Contributors

Tuesday, February 26, 2013



Is Everyone on Facebook Having Fun Except Me?
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        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.”
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        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.
 
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        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.
 
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        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
 
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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?
 
 

4 comments:

  1. Have been trying to tell this to people for ages! Great post!

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  2. I 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!
    xo
    Sharon
    PS Your blog is really so fabulous, I love checking it all out :)

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  3. 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).

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  4. This 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.

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