My mother used to say that time heals all wounds. As if time were a nurse in a starched white uniform, with lily-white hands, going around serving hot dinners, rather than a grim reaper lurking behind every corner. Just waiting for you to commit that fateful mistake that will cost you your life.
Or somebody else’s life – your child’s, for instance.
I taste the wine and smile at Afsaneh and Martin, her colleague at the university.
They laugh at something that Martin is saying – something I don’t catch, but smile at anyway, because I have neither the energy nor inclination to share my dark ruminations. Besides, I cannot stop thinking of what Hanne said about the lamb, the dove and the lion.
The lion who is Olle Berg.
We have to find him and we have to do it fast. Because although the poem likely won’t hold up as evidence in court, we can tie him to at least one of the victims via DNA. Besides, he has a documented history of violence, so the likelihood that his DNA ended up there by chance should be negligible.
Anyway, I don’t believe in chance.
I let my gaze wander across to Martin.
He is the same age as Afsaneh and has a pale, long, thin face with a disproportionately large nose. His hair is light brown and curly and appears to defy gravity. The impression is enhanced by the cut, which makes him look like a poodle.
Martin looks at me and nods, as if he is waiting for me to comment on something he just said.
I hurriedly guide the conversation to a different subject so that he won’t notice how distracted I am.
‘Afsaneh says your thesis is going well,’ I say.
Martin smiles and glances quickly at Afsaneh.
‘Well,’ as I was saying, ‘I will be getting my PhD in October, unless something goes terribly wrong. Of course you have to assume it will. And my old professor at the psychology department has gone and slipped a disc, so we shall see.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘My thoughts were somewhere else entirely.’
Martin raises his hand. ‘No worries. God knows you have other things to worry about than my dusty old thesis.’
There is a pause and I look down at the kitchen table. Study the dents in the wood that Nadja made last spring. I remember how angry I was with her and promise myself that will never happen again.
As long as she gets well. As long as everything goes back to normal.
Afsaneh clears her throat. ‘I would hardly call it dusty,’ she says. ‘It paints a pretty good picture of our time.’
‘What are you writing about?’ I ask.
Martin runs his hand through his curls and cocks his head a bit so that his hair almost touches his plate and his large nose gleams in the glow of the ceiling light.
‘Narcissism, or to be more specific, why the prevalence of narcissistic personality traits is increasing so dramatically.’
‘Is it?’ I ask. ‘Increasing, I mean.’
Martin leans forward and places his elbows on the table.
‘It is actually. Two American researchers, Twenge and Campbell, have shown that the prevalence of narcissistic personality traits has increased as much as obesity since the 1980s. And that is especially true of women.’
Martin winks at Afsaneh and pours more wine into their glasses, before continuing: ‘And several other studies confirm this,’ he says.
‘Could you call it an epidemic?’ Afsaneh asks, emptying her glass in one gulp.
‘We are doing exactly that,’ Martin says quickly. ‘Because it is an epidemic.’
‘But why?’ I ask. ‘Why should we have become more narcissistic?’
Martin smiles a crooked smile.
‘Society has changed. Social structures have dissolved, the smallest unit is no longer the family, but the individual. Add to that the emergence of social media. More than a billion people use Facebook each month. A billion, you hear me? And other social platforms are growing exponentially. And there’s a strong link between social media and narcissistic behaviour. It is actually clinically proven. And really it’s not that strange, because everything is about presenting a façade that gets you the maximum amount of followers, likes, comments, or whatever it is you’re looking for.’
‘We’re looking at this in the Project too,’ Afsaneh says, suppressing a yawn.
‘But haven’t people always been dependent on social approval?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ Martin says, lowering his voice. ‘But technology has taken hostage our natural quest for social approval and acceptance. There are people now who don’t go out. All they do is photograph themselves or film themselves in different situations in different clothes and post the pictures to social media. And all their friends are online. It’s sort of like they have become one with technology.’
Afsaneh leans forward, pouring more wine into her glass. Her movement is clumsy and the bottle hits the table hard when she puts it down dangerously close to the edge.
‘It’s a bit like Chinese weddings,’ she says, giggling.
‘Chinese weddings?’ I ask, moving the bottle to the middle of the table.
‘Well, I heard from a Chinese guest researcher at SU that it is common not to have a wedding celebration when you get married. Instead you go to the photographer and take lots of photos with props. You get champagne glasses to hold in your hands, you cut a fake wedding cake. You kiss in front of a set and so on. All so that you can show off the album to your family and friends afterwards. And in Japan you can apparently rent wedding guests, so that it looks better in the photos.’
