There is a weird dichotomy going on in the social media realm, and since I don't think we'll be getting away from it anytime soon, I wanted to try and tease it out a little bit.
We all know that Instagram and Facebook aren't real, and that, for the most part, posts are just very well curated and filtered to give the impression of something greater than what it is.
There are beautiful and simple-seeming home reno projects, there are family photos in coordinating outfits, there are perfectly baked loaves of bread, and on and on. All of these types of pictures, although they mean no malice on their own, send us into a spiral of comparing our current surroundings to what we see on our device.
This is not news, right?
But more and more I see another side. A side that is more cynical and dark, snarky and self-deprecating. A side that shows moms drinking a lot of wine to handle their days, struggling to manage overwhelm and stress by disassociating on their phones at night, and showcasing their messy entryways/kitchens/laundry piles. When we see these types of posts (I think) we relate more, we laugh, we share, and feel a little better about ourselves knowing we are same.
But I kinda think both of these ends of the spectrum are harmful because neither of them is 100% honest. There are a million shades of gray in that spectrum. At the beautiful photo shoot, a toddler is screaming that they are too hot. In the house with the pile of laundry, a family is playing a board game and laughing. On the days we are feeling overwhelmed and just want to crawl away, there is all the time when we gather all our strength to cook another meal and wipe another counter.
But that's not entertaining. No one really wants to see people just kind of being mediocre, right? I mean we actually live our lives and we see that every day. Our social media is supposed to be some kind of escape, right?
I really am just trying to work this out in real-time, I would love for us to highlight REAL. Make the post about how it is both and, share and comment about how it was hard and you did it anyway, like and subscribe to how instead of tackling the dishes you helped your 7-year-old with some big feelings, hit the notification for showing your kids that you can put down your phone and dance and play in leaves when you experience sensory overload.
Television and entertainment in general have struggled to show that line between idealizing everything and creating a false sense of reality that will never exist (my personal 80's TV show psychosis) and giving us the dark gritty reality that is too scary to look away. Maybe, just once in a while, just to honor our own lives in their weird and wacky and disorganized way we show what our real is, even if it's boring or messy and gets zero likes, at least it's honest.
