There’s a lot of reasons social media irks me. And yet…digital connection I adore.
It’s not nearly as good as real connection. But it’s pretty fascinating to connect with people who live completely different lives in completely different worlds that you would never otherwise meet.
There are of course some good things.
I mean, I met my husband on a digital dating site back in the day. All the miracles and wonder that have come as a result of that encounter can lead back to a simple swipe. A chance digital connection. You’ve Got Mail.
The wildest part is we lived one block from each other. In Los Angeles, a massive city. We went to the same bars. We walked the same streets. We even shared an alley.
And yet it took an app for us to meet.
So I’m not going to totally bash all the potential these things have to offer.
What inspired the issue.
But as I recently scrolled my feed, checking out what former acquaintances were doing with their life, I got the worst pit in my stomach. I scanned pictures and read captions of a friend of mine — who I genuinely adore in real life — doing things that brought her happiness and found myself absolutely infuriated.
I reflected on the big emotions it was causing (offline). I liked the person. I liked the actions. And yet I deeply disliked the sharing. But, the whole site is for sharing. And I felt connected to her as a result of the sharing.
So what, then, was it?
And that’s when it hit me: It’s the inauthenticity the platform itself creates that bothers me.
These social media platforms ask us to be authentic. They ask us to share about our lives. The people who follow along likely genuinely want to know elements of what’s going on.
Yet when we turn our phone on and record our lives in the moment, we are out of the moment.
Here’s the thing…
When you film yourself looking thoughtfully out of a window, you are not actually having a moment of relaxation and reflection. You are putting on a show that you are looking out of a window thoughtfully. You are acting. Not living. And that distinction is everything.
As a creative (one of my hyphenates includes “actor”), I get creating. I love creating. I actually need creating as much as I need to breathe. So I’m not going to bash the act of creation.
And some of the funniest people I’ve seen have hit it off as a result of social media creation. There’s a space for it. Like everything in life, this isn’t a clear line. It’s a gray area.
But once you start overlapping creating with living too often, the lines start to blur. You only live to create. And create, specifically, for social media. A platform that wants to show you how to supposedly live. But everyone on it is only sharing things they curated to show how they’re living. Yet you can’t really be living if you’re recording every moment. You can pretend. But you can’t actually be.
It can be a both and, not an either or.
Both can exist. But we have to at least acknowledge that they exist. That acknowledgement can create a space. It allows us to recognize which one we’re doing. Without it, they blend. And the louder, more addictive one that gives us immediate feedback (aka social media) will win out.
So our actual lives, lose.
We can have both. But we need space.
Acknowledgement can create that space.
So I acknowledge it. And that. And you.
