, Kirk Bozeman questions the significance, humor, and subtexts of viral videos, memes, and other Internet fads.<\/em><\/p>\nWe are all victims, generators, and products of perspective. We bring a host of preconceived notions and assumed truths to all of life, including into our relationships with others \u2014 ideas about ourselves, people, and the world that affect the way we view and treat each other. This is not necessarily<\/em> a bad thing, it\u2019s just an unavoidable thing. We can\u2019t function in reality without some type of a priori<\/em>, it\u2019s impossible to do. But whether our assumption is positive or negative, good or bad, we\u2019re all stuck in skin and confined to conjecture, doing the best we can to try to understand each other, hopefully well enough to feel connected to someone somewhere and\/or \u201cjust get by.\u201d<\/p>\nMaybe it\u2019s not as dramatic as all that (maybe), but we certainly all find ourselves feeling misunderstood quite often. It\u2019s here that a recent meme picks up, the one that swept social media and inundated your Facebook and Twitter timelines in the past couple of weeks, the one with the black background and one square picture per \u201cwhat\u201d to elucidate the assumptions of others (and, briefly, yourself)\u2026<\/p>\n
What my friends think I do\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat my mom thinks I do\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat I think I do\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat society thinks I do\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\nWhat I really do\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\nEveryone seemed to find themselves in this meme. It evolved quickly and relentlessly. Most versions were specifically concerned with vocation, one of the main ways adults define themselves. There are now jpegs lamenting the (evidently) ill-understood lives of photographers, seminary students, professional artists, librarians, musicians, and countless other fields. Generally they all seem to say: \u201cMy friends think I party, my parents think I play, society thinks I\u2019m weird, I think I\u2019m cool, but I really just sit at a desk behind a computer all day.\u201d<\/p>\n
But, the \u201cwhat I really do\u201d meme (like most of our assumptions of misunderstanding) got a little whiny. Do your friends or parents really <\/em>not understand you? Do they, perhaps, understand you a little better than you\u2019d like? Is their criticism or commentary something you avoid by tacking together gimmicky joke posts in MS Paint instead of taking it, at the very least, into consideration? Does society, honestly, have at least some <\/em>point in its assumptions and preconceptions of you, something you should at least give ear to and analyze for yourself? This is the problem of living in a world of conjecture \u2014 we fall victim to our own <\/em>conjectures as well \u2014 perhaps our assumptions that we are not understood by others are not entirely true. Each of us is a friend, a family member, and a member of society \u2014 we are each\u00a0in<\/em>\u00a0the jpeg, not just chuckling at it.<\/p>\nBut feelings of misunderstanding, though they should be analyzed, are often legitimate. The biblical promise that we will \u201cknow even as we are fully known\u201d has always resounded deeply with me, and this meme points to the fact that it resounds deeply in all of us. We feel misunderstood, we deeply desire to be \u201cknown,\u201d and we desperately want to \u201cknow.\u201d This is one of the problems of the Fall \u2014 this disconnect with others and the world \u2014 and only something that the coming Kingdom of the all-knowing God\u00a0can fix .<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“This is the problem of living in a world of conjecture — we fall victim to our own conjectures as well” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1250,"featured_media":18777,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,20],"tags":[1435],"class_list":["post-18750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asides","category-viral","tag-what-memes-mean"],"yoast_head":"\n
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