We’re not proud of our messy lives. Given a choice, most of us would rather skip the mesy details and just share the good stuff.
Take the picture in this post, for example. It’s my new guide dog Willa peacefully relaxing in front of the fire. What you don’t see in the picture is the messy wires laying in a heap to the right of the fireplace. I cropped that out before I shared the picture on Facebook. I certainly didn’t post a picture of her sniffing while she’s working or being hopelessly distracted by another dog while she’s guiding me. those little details I chose to not include. My life looks better when I don’t share the bad stuff. And many people choose to do the same thing.
Social media gives the perfect opportunity to choose what we want to disclose and what we want to “crop” out of the picture of our lives. On social media, people tend to share:
- funny stories
- wonderful get-togethers
- special occasions
- victories and triumphs
It’s great for people to share these things. many anecdotes encourage and inspire, raise our spirits or just make us laugh.
I’m talking about personal sharing, not political agendas or other uses of social media. Contrarily, there are those people who always share what’s going wrong in their lives, the Eeyores of social media. As a whole, though, I think you’ll find that people prefer to share the good stuff that’s going on when they share on a personal level.
There are a couple things to be aware of if you’re watching everyone’s positive life stuff flow by in your social media news feed
1. Be careful not to compare your life to other people’s posted lives.
They’ve probably cropped the not-so-pretty things out of their lives so you aren’t getting a realistic picture of what their lives are really like. It would be very discouraging to think that other people’s lives are something approaching perfect when you know your own life has so many imperfections.
2. Be sure you have people in your life who know the real you, mess and all.
I don’t think that social media is necessarily an appropriate place to share our struggles, either. My heart breaks when I see someone post a personal struggle for the masses to comment on. Sometimes, it’s just better to get together with a good friend to get some real support. Social media cannot replace honest-to-goodness real-life relationships.
We all have messy lives. That’s just reality. The point here is, first, to acknowledge this fact. Next, we need to have good quality relationships where we can be real and vulnerable. I hope you have that kind of support. Finally, we need to be the kind of person other people can share their messy lives with. People crave and genuinely need that kind of love and acceptance.
Who can you love and support even in the middle of their mess?
