Friday links! National Donut Day edition

The picture above is of my friend Nick, captured in honor of today being National Donut Day. I love motherfucking donuts,* as anyone will tell you, but Donut Day is not what interests me about this photo. What interests me is Instagram, the website on which it was posted, and their ad copy: “Robert is using Instagram—a fun & quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures. Snap a photo, then choose a filter to transform the look and feel of the shot into a memory to keep around forever.” Let us put aside “quirky,” in the same way that Caeser put aside Cicero, and consider how choosing a filter will “transform the look and the feel of the shot into a memory.” It’s true that memories are low-contrast and color saturated, just like Polaroids. Long after Nick and donuts are forgotten, this photograph of a man in military dress eating a croissant will implant a flickering, false memory in all who view it. You can see him taking the next step across the office—is it that much more difficult to see it happening from the same perspective in the room?

Don’t do that, of course. We have a name for people who can do that kind of thing successfully, and the rest of are haunted by that nagging reminder of incongruent facts, a conscience. You can tell yourself—or, better yet, tell others—that you were in Nick’s office on National Donut Day until you sort of remember it. But your conscience will simultaneously make you feel guilty about that “memory”—so guilty as to provide an incentive to believe it, so that the question of whether it really happened wears a hole in your brain like what happened to your childhood cassette of “Things That Make You Go Hmm.” Stuff like that is how you become a crazy person.

Yet the appeal of such memories is overwhelming. This morning, I felt guilty about not eating donuts. To have scrambled eggs on National Donut Day seemed a disappointing failure of continuity, another flaw in the aesthetic organization of real life. These are the mundane errors of craft in the narrative of our lived experience that we correct in our imaginations, another medium that is notoriously low-contrast and color saturated. This similarity might explain the fungibility of memories and lies—or, if you prefer, images. It is easy to put a Polaroid from the imagination pile into the memory pile.

When you do it, though, you inch closer to that terrifying bugbear of modern secular morals, the Inaccurate Perception of Reality. The fine-grain questions of right and wrong can be parsed either way, but seriously kids: don’t develop an Inaccurate Perception of Reality. This despite overwhelming evidence that many people are freed by their Inaccurate Perceptions of Reality to pursue achievements from which they might otherwise restrain themselves. It is better to feel good than to feel bad. If I feel vaguely bad about not eating donuts this morning, wouldn’t it be better to choose right now to convince myself that I did?

If you are like me, you get a cold-water feeling in your stomach when you consider that argument. It is possible that, like the constable in Hot Fuzz, the value of truth is the only suspect left unquestioned in the search for unwarranted assumptions. Yet the sensation of dishonesty is terrible. A lie, a false memory, infects everything around it. It undermines all that might otherwise be good, because in believing it you are forced to admit that what you imagine can be what you remember. Therefore, what you remember can be something you imagined. Once you believe a lie, your credibility is shot in all other pleasing memories.

So the confected memory may be sweet, but it has a hole in the middle. The truth is invariably more nuanced than anything we can imagine, even when reviewed in the low-resolution medium of memory—which possibly accounts for our irrational attachment to reality. You can look at what really happened later and see something you hadn’t considered, like with a photograph. An imagined memory offers only what you put into it, like a painting. Perhaps that is the singular appeal of Instagram, Hipstamatic, and the Polaroid filter effect generally: it makes an image feel old, assuring us that one day we will appreciate our lives today as memory. This will be a true thing that happened, says Instagram quirkily. You will feel good about remembering it.

Combat! blog is free. Why not share it?
Tweet about this on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on Reddit

21 Comments

  1. I’m so happy that a photo taken (of me) in a funny moment could inspire such an eloquent post, woven with current events that we will probably forget when we are old.

  2. To resolve the mystery of knighthood vs franchising:

    Lou’s last name is King, literalizing the “King” in Donut King (sort of like
    Beef Stroganoff. The “a la” is silent).

    However, I’ve always considered him a prince of a fellow.

  3. I’m pretty sure you just took an existing piece of writing and hyperlinked sentences chosen at random.

  4. That’s a good guess, but in fact the tenuous relation between subject and articles was completely spontaneous. You can’t fake that sort of inadequacy.

  5. My favorite Donut moment of all time was when the “DO” was out on the sign at Donutland on the Coralville strip.

  6. I loved as much as you’ll receive carried out right here. The sketch is attractive,
    your authored subject matter stylish. nonetheless,
    you command get bought an edginess over that you wish be delivering the
    following. unwell unquestionably come more formerly again as exactly the same nearly a lot often inside case you shield this increase.

  7. Whats up very nice website!! Man .. Excellent ..
    Wonderful .. I will bookmark your website and take the feeds additionally?
    I am happy to search out so many useful information here within the
    post, we need develop more strategies on this regard,
    thank you for sharing. . . . . .

  8. Hi there! This blog post couldn’t be written any better!
    Looking through this post reminds me of my previous
    roommate! He constantly kept talking about this. I will send
    this post to him. Fairly certain he’ll have a great read.
    I appreciate you for sharing!

Leave a Comment.