The Age Of “Me”: Pictures In The Home.

I remember as a child your typical Italian home. There were in those times pictures of loved ones in entrances and bedrooms, and they were of small, normal dimensions. It is not only that it would have been very expensive to have bigger ones, rather that it would have been considered wrong and excessively self-centred to put oneself so much on the spot.

Things are changing rapidly now. The availability of new technologies and the disappearance of religious feeling and practice leads to people literally staging their own overweight self, for their visitors to admire what wonderful snowflakes they are. I have seen places with life size pictures of the owner and their daughter (yes, I am thinking what you are thinking), and the same faces were on mugs in the kitchen and on cushions in the living room. Digital Photo technology is the nirvana of the “Me”-society.

Not one book in sight, of course. Nowadays, people educate themselves on Instagram.

What is initially surprising is that the owners of such places would think that their narcissism would be exposed by their very own home decoration. This is obviously not the case. My take is that this kind of thinking, (the old putting a human being in its place in the context of things), is foreign to the Atheist Society. For the “Me”- generation, every individual is a luminous pagan god, and it is only normal that others would worship him when their enter the temple where he resides.

The difference with what I was accustomed to see some, say, 50 years ago is staggering. It is not a “regional culture” phenomenon. I would say it is an epochal movement, a tectonic shift away from Christianity and into a society deprived of religious sentiment and going down slowly – or rapidly, depending on your historical perspective – as it celebrates the cult of itself.

Life-size portraits dominate the room. Not a book or crucifix in sight.

This will be more and more the standard of European homes in this rapidly decaying XXI Century.

M