I hope you have a genuinely lovely holiday, filled with
warmth, love, and joy. But if your holiday sucks, I hope you’ll consider
letting us know on social media.
The ability of Facebook, et al. to make everybody miserable
is well-documented.
People present the best versions of themselves on social media, downplaying or
completely omitting the negative aspects of their lives and exaggerating the
positive aspects. When others compare their lives, warts and all, to the
ostensibly perfect lives they see in their News Feed, it compels them to put on
a similar façade on their own Facebook page—and the process repeats, assuring a
cycle of perpetually stolen
joy. It’s not a problem social media created, but, as this short film by the
Higton Bros. demonstrates, social media has certainly amplified it.
This is particularly true during the holidays. Posts about
perfect families and perfect Christmas trees and perfect gifts are everywhere,
and, for the most part, it’s easy enough to contextualize or ignore. But if you’re
already feeling down, no matter how often you remind yourself that it’s madness
to compare the real you to the fictionalized them, it can be impossibly
difficult not to take it all as more evidence of how inadequate your life is.
And while we can all roll our eyes whenever people post
stuff that’s obviously hyperbolic (“This is the worst Christmas in the history
of humanity!”) or intentionally vague (“I will never forgive you—you know who
you are!”) or complainbragging (“Ugh, my new Maserati is such an ugly color”),
there’s something to be said about simple, matter-of-fact statements about a
holiday that isn’t going so great: This
Christmas is a little rough; I’m kind
of lonely this time of year; I wish I
could’ve afforded better gifts for my family this year.
After all, shared joy is nice enough, but it can be facile and fleeting. It doesn’t require looking beyond oneself, and it doesn’t necessarily
engage any empathic impulses. The connections forged from shared joy are often
tenuous, which isn’t surprising—I’m doing
great and you’re doing great! is pretty hard to sustain, and those
connections can break as soon as someone starts feeling less than great.
Shared misery, on the other hand, is a much more powerful
force. It requires two people to get out of their own heads, even for just a
moment, and extend a bit of kindness to each other. It’s a much more daunting
task because it’s hard enough to get a handle on the contours of your own
sadness, let alone figure someone else’s out (to misquote Tolstoy badly, happy
people are all alike; every unhappy person is unhappy in their own way). But
the result of doing so—or at least trying—is a connection that’s predicated on
the strength of understanding and selflessness.
That’s kind of heady stuff for social media, so I’ll just
say this: People can post whatever they want to post on social media, and they
can do so for whatever reason. When people brag about their holidays, I don’t
doubt that many of their loved ones will be happy to hear that they’re happy—but
because it’s generally easier to be happy for others when you yourself are
happy, those loved ones are probably doing okay. On the other hand, for someone
who feels alone and isolated, it’d probably mean a lot more to read that
they’re not the only ones feeling that way.
In other words, posting about the things that are great will
likely make happy people somewhat happier. But posting about the things that
aren’t so great could very well make someone feel less lonely and miserable.
I’m not suggesting that everything you post on social media
needs to be an act of altruism designed to make everybody feel better. I am,
however, saying that you should feel totally free to break the cycle of
projecting perfection, if not for your own sake then for the sake of someone
who might really need to see it broken.