For the past 10 years, I've measured my adult life in relation to a TV show I've never watched.

I’d always thought I was above being influenced by the media, or if I was, I was well aware of the fact. 

I only started to have an inkling when I was listening to a favourite podcast of mine, Sentimental Garbage. The hosts were talking about Sex in the City, and how the characters seemed to meet interesting people in art gallery exhibitions all the time. 

I reacted. OMG. That was how I always thought my meet-cutes would be like too! The two of us would be talking with a painting between us framed in the background.

Considering I’d never watched the show, what a coincidence! Or maybe not. 

I’ve never left Hong Kong my entire life. I’ve studied here and now am working here. I work in healthcare, which involves more body fluids than cocktails, fluorescent windowless rooms than skyscraper views, and more burned out evenings lying on the floor instead of hitting the streets, arms linked with the gals. If I keep at it, I will be doing the same job with the exact same duties for the rest of my life. 

A few years ago, someone who’d left the country and came back to visit asked me if I was happy with the choice I’ve made, this life path that I’m on. I don’t remember how I replied then, at that moment, but I remembered going home and thinking about the question.

I don’t think so, the honest reply to myself was. I had always imagined myself in Manhattan, or London, perhaps, going to art galleries and jazz bars and having long intense conversations with strangers in a nook of an apartment at someone’s crowded house party.

By my peers’ standards, I appear to have succeeded. Stable job, stable income, doing good for society, and so on. But because I had deviated away from that cocktail-swishing vision of myself in my head, I always felt a niggling sense of failure.  

People talk about how movies depicting scenes of sex or violence could harm or desensitise the minds of children. But how about more far-reaching, long term, insidious consequences of movies and TV shows seeping into the minds of pre-teens and teenagers— of what love should be like, what young adult life should be like? Here’s what Chuck Klosterman has to say on that in regards to love:

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence… these things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy… real people are actively trying to live like fake people… the best relationship I ever had was with [someone] who was as crazy as me, and some of our coworkers liked to compare us to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen… we even watched Sid & Nancy in her parents’ basement and giggled the whole time. “That’s us,” we said gleefully. And like I said—this was the best relationship I ever had. And I suspect it was the best one she ever had, too. (Source)

Huh, interesting.

It was only a few months ago, after listening to Sentimental Garbage’s Sentimental in the City, that I decided to check out the TV show that had been haunting my dreams (literally) all this time.

Although dated and the dialogue unfresh and cringey at some portions, I realised, holy shit, now I finally know. All those scenes in my head of “living the ideal life”– being a journalist or a writer, art galleries, jazz bars, the Manhattan skyline– this was where it all came from. 

Its influence, along with sitcoms like Friends or How I Met Your Mother about twenty-somethings living in Manhattan, is undeniable; even the editors of New York Times’ Modern Love column explicitly tells their potential contributors to avoid the specific phrase “I felt like Carrie in Sex and the City”.

How did a TV show I’ve never watched seep into my consciousness and take root in the sulci of my brain? The only memory I have of SATC was as a pre-teen, that it was the show my mother told me to run off to bed for whenever she saw it on TV.

Perhaps it’s the influence of similar shows I did watch about young adult life in Manhattan. Or perhaps, for media transference to happen, we don’t even need to have watched it. Here’s Chuck Klosterman again on media transference and love:

Woody Allen made it acceptable for beautiful women to sleep with nerdy, be spectacled goofballs… the irony is that many of the women most susceptible to this scam haven’t even seen any of Woody’s movies, nor would they want to touch the actual Woody Allen… but this is how media devolution works: It creates an archetype that eventually dwarfs its origin. By now, [the archetype] has far greater cultural importance than the man himself.

So has the Carrie Bradshaw experience, apparently. 

There’s not a lot of literature on the influence of indirect media transference or media devolution, but it probably goes something like this in terms of SATC– people watch it, it gets referenced in other shows or other types of pop culture, its message and lifestyle is adopted (consciously or subconsciously) by impressionable viewers all over the world and they share it with their peers around them or online, and it rubs off on those who have never watched it, including myself.  

And what came of the realisation was a huge sense of relief— that what I thought were my very personal, unique dreams actually came from the influence of a character on a TV show that aired 20 years ago. That what I thought was living the “ideal life” was actually how I would look and act in spliced scenes from a combination of episodes. That not living these scenes out was not a deep, personal betrayal or a moral failing to follow my true self, but, simply, not imitating Carrie. 

I’m pretty sure there are other TV tropes and story arcs nestled inside my ideals and expectations for all sorts of things, from friendships to romance to career (we haven’t even started on Korean dramas or Gilmore Girls yet). With all that being said, I’m not criticising movies or TV shows for being a bad influence or for brainwashing us though. Hell I still love them. We just have to start being aware and question ourselves whenever images or scenes pop up in our heads– where did this come from? Is it something that I feel morally that should be so, something someone has told me about, or something that… I watched? 

This awareness made me appreciate my version of adulthood more. I’m learning how to appreciate forging my own story arc, instead wishing I’d lived out a fabled, scripted version instead. I’ve come to appreciate my friends and family around me more for who they are instead of wishing we were more like characters from a TV show or movie. Career-wise, I’ve come to join Write of Passage, which is the first time I’m investing my time and money formally into writing, my true passion. 

Undocumented, alternate versions of adulthood can be just as good as the ones on the silver screen. You just need to make sure you are living your own version of it, in all its unscripted glory.   

Thank you for reading!

A big thank you to friends at WoP’s writing group 6 for providing feedback on this essay.

---

Welcome to Slow Burn Living, where I hope to spark joy✨ in your inbox every two weeks with personal insights about culture, identity, spirituality through my own lens of trying to live life mindfully through its ups and downs. As Bernadine Evaristo writes, no matter where we are in life, “aging is nothing to be ashamed of / especially when the entire human race is in it together.”