‘Exactly,’ Martin says. ‘It’s the same mechanism. It’s like it is more important to be able to show off the pictures than to actually have experienced your wedding with friends and family. That’s precisely what I’m looking at. But you don’t put pictures in an album, you post them on some kind of social media platform. Online, the opportunity for validation is endless. I was at Auschwitz last winter. Do you have any idea how many people are there taking selfies? As if it’s more important to show off having been there than digesting what actually happened.’
Afsaneh grimaces.
‘Are you serious? I’d have thrown up if I had seen someone gurning in front of the gas chambers.’
‘And yet that’s exactly what they were doing.’
Martin leans back in his chair, looking resigned.
He goes on: ‘We’ve only seen the beginning. The internet has changed the social contract. The one that regulates how often it is acceptable to say “look at me!”. And real life doesn’t offer nearly as many or as frequent opportunities for positive validation as the internet does. So why focus on real life?’
‘So Facebook has won?’ I say, mostly joking.
But Martin doesn’t smile.
‘Did you know that Facebook virtually exploded when they invented the like button? A woman named Leah Pearlman came up with that, if I don’t misremember. In any case that was almost ten years ago. And that little icon, the thumbs-up, would change the entire internet. It has changed human behaviour, it has helped companies succeed or caused them to perish. It has made and broken presidents.’
‘Aren’t you exaggerating just a little?’ I ask.
Martin shakes his head vehemently.
‘Social media will fundamentally change society. It will fundamentally change us. And not necessarily for the better. Beyond our addiction to likes, there is the risk that we’re rendered passive. How does the world change when we access everything second-hand rather than take part ourselves? It is a bit like reading about the colour blue, but never seeing it. Internet separates us from real reality. We live our lives through a camera lens, where there is always a layer between the individual and reality. A film. So I think there is a risk that the new technology makes us dumber. That it brainwashes us and puts us into some kind of . . .’
‘Inertia?’ I ask.
Martin nods enthusiastically.
‘Come on,’ Afsaneh says. ‘I don’t think we need to worry. Not in the longer term, anyway. Of course we will continue to interact. Interacting with only technology is not sustainable in the long term. We wouldn’t even be able to reproduce.’
‘Now you are talking like a biologist,’ Martin says, making it sound like a severe insult. ‘Besides there are other problems. For instance, it is impossible to know what’s true on the internet.’
‘Do people even care what’s true anymore?’ I ask.
‘Interesting question!’ Martin exclaims and I immediately regret posing it, because I can feel my eyelids growing heavy. ‘I think we are on our way towards a society in which our model of explanation is primarily phenomenological.’
‘Phenomenowhat?’
‘Sorry,’ Martin says running his hand through his curls. ‘When I talk about a model of explanation I mean how we explain our reality. For instance, there are religious models of explanation. Imagine that you don’t feel good and you wonder why. Based on a religious model of explanation you might draw the conclusion that you have distanced yourself from God. So the cure is to . . . well, pray for example. And then there are scientific models of explanation. You may draw the conclusion that you aren’t feeling well because you are deficient in iron. The cure is a pill. A phenomenological model of explanation is based on the individual’s own experience, like, I feel bad because I have experienced this trauma, or because I am the way I am. I have the right to my own experience, my own trauma. What I feel is true and cannot be questioned. That is exactly how it is online today. Besides, there is so much information online but only that which supports your own point of view and goes viral penetrates the noise.’
I get up and begin to clear the table hoping that Martin will get the hint.
‘What makes something go viral?’ Afsaneh asks.
‘Extreme things go viral,’ Martin whispers, as if he were revealing a big secret. ‘The quotidian lifestyle is dead! You need to be more of a Dostoevsky than a Tolstoy online, if you follow me.’
There is a brief pause and I look Afsaneh in the eyes.
‘Um . . .’ I begin.
‘Tolstoy wrote about the quotidian,’ Martin continues without waiting for my answer. ‘People don’t give a shit about the everyday on social media, unless you are super famous. They don’t care about your geraniums, your puppy, or the salad you just made. They don’t give a flying fuck about your new couch or how many miles you jogged this weekend. If you want to make it big on social media you have to be extreme. Dostoevsky wrote about lunatics. That works very well online. Feel free to quote me on that.’
Martin makes a theatrical gesture of thanks with his hands, as if he is bowing in front of a large audience.
A mobile rings and Afsaneh gets up. Goes over to the countertop, picks up the phone and looks at it. Then she hands it over to me.
‘For you,’ she says.
I reluctantly take the phone.
It’s Letit.
‘We have him,’ he says. ‘We’ve found Olle Berg. You need to come in.’