The winner of the New York Times‘ Third Annual Student Editorial Contest has been honored with the publication of her essay, “The Resurrection of Gilgamesh.” The author, Annie Cohen, thinks of Gilgamesh when she finds herself drowned in a sea of teenagers absorbed into flashing gadgets. Like Gilgamesh, they are too absorbed into themselves:suffering from a lack of self-esteem, people have taken recourse in various social media platforms to have others remind them of how good it is to be them. This she calls the “Gilgamesh Complex”:
Todd Heisler, a New York Times photographer, took these personal snapshots and embellished them using Instagram filters. Related ArticleCredit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
My generation has a Gilgamesh Complex, and it is enabled. Gilgamesh, for those unfamiliar, went on a quest for immortality, and when he discovered the impossibility of this act, vowed to make his name live on forever, the closest thing to immortality we humans have. Gilgamesh succeeded, as every high schooler who has read his epic knows. The problem is that fame, however short-lived, is in the grasp of every young human who has access to the Internet, American Dream Style. Everybody must have his or her name known, everybody must know who is doing what, to feed our Gilgamesh Complex.
The ‘selfie’, then, might suggest more than the taking of a digital self-portrait, but an also an attempt to make our digitally transmuted world more fuller of one’s self. But like Gilgamesh, Cohen remarks, we are only fooling ourselves to believe this will last longer than six days and seven nights.
Read her full essay at The New York Times.
