Is Everyone on Facebook Having Fun Except Me?
Have
you seen yesterday’s article dubbed “We Need to Quit Telling Lies on Facebook”
by Sarah Emily Tuttle-Singer (a guest contributor on Kveller.com)? Sarah’s
article is hilarious and saturated with truth. She coaxes herself, and other parents,
to paint a more realistic portrait of their life on social media:
“My life on Facebook is an
airbrushed and instagrammed image of my real life,” Sarah claims. “I
edit the suckage because I want people to think I have my act together. I give
everything a hipstacular filter to make the drudgery look interesting. Most of
the time, I think I’m a decent mom, and I think I’m giving my children a pretty
good life. But I also think I’d be a better mom if I stopped pretending, and
making friends on Facebook feel like they have to pretend as well.”
Since
this blog is geared towards (mostly) 20-something singles, here’s a post that
carries the same theme and relates it to our age-group. It may come across as
a bit of a downer—but it ends with a single line that brings our Internet-absorbed,
Twitter-lovin’, Facebook-fueled selves back to earth; a place where we must
take off our synthetic masks in order to breathe.
This is from Thought Catalag at www.ThoughtCatalog.com
Author: Brad Pike
Each time you check your Facebook
newsfeed, you are confronted with a terrible truth: everyone is having more fun than you. Everyone. Their joie de vivre vastly exceeds
your own, renders it mort de vivre by comparison. They are all self-actualized.
They are achieving amazing things. They are living the lives they always
dreamed of living because they deserve it. They are in a perpetual state of
intense, mind shattering bliss that never ends, but only grows. Meanwhile, you
sleep on an air mattress, use Starbucks for internet, and your dinner was
dinosaur egg oatmeal and 2 day old coffee (no icebergs of mold, so it’s
probably safe). Yes, you’ve always suspected your life was a half-life, a
shadow of what constitutes the typical human experience, and Facebook has
confirmed your worst fears. Compared to your friends, you are a sad pale
Gollum, peering out of the darkness at the bright shining multitudes, doomed to
eternal loneliness and mediocrity.
What did you do today? Read a snarky
Gawker article about Taylor Swift? Walked to the kitchen, remembered you didn’t
need anything in the kitchen, and then walked back from the kitchen? Ate the
aforementioned dinosaur egg oatmeal? Everyone on Facebook just published their
novels, each one a 900 page magnum opus, and they’re all bestsellers, all
complex statements about the American Dream, the ontological state of being,
and the struggle against societal tyranny. Where’s your book, huh? You should
write about walking to the kitchen and then walking back from the kitchen and
then playing Temple Run on the iPad in the dark because everyone is desperate
to read about the Sad Banal Life of Mid Twenties White Male.
Where did you go today? Besides the
kitchen. All your Facebook friends visited Paris, Kenya, and Tokyo, and they’ve
posted 14,000 gorgeous photos of their life-changing experiences. They’re all
worldly cosmopolitan people now, more cognizant of other cultures and able to
speak fluent Cantonese. One of their photos shows them feeding an elephant. An
elephant!Today, you fed a dust mite in your sleeping bag your discarded
fingernails, and even if you did own an electron microscope capable of
photographing it, no one on Facebook would want to see. Subsistence farmers
travel more than you; even death row inmates go outside from time to time. Your
fantastic voyage consisted of a walk to the kitchen to see the wonders of the
broken dishwasher.
How far along are you in your career?
Do you even have a job? Everyone on Facebook is a social media director for a
prestigious ad agency, racking up six figure salaries, and steadily assembling
the components of a stable comfortable life so that as their bodies
deteriorate, a trained medical professional will care for their soon-to-be
corpses rather than quietly euthanize them. They’re posting statuses about
work, posting photos of the new cars they all purchased. They put as much
thought into buying a house as you put into whether or not to buy a peppermint
long john from 7/11 (‘It’s $1.19, but the iced cheese Danish is $1.29, and the
cupcake is $1.65, so how do the good feelings elicited by each pastry correlate
with price?’). Their lives are so far ahead, they’re popping out dozens of
infants, hundreds of infants, thousands of infants because, unlike you, they
have the financial and emotional maturity to care for another living organism.
If you reproduced, you would immediately transform into one of the sad
desperate children on 16 and Pregnant even though you’re 24.
‘But is my life really that terrible,’ you
wonder, ‘Or is Facebook some kind of
platform for people’s idealized, carefully curated versions of themselves in
which they’re talented, successful, hilarious,sophisticated professionals?’
--Article from Thought Catalog by author Brad Pike
My personal answer to that is “yes, yes, and yes.” Facebook is the 21st century version of the wicked stepmother’s Magic Mirror. It hurled itself into a secretive time machine and shed its purely glass-skin in favor of pixels. In essence, however, it’s the same contraption: A way to deceive ourselves and others.
What are YOUR thoughts on this?
Have been trying to tell this to people for ages! Great post!
ReplyDeleteI agree that FB can make you a little envious...but only if you're not smart enough to realize that everyone has real lives!! I don't see all of this fake fabulousness in my news feed. I see plenty of regular stuff and lots of business promoting. Take it with a grain of salt and be grateful for your life and all will be fine in the world of social media!
ReplyDeletexo
Sharon
PS Your blog is really so fabulous, I love checking it all out :)
Thanks so much Chaya. And yes, Sharon, you're absolutely right. Before I used to allow social media hoopla to adversely affect me, but I suppose experience and maturity makes one realize that Facebook IS a more or less a facade. It did take me a while to realize. Not going to lie. Thanks for visiting! I hope you'll come back. I love your blog as well! i'm always excited to see your fashion posts (like the Oscar de la Renta photos you posted today).
ReplyDeleteThis post is one of the many reasons that I don't use Facebook. Aside from the hours wasting perusing other peoples' lives, by doing so I'm also looking into a highly filtered, beatific picture of these people's lives, as the article states. I can't help but feel that I've accomplished nothing when reading about their lives and seeing their pictures.
ReplyDelete