It is difficult to be shy in the digital age, but impossible to be honest. So often our self-portraits are of the selves we would like to become: they are aspirational, always attempting to make us into someone other than who we are. As Ashbery writes: “Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted, / Desolate, reluctant.”

All those millions of selfies filling our albums and feeds are rarely of the selves who lounge in sweatpants or eat peanut butter from the jar, the selves waiting in line at the unemployment office, the selves who are battered and abused or lonely and depressed. Even though the proliferation of self-portraits suggests otherwise, we are still self-conscious.

In Praise of Selfies: From Self-Conscious to Self-Constructive