When porn is the norm

Some sentences hit you in the gut and stay there for a long while. Like insight-shaped IBS, if you will. This is one of those sentences:

“Porn is what you get when the act matters more than the intimacy. And now everything’s porn. Food porn. Design porn. Storytelling porn. Slick. Stimulating. Shallow.”

Everything’s porn. It’s impossible to un-see. The performance is more important than the passion or the purpose. It’s in our social feeds, it’s in how we narrative our own life’s stories, it’s even in how we show up to work and basically have a shallow sense of any loyalty being there; all there is, is libido.

One possible read here is that, when porn is the norm, then the performance of something is less important than simply being something. Take spirituality. Do you want to perform spirituality (47 day meditation streak?) or simply be spiritual? The answer is not very engaging for social media, but it probably feels far more memorable for the wider world outside of it.

Memorability becomes a more important factor when we look at the world through the lens of “porn” vs “not porn”. Porn is a volume game, a performance game, but like most addictions it ceases to be memorable after the 20th hit. Whereas true intimacy and love can stay with you forever.

But this isn’t about the sex vs love debate exclusively, though there are direct applications there. It’s about whether what we want to create, consume and be for each other is more about being performative or being memorable.

Because some performances can drive memorability, but more often than not what feels memorable is that which goes against the current (insert salmon joke here, of course). And when everything’s performance, the truly memorable thing is not to over-rehearse and just show up, vs show off.