusion them. We should make sure that they know that they’re pretending and that the real world is much more difficult and less entertaining than their pretend world. We should tell them to believe their eyes and ears instead of comforting fantasies. We should tell them:

“You are not a fireman or an astronaut. You are not an action hero. You are nothing but a little boy sitting in the grass. You might one day become fire chief, or mayor, or a fighter pilot, but not by pretending.”