Humanity has spent centuries developing perfectly reflective mirrors.
The idea of transposing your own image to an external object was almost dreamlike. It was something magical.
Some colonizers used rudimentary mirrors to enchant indigenous peoples in the Americas when they arrived. Some colonizers pleased the locals with the gadget, while others were eaten alive as the indigenous people thought they were demons from another world.
Fast forward to the present day, mirrors are relics found in your grandmother’s attic. Of course, there are decorative mirrors all over the place, but what I’m referring to is the bedroom mirror, the mirror that reflects our own intimacy, our first look as we get out of bed.
Humanity lost interest in this kind of mirror. It is simply too perfect and honest of a gadget. It shows our face and body as they are. That’s a problem.
We see ourselves now through the micro-lenses of our cellphones, through the precision of image-enhancing algorithms, through AI. An intelligence that knows well how we want to look. It knows the type of eyes we want to have, the type of skin color we want to have, mouth shape, nose shape, ears… the list goes on.
A lot of people are getting used to this better-looking version of themselves. Maybe in a few years’ time, they will have forgotten how they looked when they were 20 or 30 years old. All they will have is a set of memories of somebody else who used to look a little like them, but not exactly.
We would then realize we have lost the opportunity to take mental pictures of ourselves and keep them as a reference for our youth.
The reflection of reality represented by mirrors has been replaced by phones and algorithms. What we’ll have, at most, is a collection of content that inspired our dreams of perfection, but which never came true.
People will look at their photos from decades ago and won’t feel a thing because you cannot miss the person you never were.