Why We All Want to be Sigmas

We often discuss cultural moments in terms of their stars and idols. To many, the ‘90s was the age of the supermodel, dominated by Kate Moss and Cindy Crawford, while the ‘60s is cemented in our cultural consciousness by the mania that the Beatles garnered. Far more telling than who was celebrated, however, is how they were celebrated. The traits that these celebrities were so praised for possessing and the comparisons drawn between them, historical figures, and the popular imagination reveal the cultural desires that their eras sought to satisfy through celebrity culture.

The vocabulary of this praise follows shifting cultural attitudes and ideas, changing along with the standards that individuals are compared to. The emergence of terms like “aura,” “nonchalant,” and “sigma” represent these changing standards. These terms all refer to a certain irreverence and confidence, especially in the case of possible social pushback. Someone who has “aura” will continue doing what they want, exactly when they want to, especially when others would stop because of fear of judgment. Someone who’s “nonchalant” or a “sigma” is similarly devoid of social anxiety, able to navigate the world without the crippling fear of criticism that blankets so many lives. Our recent cultural preoccupation with the ability to brush off that fear and ignore social norms is a response to the propagation and intensification of those standards by social media algorithms. The societal realization that our attempts to meet those norms are futile has placed a new value on being brave enough to disregard them.

Social criticism, in a milder form, has always been part of the human experience, promoting cooperation and social cohesion. As social media services—initially designed to enhance that social cohesion—transitioned to algorithm-based recommendation systems, they exposed users to a hugely increased pool of potential critics. Suddenly, judgment came not only from one’s community but from the entirety of a social network’s user base. Throughout these changes, social media has maintained the illusion of presenting users’ authentic lives. A grid of stories and posts is presented as an equivalent to the user’s whole self. The algorithmic quality of social media means that only the most attractive and meticulously perfected aspects of these lives are presented to a majority of users.

Thousands and thousands of young people saw this tapestry of perfection and tried to fit themselves into it, only to realize that they lacked the perfectly toned bodies and angular faces of their favorite creators. This sparked a movement amongst teenagers, particularly young, insecure men, to dedicate their off-screen lives to perfecting their on-screen ones. They developed increasingly complex routines, often based on research they discovered across the internet—most of which were dubious at best and dangerous at worst. Across the message boards that hosted this toxic community, there was an understanding that many members lacked the genetic traits that would make them attractive—regardless of how hard they worked at self-improvement. Even those who saw improvements only did so through an intense daily ritual of potentially dangerous facial exercises that molded their faces to the ideals put forth by social media algorithms.

Many social media trends don’t even attempt the impossible task of meeting social media’s standards of attractiveness, instead giving users an avenue to share their perfect life through the inanimate. In one, users record short, extremely zoomed-in clips of each of their facial features, which, without a cohesive whole to conform to, appear completely beautiful. Videos made according to this trend reduce their creator’s faces to a collection of disparate items, individually aesthetically pleasing but utterly inhuman. Other creators represent themselves through their material possessions, posting their outfits not on their bodies but lying in piles on the floor. This takes the unavoidably flawed human component out of the equation, allowing their lifeless outfits to sum up their personality and character. Even the most intimate details of domestic life are subject to social media’s exacting standards. In one recent social media trend, users were asked to share photos of their fridges. This simple prompt created a frenzy amongst users who competed to make even the most intimate part of their kitchen perfectly suitable to the eyes of strangers across the internet. Many of these domestic tableaus even manufactured a slight messiness to make them believably real but impossible to sustain in everyday life, extending their viewers’ social media-induced feelings of insufficiency to the cleanliness of their own homes.

As these trends and crazes have become less relevant, a new cultural awareness of their absurdity and the impossibility of living up to social media’s expectations has arisen. After watching so many fall into a cycle of endless self-improvement or self-reduction in order to meet social media’s expectations, the most admirable trait is now the ability to resist that power. Many struggle to embody that resistance, and those who do succeed are praised with admittedly ridiculous and clunky language—but the changing values that language emphasizes represent a distinct shift away from the conformity spread by algorithmic social networks.